which was too lovely to
be entirely good for the soul.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the musical life of Europe was
in full swing. Then there came forward a man who was greater than all
others, a simple organist of the Thomas Church of Leipzig, by the
name of Johann Sebastian Bach. In his compositions for every known
instrument, from comic songs and popular dances to the most stately of
sacred hymns and oratorios, he laid the foundation for all our modern
music. When he died in the year 1750 he was succeeded by Mozart, who
created musical fabrics of sheer loveliness which remind us of lace
that has been woven out of harmony and rhythm. Then came Ludwig van
Beethoven, the most tragic of men, who gave us our modern orchestra,
yet heard none of his greatest compositions because he was deaf, as the
result of a cold contracted during his years of poverty.

Beethoven lived through the period of the great French Revolution.
Full of hope for a new and glorious day, he had dedicated one of his
symphonies to Napoleon. But he lived to regret the hour. When he died in
the year 1827, Napoleon was gone and the French Revolution was gone, but
the steam engine had come and was filling the world with a sound that
had nothing in common with the dreams of the Third Symphony.

Indeed, the new order of steam and iron and coal and large factories had
little use for art, for painting and sculpture and poetry and music. The
old protectors of the arts, the Church and the princes and the merchants
of the Middle Ages and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no
longer existed. The leaders of the new industrial world were too busy
and had too little education to bother about etchings and sonatas and
bits of carved ivory, not to speak of the men who created those things,
and who were of no practical use to the community in which they lived.
And the workmen in the factories listened to the drone of their engines
until they too had lost all taste for the melody of the flute or fiddle
of their peasant ancestry. The arts became the step-children of the
new industrial era. Art and Life became entirely separated. Whatever
paintings had been left, were dying a slow death in the museums. And
music became a monopoly of a few "virtuosi" who took the music away from
the home and carried it to the concert-hall.

But steadily, although slowly, the arts are coming back into their own.
People begin to understand that Rembrandt and Beethoven and R