published immediately, the possibility now of taking the work of
our musicians in some perspective, and the opportunity of bringing my
information up to date, have meant so much revision, excision, and
addition, that this book is really a new work.

The biographical data have been furnished in practically every case by
the composers themselves, and are, therefore, reliable in everything
except possibly the date of birth. The critical opinions gain their
possibly dogmatic tone rather from a desire for brevity than from any
hope--or wish--that they should be swallowed whole. No attempt to set
up a standard of comparative merit or precedence has been made, though
it is inevitable that certain music-makers should interest one more
than certain others even more worthy in the eyes of eminent judges.

It may be that some inspectors of this book will complain of the
omission of names they had expected to find here. Others will feel a
sense of disproportion. To them there is no reply but a pathetic
allusion to the inevitable incompleteness and asymmetry of all things
human.

Many will look with skepticism at the large number of composers I have
thought worthy of inclusion. I can only say that the fact that an
artist has created one work of high merit makes him a good composer in
my opinion, whether or no he has ever written another, and whether or
no he has afterward fallen into the sere and yellow school of trash.
So Gray's fame is perennial,--one poem among many banalities.

Besides, I do not concur in that most commonplace fallacy of
criticism, the belief that not more than one genius is vouchsafed to
any one period of an art, though this opinion can be justified, of
course, by a very exclusive definition of the word genius. To the
average mind, for instance, the whole literary achievement of the
Elizabethan era is condensed into the name of Shakespeare.
Contemporary with him, however, there were, of course, thirty or forty
writers whose best works the scholar would be most unwilling to let
die. There were, for instance, a dozen playwrights, like Jonson,
Fletcher, Ford, Marlowe, and Greene, in whose works can be found
literary and dramatic touches of the very highest order. There were
poets less prolific than Spenser, and yet to be credited with a few
works of the utmost beauty, minor geniuses like Ralegh, Sidney, Lodge,
Shirley, Lyly, Wotton, Wither, John Donne, Bishop Hall, Drayton,
Drummond, Herbert, Carew, Herrick, Br