This lyric spirit is obviously seldom to be found in the ‘art’ music of the eighteenth century. It is not too much to say that music in that age was regarded as dignified in proportion to its length. The clavichord pieces of Rameau or Couperin were hardly more than after-dinner amusements; and the fugues and preludes of Bach, for all the depth of the emotion in them and despite their flexible form, were primarily technical exercises. The best creative genius of the latter half of the century was expended upon the larger forms--the symphony, the oratorio, the opera, the mass. All the qualities which are peculiar to the lyric in poetry we find in the song--the _Lied_--of the nineteenth century. A definition or description of the one could be applied almost verbatim to the other. The lyric song must be brief, emotional, direct. Like the lyric poem, it cannot waste a single measure; it must create its mood instantly. It is personal; it seeks not to picture the emotion in general, but the particular emotion experienced by a certain individual. It is unique; no two experiences are quite alike, and no two songs accurately expressive of individual experiences can be alike. It is sensuous; emotions are felt, not understood, and the song must set the hearer’s soul in vibration. It is intimate; one does not tell one’s personal emotions to a crowd, and the true song gives each hearer the sense that he is the sole confidant of the singer. Musical architecture, in the older sense, has very little to do with this problem. Individual expression goes its own way, and the music must accommodate itself to the form of the text. Abundance of riches is only in a limited way a virtue in a good song. The great virtue is to select just the right phrase to express the particular mood. Fine sensibilities are needed to appreciate a good song, for the song is a personal confession, and one can understand a friend’s confession only if one has sensitive heart-strings. Thus the song was peculiarly fitted to express a large part of the spirit of the romantic period. This period, which appreciated the individual more than any other age since the time of Pericles (with the possible exception of the Italian Renaissance), which sought to make the form subsidiary to the sense, which sought to get at the inner reality of men’s feelings, which longed for sensation and experience above all other things--this period expressed itself in a burst of spontaneous song as truly as the drama expressed Elizabethan England, or the opera expressed eighteenth century Italy. I