It may be well to say that, with the exception of the occasional necessity or seeming-necessity for taking one side or the other in a matter of dispute, I have avoided the facility of bandying highly moral verdicts and labelling these victors or victims of life with tags marking their destinations in the next world.  He who gets into another’s heart with understanding, will find it impossible to indulge in wholesale blame—­“tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.”  So, without pretending to have comprehended any of these human hearts altogether, I have learned enough to lean almost always a little toward the defence, and still more nearly always toward the praise of the woman in the case.  And yet, the whole effort and viewpoint of the work will be found, I think, to be based upon a deep belief that one love is better than two, and that earnestness and honesty and altruism are more blessed and blissful, even with poverty and suffering, than any wealth of money, or of fame, or of amorous experience.

As a last chapter to this series of “true stories,” I have ventured to sum up the conclusions, to which the study of all these affairs has compelled me, and to state a general opinion as to the effect of music on character.  It might have been more exciting to some readers, if I had started out with a hard and fast theory, and then discarded or warped everything contradictory to it, but it would have been a dishonest procedure for one who believes that musicians are neither saints of exaltation nor fiends of lawless ecstasy; but only ordinary clay ovens of fire and ashes like the rest of us.  He who generalises is lost, and yet I make bold to believe that the conclusion of this book is true and reasonable and in accordance with such evidence as could be collected.

And now after this before-the-curtain lecture, it is high time, as Artemus would say, to “rise the curting.”

CHAPTER II.

THE ANCIENTS

The very origins and traditions of the trade of music seem to enforce a certain versatility of emotion and experience.  Apollo, the particular god of music, was not much of a lover, and what few affairs he had were hardly happy; his suit was either declined with thanks, or, if accepted, ended in the death of the lady; as for himself—­being a god, he was denied the comfortable convenience of suicide.  Daphne, as every one knows, took to a tree to escape his attentions; and Coronis, as so many another woman, was soon blase of divine courtship, and, for variety, turned her eyes elsewhere.  She was punished with death indeed; but her son was Aesculapius.  Which explains the medicinal value music has always claimed.

Old Boetius—­who had affection enough for both a first and a second wife—­tells, in his treatise on music, many anecdotes of the art’s influence, not only upon sickness but upon wrathful mobs bent on mischief.  He quotes Plato’s statement that “the greatest caution is to be taken not to suffer any change in well-moraled music, there being no corruption of manners in a republic so great as that which follows a gradual declination from a prudent and modest music; for whatever corruptions are made in music, the minds of the hearers will immediately suffer the same, it being certain that there is no way to the affections more open than that of hearing.”