re fabric of fugue, sonata, symphony and the whole
world of free music. And at every period there have been those also
who sought to connect these tonal fancies with the inner life of the
spirit--to awaken feeling, inspire imagination, deepen dramatic
impression; in short, to give us in place of irresponsible tonal
crystallizations a poetically conceived discourse, operative upon the
feelings and stimulative to the entire mind. This was the ideal of the
new movement in Italy at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and
opera has steadily worked along this ideal. Sebastian Bach had moments
when he himself attempted the programme music; and Beethoven made many
attempts of the same kind, some of which are significant and lasting.
Hence the romantic impulse was not something new in the history of
music, but the blossoming of buds from seeds planted long before. The
programme music of Berlioz was simply larger and more flamboyant than
the little exercises of Bach in the same direction. Wagner's idea of
bringing together the entire resources of musical, dramatic and scenic
art into a single highly complex work was merely the idea of the unity
of all the arts, upon which AEschylus worked two thousand years
earlier, and upon which Jacopo Peri and Claudio Monteverde worked at
the beginning of the seventeenth century. In short, the art of music,
while in this century being enriched by a multitude of new creations
representing a variety of subordinate ideals, is nevertheless still a
unity, constantly becoming more elaborate and masterly upon the tonal
side, and continually more and more in touch with the deeper springs
of duration in art, the intuitively realized correspondence between
certain art forms and modes of expression and human feeling.

The composers of the last quarter of the century are very numerous;
indeed, so numerous that a catalogue even of their names would occupy
too much space. Moreover, their proximity to our own times brings them
too near for successfully estimating their places in the pantheon of
art, or even for the much simpler task of deciding upon certain names
which undoubtedly should occupy places in the list. For present
purposes it will be more convenient to notice them by nationalities,
since every racial stock has certain individualities and ideals which
the national composers eventually bring into art, as we see
brilliantly illustrated in the case of the Russians, both in music and
in painting