We must bear in mind, however, that the invention of mechanical instruments has come far earlier in the history of music than the invention of printing came in the history of literature. Music is the youngest of the fine arts. It is in somewhat the same stage of development to-day that literature was in the time of Homer. It is in the age of oral--and aural--tradition. Most people still take in music through their ears alone. For all that the invention of note-printing means to them as enjoyers of music, they might almost as well be living aeons before Gutenberg. Musically speaking, they belong to the Homeric age. Now the entrance of mechanical music upon the scene is making men depend on their ears more than ever. It is intensifying and speeding up this age of oral tradition. But in so doing, I believe that it is bound to shorten this age also, on the principle that the faster you go the sooner you arrive. Thus, machinery is hastening us toward the time when the person of ordinary culture will no more depend on his ears alone for the enjoyment of music than he now depends on his ears alone for the enjoyment of Shakespeare. Thanks to machine-made music, the day is coming the sooner when we shall behold, as neighbors in the ordinary bookcase, such pairs of counterparts as Milton and Bach, Beethoven and Shakespeare, Loeffler and Maeterlinck, Byron and Tschaikowsky, Mendelssohn and Longfellow, Nietzsche and Richard Strauss. Browning will stand up cheek by jowl with his one true affinity, Brahms. And the owner will sit by the quiet hearth reading to himself with equal fluency and joy from Schubert and Keats. X MASTERS BY PROXY _It is only in a surrounding of personalities that personalities can as such make themselves seen and heard._ HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN. Between many of my readers and the joyful heart there seems to stand but a single obstacle--their lack of creativeness. They feel that they could live and die happy if only they might become responsible for the creation of something which would remain to bless mankind after they are gone. But as it is, how can they have the joyful heart when they are continually being tortured by regret because God did not make masters of them? One is sad because he is not a master of poetry. He never sees A, his golden-tongued friend, without a pang very like the envy of a childless man for a happy father. But he has no suspicion that he is partly responsible for A's poetic excellence. Another thinks her life a mistake because the Master of all good workmen did not make her a sculptor. Yet all the while she is lavishing unawares upon her brother or son or husband the very stuff that art is made of. Others are inconsolable because no fairy wand at their birth destined them for men of original action, for discoverers in science, pianists, statesmen, or actors; for painters, philosophers, inventors, or architects of temples or of religions.