t the
most. The man who gets his work hung in the Salon is not the one who
puts on his canvas delicate touches in harmonious tones, but he who
juxtaposes vermillion and Veronese green. The man with a "developed
taste" is not the one who knows how to get new and unexpected results by
passing from one key to another, as the great Richard did in _Die
Meistersinger_, but rather the man who abandons all keys and piles up
dissonances which he neither introduces nor concludes and who, as a
result, grunts his way through music as a pig through a flower garden.

Possibly they may go farther still. There seems to be no reason why they
should linger on the way to untrammeled freedom or restrict themselves
within a scale. The boundless empire of sound is at their disposal and
let them profit by it. That is what dogs do when they bay at the moon,
cats when they meow, and the birds when they sing. A German has written
a book to prove that the birds sing false. Of course he is wrong for
they do not sing false. If they did, their song would not sound
agreeable to us. They sing outside of scales and it is delightful, but
that is not man-made art.

Some Spanish singers give a similar impression, through singing
interminable grace notes beyond notation. Their art is intermediate
between the singing of the birds and of man. It is not a higher art.

In certain quarters they marvel at the progress made in the last thirty
years. The architects of the Fifteenth Century must have reasoned in the
same way. They did not appreciate that they were assassinating Gothic
art, and that after some centuries we would have to revert to the art of
the Greeks and Romans.

CHAPTER X

THE ORGAN

When hairy Pan joined reeds of different lengths and so invented the
flute which bears his name, he was, in reality, creating the organ. It
needed only to add to this flute a keyboard and bellows to make one of
those pretty instruments the first painters used to put in the hands of
angels. As it developed and gradually became the most grandiose of the
instruments, the organ, with its depth of tone modified and increased
tenfold by the resonance of the great cathedrals, took on its religious
character.

The organ is more than a single instrument. It is an orchestra, a
collection of the pipes of Pan of every size, from those as small as a
child's playthings to those as gigantic as the columns of a temple. Each
one corresponds to what is termed an organ-