s beautiful to ME, is a joy to
ME, as long as it remains beautiful to ME--and if it remains so as long
as I live, it is so forever, that is, forever to ME. If he had put it
this way, he would have been tiresome, inartistic, but perhaps truer.
So we will assume here that this change only goes on in man and nature;
and that this eternal process in mankind is paralleled in some way
during each temporary, personal life.

A young man, two generations ago, found an identity with his ideals, in
Rossini; when an older man in Wagner. A young man, one generation ago,
found his in Wagner, but when older in Cesar Franck or Brahms. Some may
say that this change may not be general, universal, or natural, and
that it may be due to a certain kind of education, or to a certain
inherited or contracted prejudice. We cannot deny or affirm this,
absolutely, nor will we try to even qualitatively--except to say that
it will be generally admitted that Rossini, today, does not appeal to
this generation, as he did to that of our fathers. As far as prejudice
or undue influence is concerned, and as an illustration in point, the
following may be cited to show that training may have but little effect
in this connection, at least not as much as usually supposed--for we
believe this experience to be, to a certain extent, normal, or at
least, not uncommon. A man remembers, when he was a boy of about
fifteen years, hearing his music-teacher (and father) who had just
returned from a performance of Siegfried say with a look of anxious
surprise that "somehow or other he felt ashamed of enjoying the music
as he did," for beneath it all he was conscious of an undercurrent of
"make-believe"--the bravery was make-believe, the love was
make-believe, the passion, the virtue, all make-believe, as was the
dragon--P. T. Barnum would have been brave enough to have gone out and
captured a live one! But, that same boy at twenty-five was listening to
Wagner with enthusiasm, his reality was real enough to inspire a
devotion. The "Preis-Lied," for instance, stirred him deeply. But when
he became middle-aged--and long before the Hohenzollern hog-marched
into Belgium--this music had become cloying, the melodies threadbare--a
sense of something commonplace--yes--of make-believe came. These
feelings were fought against for association's sake, and because of
gratitude for bygone pleasures--but the former beauty and nobility were
not there, and in their place stood irritating