thought nothing of the rules that had not been definitely stated in
their time. Before Beethoven--and after Beethoven, Wagner and all the
moderns--could come, music had to go through the stiff scientific
stage; a hundred thousand things that had been done instinctively by
the early men had to be reduced to rule; a science as well as an art
of music had to be built up. It was built up, and in the process of
building up noble works of art were achieved. After it was built up
and men had got, so to say, a grip of music and no longer merely
groped, Beethoven and Wagner went back to the freedom and
indifference to rule of the first composers; and the mere fact of
their having done so should show us that the rules were nothing in
themselves, nothing, that is, save temporary guide-posts or landmarks
which the contrapuntal men set up for their own private use while they
were exploring the unknown fields of music. We should know, though
many of us do not, that it is simply stupid to pass adverse judgment
on the early composers who did not use, and because they did not use,
these guide-posts, which had not then been set up, though one by one
they were being set up. For a very short time the rules of
counterpoint were looked upon as eternal and immutable. During that
period the early men were human-naturally looked upon as barbarians.
But that period is long past. We know the laws of counterpoint to be
not eternal, not immutable; but on the contrary to have been
short-lived convention that is now altogether disregarded. So it is
time to look at the early music through our own, and not through the
eighteenth-century doctors' eyes; and when we do that we find the
early music to be as beautiful as any ever written, as expressive, and
quite as well constructed. There are, as I have said, people who
to-day prefer Mr. Jackson in F and his friends to Byrde. What, I
wonder, would be said if a literary man preferred, say, some
eighteenth-century poetaster to Chaucer because the poetaster in his