The present age revolts from the music of the past century because of its insincerity and pretentiousness. Musicians of the older generation will repudiate this charge with indignation. The criticism is indeed a very summary one, and the man of to-day, if pressed with cross-questioning, may probably be induced to admit a good many single exceptions to his universal condemnation. But technical analysis will show that there is a sounder basis for modern criticism than mere caprice of youthful iconoclasm. The wealth of harmonic resource which the nineteenth century built up was derived, as has been shown, to a large extent from associations, some extra-musical, some intra-musical, some derived from literary or pictorial ideas, some depending on recollections of previous music. These two categories interact on each other again and again, so that it is not easy to separate them out clearly. Like a system of monetary wealth, the wealth of western music has become largely a paper currency and with the realization of this fact values have in many cases become suddenly depreciated. It may be urged that music as an art has derived enormous benefit from the tendency to widen the scope of its significance, from its closer alliance with other intellectual activities and from the deepening conviction of its ethical influence. Is it not childish, it may be asked, for us deliberately to throw away all that we have gained and revert to a condition of music in which it shall be at best a mere entertainment or possibly no more than a physiological stimulus of dangerous passions? The lofty idealism of Beethoven and certain of those who came after him, both composers and interpreters, is a thing which we cannot possibly deny or ignore; but we may justly question whether the artistic expression of it is still convincing to modern ears. That noble and visionary idealism, in its ardent insistence on the spiritual, tended more and more to suggest that the reality of music lay not so much in the actual sounds perceived by the physical ear as in the relations between them, in sounds――or rather in relations between sounds――never actually heard at all, but induced in the perceptive faculty by association. The works of Beethoven’s third period often seem to lead us into a metaphysical labyrinth. But philosophical language is apt to degenerate into a jargon, and philosophical music, when it is the product of lesser minds than Beethoven’s, into platitudinous rigmarole. “Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.”