rained your ears to listen to details.

If you were asked to name the instruments which play the great theme at
the beginning of the C minor symphony you could not name them for your
life's sake. Yet you admire the C minor symphony. It has thrilled
you. It will thrill you again. You have even talked about it, in an
expansive mood, to that lady--you know whom I mean. And all you can
positively state about the C minor symphony is that Beethoven composed
it and that it is a "jolly fine thing."

Now, if you have read, say, Mr. Krehbiel's "How to Listen to Music"
(which can be got at any bookseller's for less than the price of a
stall at the Alhambra, and which contains photographs of all the
orchestral instruments and plans of the arrangement of orchestras) you
would next go to a promenade concert with an astonishing
intensification of interest in it. Instead of a confused mass, the
orchestra would appear to you as what it is--a marvellously balanced
organism whose various groups of members each have a different and an
indispensable function. You would spy out the instruments, and listen
for their respective sounds. You would know the gulf that separates a
French horn from an English horn, and you would perceive why a player
of the hautboy gets higher wages than a fiddler, though the fiddle is
the more difficult instrument. You would _live_ at a promenade
concert, whereas previously you had merely existed there in a state of
beatific coma, like a baby gazing at a bright object.

The foundations of a genuine, systematic knowledge of music might be
laid. You might specialise your inquiries either on a particular form
of music (such as the symphony), or on the works of a particular
composer. At the end of a year of forty-eight weeks of three brief
evenings each, combined with a study of programmes and attendances at
concerts chosen out of your increasing knowledge, you would really know
something about music, even though you were as far off as ever from
jangling "The Maiden's Prayer" on the piano.

"But I hate music!" you say. My dear sir, I respect you.

What applies to music applies to the other arts. I might mention Mr.
Clermont Witt's "How to Look at Pictures," or Mr. Russell Sturgis's
"How to Judge Architecture," as beginnings (merely beginnings) of
systematic vitalising knowledge in other arts, the materials for whose
study abound in London.

"I hate all the arts!" you say. My dear sir, I respect you m