In our last chapter we spoke to some extent of concert life in America during the eighteenth century, and it may be well to complete the record here as far as the information at our disposal will allow. The importance of concerts as reflecting the musical culture of a people can very easily be overestimated. At best, they represent the taste of merely a small portion of the community; at worst they serve simply as occasions for social display and for the indulgence of various forms of snobbery. It is very difficult at a distance to judge a true from a false artistic life. For aught we know to the contrary, the concerts of the American colonists represented chiefly their ideas of what was socially correct. On the other hand, we are equally justified in assuming that these concerts reflected accurately the musical taste of the people. The truth is that we must accept the record of early concert life in America purely for its historic interest. Such deductions as we may draw from it must always be presumptive. On the surface, as we have already said, it speaks well for the state of musical culture in America of the eighteenth century. It would be futile--perhaps disappointing--to pry further into its possible significance. A certain characteristic indifference to the importance of historical remains has lost to us irretrievably much documentary evidence that would be of great value in compiling a complete history of music in America. Of our earliest newspapers, such as the 'Boston News Letter,' the 'New York Gazette,' the 'American Weekly Mercury,' and the 'South Carolina Gazette,' no complete files seem to have been preserved, and there is an irritating poverty of other documents that would supplement the information contained therein or fill out such lacunæ as the lost numbers may have left. For our information on early concerts in America we are almost totally dependent on old newspaper files. Even if these files were complete it would not follow by any means that the information obtainable from them would be exhaustive, for it is not probable that the newspapers mentioned all the concerts given. A few diaries and similar documents have been discovered which throw a little added light on the subject, but there still remain many dark corners.[25] I