The most frequent accusation brought against modern music is that it is devoid of melody. It is an accusation which has been made for at least a hundred years. When it is made to-day the modern musician may point out that many of the most advanced teachers of composition insist on their pupils practising the composition of real independent melodies, that is, of melodies which do not depend on an implied harmony. The ordinary lover of melody is hardly capable of realizing what this means, and the most gifted pupils generally find it an unexpectedly severe discipline. What the plain man understands by a tune is a melody in simple and obvious rhythm; and he is by now so accustomed to the classical key-system that its conventional stresses automatically suggest――even if only half consciously――the conventional harmonic relations, with the result that he is quite willing to accept as a tune a succession of notes which in reality is often meaningless when considered as a pure melody. Our popular hymn-books will provide plenty of examples. The rejection of the classical key-system makes this type of melody impossible, and one of the chief reasons why the present age has rejected the classical key-system is because it is seeking new and more supple rhythms for its melodic line. Another favourite accusation, expressed in different ways by different people, and to most people curiously difficult of expression, may be generally formulated by saying that modern music is devoid of feeling, or even that it stimulates and appeals to feelings which are unpleasant or even morally repugnant. My attempt to put this charge into a few words is unreasonable, I admit, but I think it more or less represents the attitude of a large number of people whose conduct is guided more frequently by good feeling than by conscious reasoning. Such people feel instinctively that music, more than anything else, is or ought to be a matter of instinctive feeling. As music-lovers, they are exactly the people who are most completely under the spell of association. But as I have already attempted to show, it is just this tyranny of association against which the leaders of new movements most energetically rebel. In time they or their successors will accumulate a new store of associations; for the present they are compelled and indeed anxious to do without them altogether. If the older listeners persist in attaching unpleasant associations to the new music, it is the listeners’ own fault; it is they who by force of habit provide those associations out of their own good feeling. XIV