There are some who sadly deplore the popularization of the classics on the ground that they risk being desecrated. Why not? If some unlettered person goes into a cinema, hears a fragment of the _Unfinished Symphony_ for the first time and receives a new thrill, surely it is all to the good, at any rate for him. If others feel that the vulgar associations of the cinema have destroyed the music’s beauty for them, let them have done with it, throw it away as a worn-out thing and turn to something else. We may reasonably say that people who are the prey of their unwilling associations, unable to view a work of art with detachment, do not deserve to experience artistic enjoyment; but at the same time we should do well to admit frankly that music which cannot survive momentary degradation (and all things connected with music are and must be merely momentary) is not worth preserving and reproducing. When we consider the innermost nature of music it is surprising that any of it should survive for more than a generation. Some has survived for less, some for far more; but that is no reason why it should survive for ever. Occasionally some work of a remoter age is exhumed and seems to have a new significance for us after having been forgotten for centuries. But its significance is what our own age puts into it. That is one of the advantages of dealing in the art of the past; we can do what we like with it. The art of the present, if it has any vitality, compels us to submit our minds to itself.