shion, the prevalent
activity of the life of the day, or, in other words, the environment.
Illustrating this principle, reference might be made to the condition
of Greek art in the flowering time of its history, when the wealth of
Athens was so great as to leave resources unemployed in the material
uses of life, and when the intellectual movement was so splendid as to
leave it until now a brilliant tradition of history. Only one form of
art was pre-eminently successful here; it was sculpture, which at that
time reached its fullest development--to such a degree that modern
sculpture is only a weak repetition of ancient works in this line. So
also the brilliant period of Italian painting, when the mental
movement represented by Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Lorenzo de
Medici, and the pleasure-loving existence, the brilliant fetes, in
which noble men and beautifully appareled women performed all sorts of
allegorical representations, and the colors, groupings, etc., afforded
the painter an endless variety of material and suggestion. When Rubens
flourished in the Netherlands, a century later, similar conditions
accompanied his appearance and the prolific manifestations of his
genius. In the same way, music depends upon peculiar conditions of its
own. They are three: The vigor of the mental movement in general, its
strength upon the imaginative and sentimental side, and the suggestion
from the environment in the way of musical instruments of adequate
tonal powers. Such instruments never existed in the history of the art
until about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The organ, the
violin and the predecessor of the pianoforte, the spinet, came to
practical form at nearly the same time. At the same time the
instruments of plucked strings--the guitars, lutes and other
instruments which until then had occupied the exclusive attention of
musicians--began to go out. Moreover, musical science had been worked
out, and the arts of counterpoint, canonic imitation, fugue, harmony,
etc., had all reached a high degree of perfection when Bach and Haendel
appeared.

7. The entire history of music is merely an illustration of these
principles. Wherever there has been vigorous movement of mind and
material prosperity (and they have always been associated) there has
been an art of music, the richness of which, however, has always been
limited by the state of the musical ears of the people or generation,
and the perfection of their