Fashionable or critical audiences will pay little attention to the man who seems merely to be repeating what a greater man has written before him; these audiences continually crave a novelty or a sensation. Everything forces the conscious composer in these days to be as personal as possible. His song then expresses the feelings of one individual in one particular style. It has always been a nice question of taste whether one prefers to observe the type or the individual. Would you have your love song one that could be sung by every lover, high or low, or one that would ring true for you alone? If you are quite honest you will probably have to admit that you will swing from one to the other from time to time. At times it will seem vulgar that you should be rejoicing in precisely the same sentiments as those which are sending the Italian bootblack into a seventh heaven; your delicacy, your sense of dignity will demand that your love be your own, like no one else’s on earth. And, again, the precious selfishness of cultivating your own soul with such conscious care when it is such a tiny part of humanity--such a reaction will make you praise heaven that you and the bootblack can sing the same love song and feel the same love. However you feel about it the art-song has chosen to specialize on individuals. Not only on individual persons, but on particular feelings of those persons. The folk-song expresses the type emotion--love, sorrow, or patriotism; the art-song expresses some particular shade or nuance of these emotions. The Scotch folk-tune which we sing with Burns’s stirring words, ‘Scots Wha Hae,’ expresses magnificently the defiance of patriotic bravery. It might be the song of anybody facing odds in defense of his beliefs. Schubert’s song, ‘Courage,’ has exactly the same note of defiance, but, so to speak, only a particular section of the great general emotion. His defiance is that of a man broken down with sorrow and misfortune, who in one superb moment vows to conquer by pure force of will power--a vow which we know is impossible of fulfillment. The modern French composers are especially apt at catching a particular delicate phase of a mood or emotion and rendering it so that it would never be mistaken for another phase, however much the two resembled each other. Have you never caught yourself moodily looking at the last glow from a sunset and wondered whether you have ever had a moment just like that before--a moment which the slightest change in the things about you would have spoiled utterly? Such a moment it is the delight of the art-song to portray; it is almost unknown to the folk-song.