ust be: "Almost
anywhere." Wherever men have had the wealth and the energy to build
greatly, they have builded beautifully, and the distinctions are less
between style and style or epoch and epoch than between building and
building: The masterpieces of one time are as the masterpieces of
another, and no man may say that the nave of Amiens is finer than the
Parthenon or that the Parthenon is nobler than the nave of Amiens. One
may say only that each is perfect in its kind, a supreme expression of
the human spirit.

Of the art of music I must speak with the diffidence becoming to the
ignorant; but it seems to me to consist of two elements and to contain
an inspirational art as direct and as simple as that of poetry, and a
science so difficult that its fullest mastery is of very recent
achievement. In melodic invention it is so far from progressive that its
most brilliant masters are often content to elaborate and to decorate a
theme old enough to have no history--a theme the inventor of which has
been so entirely forgotten that we think of it as sprung not from the
mind of one man, but from that of a whole people, and call it a
folk-song. The song is almost as old as the race, but the symphony has
had to wait for the invention of many instruments and for a mastery of
the laws of harmony, and so symphonic music is a modern art. We are
still adding new instruments to the orchestra and admitting to our
compositions new combinations of sounds, but have we in a hundred years
made any essential progress even in this part of the art? Have we
produced anything, I will not say greater, but anything as great as the
noblest works of Bach and Beethoven?

Already, and before considering the arts of painting and sculpture, we
are coming within sight of our general law. This law seems to be that,
so far as an art is dependent upon any form of exact knowledge, so far
it partakes of the nature of science and is capable of progress. So far
as it is expressive of a mind and soul, its greatness is dependent upon
the greatness of that mind and soul, and it is incapable of progress. It
may even be the reverse of progressive, because as an art becomes more
complicated and makes ever greater demands upon technical mastery, it
becomes more difficult as a medium of expression, while the mind to be
expressed becomes more sophisticated and less easy of expression in any
medium. It would take a greater mind than Homer's to express modern
ideas in m