So far as I can see, this is the least stable of the arts. From the earliest records we learn that there were musicians, and people seem to have been just as fond of music as we are ourselves, but, whereas we find the old sculpture, painting (what there is of it) and literature to have been in all essentials like our own, and not only this but whereas we find them essentially the same in existing nations in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, this is not so as regards music either looking to antiquity or to the various existing nations. I believe we should find old Greek and Roman music as hideous as we do Persian and Japanese, or as Persians and Japanese find our own. I believe therefore that the charm of music rests on a more unreasoning basis, and is more dependent on what we are accustomed to, than the pleasure given by the other arts. We now find all the ecclesiastical modes, except the Ionian and the Æolian, unsatisfactory, indeed almost intolerable, but I question whether, if we were as much in the habit of using the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and Mixo-Lydian modes as we are of using the later Æolian mode (the minor scale), we should not find these just as satisfactory. Is it not possible that our indisputable preference for the Ionian mode (the major scale) is simply the result of its being the one to which we are most accustomed? If another mode were to become habitual, might not this scale or mode become first a kind of supplementary moon-like mode (as the Æolian now is) and finally might it not become intolerable to us? Happily it will last my time as it is. Discords Formerly all discords were prepared, and Monteverde’s innovation of taking the dominant seventh unprepared was held to be cataclysmic, but in modern music almost any conceivable discord may be taken unprepared. We have grown so used to this now that we think nothing of it, still, whenever it can be done without sacrificing something more important, I think even a dominant seventh is better prepared. It is only the preparation, however, of discords which is now less rigorously insisted on; their resolution—generally by the climbing down of the offending note—is as necessary as ever if the music is to flow on smoothly. This holds good exactly in our daily life. If a discord has to be introduced, it is better to prepare it as a concord, take it on a strong beat, and resolve it downwards on a weak one. The preparation being often difficult or impossible may be dispensed with, but the resolution is still de rigueur. Anachronism