OF THE PRINCIPLE OF MUSICAL EXECUTION.—Do the modern musical performers really believe that the supreme law of their art is to give every piece as much high-relief as is possible, and to make it speak at all costs a dramatic language? Is not this principle, when applied for example to Mozart, a veritable sin against the spirit—the gay, sunny, airy, delicate spirit—of Mozart, whose seriousness was of a kindly and not awe-inspiring order, whose pictures do not try to leap from the wall and drive away the beholder in panic? Or do you think that all Mozart’s music is identical with the statue-music in _Don Juan_? And not only Mozart’s, but all music?—You reply that the advantage of your principle lies in its greater _effect_. You would be right if there did not remain the counter-question, “_On whom_ has the effect operated, and _on whom_ should an artist of the first rank desire to produce his effect?” Never on the populace! Never on the immature! Never on the morbidly sensitive! Never on the diseased! And above all—never on the _blasé_! 166. THE MUSIC OF TO-DAY.—This ultra-modern music, with its strong lungs and weak nerves, is frightened above all things of itself. 167. WHERE MUSIC IS AT HOME.—Music reaches its high-water mark only among men who have not the ability or the right to argue. Accordingly, its chief promoters are princes, whose aim is that there should be not much criticism nor even much thought in their neighbourhood. Next come societies which, under some pressure or other (political or religious), are forced to become habituated to silence, and so feel all the greater need of spells to charm away emotional ennui—these spells being generally eternal love-making and eternal music. Thirdly, we must reckon whole nations in which there is no “society,” but all the greater number of individuals with a bent towards solitude, mystical thinking, and a reverence for all that is inexpressible; these are the genuine “musical souls.” The Greeks, as a nation delighting in talking and argument, accordingly put up with music only as an _hors d’œuvre_ to those arts which really admit of discussion and dispute. About music one can hardly even _think_ clearly. The Pythagoreans, who in so many respects were exceptional Greeks, are said to have been great musicians. This was the school that invented a five-years’ silence,(23) but did not invent a dialectic. 168.