[1] It may, of course, be used with molds of definite meaning; but we are speaking of pure music.
[2] The Scherzo of Opus 59, no. 1.
[3] Gilbert Murray translation.
CHAPTER II MUSIC FOR CHILDREN
I. TRAINING THE SENSE FOR BEAUTY
In what I have to say about music for children I am not unmindful of the diversity of American life, and of the prevalent idea that Americans do not pay much attention to music (or to any other form of beauty) because they live in a new country in which the greater part of their energy is devoted to subduing nature and carving their fortunes. As a nation we are said to be too diverse to have evolved any definite æsthetic practice, and we suppose ourselves too busy with the practical things in life to pay much attention to it.
While it is doubtless true that there are numberless prosperous American families in which the words “art” and “literature” mean nothing whatever, this condition is due, in most cases, not to lack of time, but to lack of inclination. We, like other people, do what we like to do. No real attention is paid in childhood to the cultivation of a love of the beautiful; very little attention is paid to it in the educational institutions where we are trained; so we grow up and enter upon life with a desultory liking for music, with a distinct lack of appreciation for poetry, and with almost no interest in painting or sculpture.
And this condition is likely to increase rather than diminish as time goes on, until, having finally arrived at moments of leisure and finding that neither our money nor any other material possession gives us any deep or permanent satisfaction, we turn to beauty only to be confronted with the old warning: “Too late, ye cannot enter now.” For we have arrived at the time when, in Meredith’s phrase, “Nature stops, and says to us, ‘Thou art now what thou wilt be.’” For this capacity for understanding and loving great books and paintings and music has to grow with our own growth and cannot be postponed to another season. The average American man is supposed to have no time for these things. He has time, but he refuses to turn it into leisure,—leisure which means contemplation and thoughtfulness,—though he very likely knows that this has been accomplished over and over again by men who have saved out of a busy life for that purpose a little time every day.