Outside of these two principal groups we see to-day a constantly increasing number of composers who are making serious attempts to weld from the several folk-song elements of this continent a truly national music. It was Antonin Dvořák who first counselled the American composer to thus employ the methods from which alone could be formed a distinctive school. Dvořák himself, in setting the example, only proved how deep-rooted are the traditions and feelings of the racial vein, and placed our negro themes into a setting unmistakably Slavic. It must be confessed that a similar result has been obtained by most of our native composers and the surroundings in which they have set these various folk-song elements only serve to emphasize the decided and almost inevitable leanings of these composers toward one or another of the prevailing European schools. From an æsthetic standpoint our native art exhibits the varied manifestations common to the art of all times, traits as varied as those of human character itself. Broadly speaking, there are always the large and the small, which in poetic forms we can conveniently label as epic and lyric. Of the former there is no prodigality of output by any age or people. There is always much of the spurious epic, and it must be confessed that America, with its lack of national consciousness and art discipline or tradition, together with its over-weening ambition, has already produced its share of this form of insincere art. On the contrary, the number of genuine lyrical writers which America can boast is surprisingly large, and those names which stand out conspicuously in the annals of American art may, almost without exception, be called lyricists. [Illustration: Early American Composers: Lowell Mason, William H. Fry, Louis M. Gottschalk, Stephen Emery.] The first creative activities in American music were those of the psalm-tune writers in New England, William Billings, Oliver Holden, Lowell Mason, and others which have been spoken of in our chapter on the Beginnings of Musical Culture (pp. 45 ff.). Historically these early hymns are interesting, and, had not European culture so completely influenced the later course of American composition, it is not unlikely that they might have served in some measure as a contributory vein to our native art. They remain, however, but the reflection of the colorless puritanism which was their source, a naïve expression which can hardly be placed in the category of art and hence as American compositions do not here claim our further notice.