Those who have been brought up on the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms can readily accept this theory of musical æsthetics. It is eminently satisfactory as an interpretation of all that we commonly call classical music. There are many people who do not want to listen to any other kind of music. They have heard of great names in the days before Bach, but they are easily inclined to take the view that such composers as Purcell and the elder Scarlatti were merely the necessary forerunners who prepared the way; that Palestrina was an exceptional and unaccountable expression of a peculiarly exalted age of religious belief, and that any one belonging to an earlier date can be dismissed as a primitive interesting only to the antiquary. But at the present day the antiquaries are coming into their own. Both in England and abroad there is a vigorous revival of interest in the music of the centuries before Bach. After long years of dusty research the antiquaries have at last begun to convince a younger generation that a great deal of this so-called primitive music can be given life in performance, and performance has shown that it has a surprisingly vivid power of appealing to the emotions of modern hearers. Leaders of contemporary music indeed are clearly feeling that pre-classical and even mediaeval music has in many cases a more intimate affinity with that of our own day than the music of the last two hundred years. It has even come to exercise a definite and admitted influence on the technique of modern composition.