Swinburne’s parody has its musical application too. The classical key-system of Rameau and Bach established a tradition that was academic in the most honourable sense of the word. It won too much respect. It had the symmetrical logic of the heroic couplet in poetry. We can see how in literature the austere reverence for the great academic tradition inevitably petrifies poetry into what discreet reviewers call “scholarly verse.” Music followed an analogous course. By the irony of fate the music of the last century, when it was designed to edify, has become vapid and tedious; what has survived, quaintly artificial though its freshness may be, is the music that was made only for ephemeral entertainment. _La Belle Hélène_ has outlived _Les Béatitudes_. XIII It is quite untrue to say that the music of to-day is predominantly frivolous. The modern composer might well reply that even for those who cling to the ideals of the past there are plenty of old-world frivolities that have triumphed over their contemporary solemnities. The devotees of Haydn, Mozart and Cimarosa easily forget that all these three wrote music of deeply serious character and that it was chiefly their serious music which won the respect of their own audiences. There is not even anything new in the modern composer’s occasional habit of making a fool of his critics. But the jokes of the old composers, like those of Aristophanes, often require the elucidation of learned commentators, whereas in our own day the newspapers provide the needful commentary, sometimes before the musician makes his joke. The “verbal hæmorrhage”――as it has been appropriately called――of musical journalism is responsible for most of the deliberate silliness recently perpetrated by composers, who in these days are fully alive to the value of publicity. Music of this type is as ephemeral as the criticism which it is designed to provoke. At the same time it is perfectly reasonable that modern composers should occupy themselves in an artistic spirit with modern dance-forms. They may well take their place in musical history just as the waltz, the minuet, the pavan and the galliard have done.