while its purely musical beauty is often great, they wish us not to rest content with the music for itself, but to regard it as a symbol of something beyond. Once composers had begun to label, so to speak, the musical expressiveness which the classicists preferred to leave free to act upon each hearer according to his temperament and associations, certain especially literary minds among them, notably Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) and Franz Liszt (1811-1886), naturally felt impelled to carry the process a step further, to amplify and edit the label into complete 'directions for using.’ Such 'directions for using’ are called 'programs,’ and the school which affects them is named 'programmistic,’ or, by analogy with a similar school in literature, 'realistic.’ Your typical programmist, such as Berlioz, is not satisfied with the romanticist’s mere suggestion of a subject; he demands in advance a complete bill of fare of his musical feast. When Beethoven, a classicist, deals with a human emotion--love, for instance, as in the Fifth Symphony--he aims merely to stimulate in us the most general feeling and let each of us interpret for himself; when a romanticist like Tschaikowsky writes almost equally beautiful love music he gives a fillip to our imagination by naming it an overture to 'Romeo and Juliet’; but when Berlioz conceives his _Symphonie Fantastique_ he must have his lover killed on the guillotine--he must even hear the knife fall. Such a theory of musical æsthetics is evidently highly dangerous, since it tends to bind shackles on the free movement of the music, and also to distract the hearer’s attention from the music to something far less vital. Nevertheless in the hands of Richard Strauss in our own day (born 1864), who seems to be the genius in which this school is to culminate, it has led to remarkable results.