Still, I own Bach does appeal to me sometimes. In my own poor music I have taken passages from him before now, and have my eye on others which I have no doubt will suit me somewhere. Whether Bach would know them again when I have worked my will on them, and much more whether he would own them, I neither know nor care. I take or leave as I choose, and alter or leave untouched as I choose. I prefer my music to be an outgrowth from a germ whose source I know, rather than a waif and stray which I fancy to be my own child when it was all the time begotten of a barrel organ. It is a wise tune that knows its own father and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents. Roughly, however, as I have said over and over again, if I think something that I know and greatly like in music, no matter whose, is appropriate, I appropriate it. I should say I was under most obligations to Handel, Purcell and Beethoven. For example, any one who looked at my song “Man in Vain” in _Ulysses_ might think it was taken from “Batti, batti.” I should like to say it was taken from, or suggested by, a few bars in the opening of Beethoven’s pianoforte sonata op. 78, and a few bars in the accompaniment to the duet “Hark how the Songsters” in Purcell’s _Timon of Athens_. I am not aware of having borrowed more in the song than what follows as natural development of these two passages which run thus: [Picture: Music score by Beethoven then Purcell] From the pianoforte arrangement in The Beauties of Purcell by John Clarke, Mus. Doc. Honesty Honesty consists not in never stealing but in knowing where to stop in stealing, and how to make good use of what one does steal. It is only great proprietors who can steal well and wisely. A good stealer, a good user of what he takes, is _ipso facto_ a good inventor. Two men can invent after a fashion to one who knows how to make the best use of what has been done already. Musical Criticism I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart’s _Requiem_. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from _Parsifal_ which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes. Yet next morning in the _Times_ I saw this able, heartless failure, compact of gnosis as much as any one pleases but without one spark of either true pathos or true humour, called “the crowning achievement of dramatic music.” The writer continues: “To the unintelligent, music of this order does not appeal”; which only means “I am intelligent and you had better think as I tell you.” I am glad that such people should call Handel a thieving plagiarist. On Borrowing in Music