I
There are three stages in the history of every new truth. Take, as an example, the Darwinian theory. First of all it is assailed with tooth and claw by a thousand people who know nothing about it and have never given ten minutes' consecutive thought to it, but who hate it simply because it disturbs their long mental inertia. Then, when its truth becomes more and more evident, and too many clear-headed people believe in it for it to be laughed down, and too many strong people adopt it for it to be howled down, the partisans of the older school become obnoxiously polite to it; they no longer call it a mass of error, but they graciously permit it to take rank, after their own particular theory, as a secondary and imperfect kind of truth. Finally, it is universally accepted, purged of its admixture of error, and both it and its predecessors are then seen to be just inevitable stages in the development of the human mind, the second having no more title than the first to be considered the end of the story. At first Darwin's theory of development is thought to be crushed by the mere flinging at it of citations from the Bible; then the professional theologians try to impress it into their own service; finally its victory over misunderstanding and ignorance and prejudice is complete, but by this time it is no longer the ultimate theory of things, but only a stepping-stone to other theories. Something of the same kind has happened, or is in process of happening, with programme music. Formerly the dear old virginal academics shuddered if the foul word polluted their chaste ears; now they condescend to discuss it, more or less temperately, but always with the idea that it is merely an inferior branch of the great music-family—a kind of poor relation of absolute music; in a little while the rationality of the thing will be beyond question, but by that time it will probably be making way for something still newer than itself—though what that may be we have at present no means of knowing. Just now we are in the second stage of the controversy upon the subject. The advocate of programme music, it should be said at once, is not necessarily a hater of absolute music, nor is the lover of absolute music necessarily an enemy of programme music. One can like Wagner and Strauss and Liszt and Berlioz and still appreciate to the full the Bach fugue or the Mozart or Beethoven or Brahms symphony. Still it is an unfortunate fact that too often a liking for the one kind of art goes along with an abhorrence of the other. Any narrowness of this kind is to be regretted on either side; but if one partisan exhibits more of it than the other, I should say it is the absolutist, who is usually much less fair towards programme music, and less open to conviction, than the programmist is to absolute music. And since the contest between the two schools is very strenuous just now, and as one of the services of the critic is to give an art room to breathe and grow by clearing away dead traditions from around it, some good may be done to the creative musician, as well as to the ordinary concert-goer, by a review of the field of dispute between the antagonists.