Instrumental music should be on the same general order, not loud and
showy, but clear, simple, sweet, and free from startling effects.
Dashing pieces, rag-time pieces, marches, two-steps, and familiar
tunes with variations, instead of bringing about a spirit of
gentleness and harmony, actually tend to produce self-assertiveness
and quarrelsomeness. Let any mother who does not believe this try the
effort of an hour of the one kind of music on one evening, and an
hour of the other kind on another evening. The difference will be
immediately apparent.

[Sidenote: The Drama]

The influence of the drama must not be forgotten. This form of art,
fallen so low among us since the time of the Puritans that it can
scarcely be called an art at all, is, nevertheless, the art which
perhaps above all others has an immediate and yet lasting influence.
Children are themselves instinctively dramatic. They like to compose
and act out all sorts of dramas of their own, from playing house
(which is nothing but a drama prolonged from day to day), to such
dramatic games as Statue-posing and Dumb Crambo. All children like to
dress up, to wear masks, and to imitate the peculiarities of persons
about them; to try on, as it were, the world as they see it, and
discover thereby how the actors in it feel. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister
has already been referred to. In this--his great book on education--he
practically bases all education upon the drama, and even throws the
treatise itself into dramatic form.

This does not mean, however, that all children should be permitted
to go to the theater as freely as they like. No; the plays which they
compose and act for themselves have a far higher value educationally