Let us examine a little more closely the ground covered by each of these three general sections, one after another, not yet in detail--that will come only with the actual reading--but with the idea rather of getting a bird’s-eye view of the whole field in its salient masses and divisions. The history of music is like that of other arts in being divided into schools or epochs. These are of course to a certain extent arbitrary and artificial--marked off by critics for convenience of classification--and a composer may belong to two or more schools, as Beethoven, for example, is both 'classical’ and 'romantic,’ without being any more aware of it than we are when our train crosses the line, say, from New York State into Massachusetts. But they are also in part natural and real, because any fruitful idea in art--such as the 'impressionistic’ idea of light in painting, for instance--is so much greater than any one man’s capacity to grasp it that a whole generation or more of artists is needed to develop its possibilities. Such a group of artists forms what we call a 'school’ or 'period,’ beginning usually with pioneers whose work is crude but novel, continuing with countless workers, most of whom are after a short time completely forgotten, and culminating with one or two greatly endowed masters who gather up all the best achievements of the school in their own work and stands for posterity as its figure-heads, or in some cases engulf it entirely in their colossal shadows. Pioneers, journeymen, geniuses--that is the list of characters in the drama we call an artistic school.