e cathedral services themselves a constant school of
taste in music, but successive generations of choristers and organists
gave rise to something like a musical caste in our episcopal centres. It
is true, our vocalists have always come mainly from Wales, from the
Scotch Highlands, from Yorkshire, from Ireland. But for that there is, I
believe, a sufficient physical reason. For these are clearly the most
mountainous parts of the United Kingdom; and the clear mountain air
seems to produce on the average a better type of human larynx than the
mists of the level. The men of the lowland, say the Tyrolese, croak like
frogs in their marshes; but the men of the upland sing like nightingales
on their tree-tops. And indeed, it would seem as if the mountain people
were always calling to one another across intervening valleys, always
singing and whistling and shouting over their work in a way that gives
tone to the whole vocal mechanism. Witness Welsh penillion singing. And
wherever this fine physical endowment goes hand in hand with a delicate
ear and a poetic temperament, you get your great vocalist, your Sims
Reeves or your Patti. But in England proper it was only in the cathedral
towns that music was a living reality to the people; and it was in the
cathedral towns, accordingly, during the dark ages of art, that
exceptional musical ability was most likely to show itself. More
particularly was this so on the Welsh border, where the two favouring
influences of race and practice coincided--at Gloucester, Worcester,
Hereford, long known for the most musical towns in England.

Cause and effect act and react. Art is a product of the artistic
temperament. The artistic temperament is a product of the long
hereditary cultivation of art. And where a broad basis of this
temperament exists among the people, owing to intermixture of
artistically-minded stocks, one is liable to get from time to time that
peculiar combination of characteristics--sensuous, intellectual,
spiritual--which results in the highest and truest artist.

XXIII.

_A GLIMPSE INTO UTOPIA._

You ask me what would be the position of women in an ideal community.
Well, after dinner, imagination may take free flight. Suppose, till the
coffee comes, we discuss that question.

Woman, I take it, differs from man in being the sex sacrificed to
reproductive necessities.

Whenever I say this, I notice my good friends, the women's-rights women,
with whom I am generall