“Ah, your father showed it to you; you hadn’t told me.”

Then, absorbed in his idea, never speaking for effect, stripping himself of every adventitious pleasure in the service of his idea, he told her of the change that had come upon his aestheticism in the last year.  He had been organist for three years at St. Patrick’s, and since then had been interested in the modes, the abandoned modes in which the plain chant is written.  These modes were the beginning of music, the original source; in them were written, no doubt, the songs and dances of the folk who died two, three, four, five thousand years ago, but none of this music had been preserved, only the religious chants of this distant period of art have come down to us, and from this accident his sprung the belief that the early modes are only capable of expressing religious emotion.  But the gayest rhythms can be written in these modes as easily as in the ordinary major and minor scales.  It was thought, too, that the modes did not lend themselves to modulation, but by long study of them Ulick had discovered how they may be submitted to the science of modulation.

“I see,” Evelyn replied pensively.  “The first line written in one of the ancient modes, and underneath the melody, chromatic harmonies.”

“No, that would be horrible,” Ulick cried, like a dog whose tail has been trodden upon.  “That is the infamous modern practice.  I seek the harmony in the sentiment of the melody I am writing, in the tonality of the mode I am writing.”

And then, little by little, they entered the perilous question of the ancient modes.  There were several, and three were as distinctive and as rich sources of melody and harmony as the ordinary major scale, for modern music limited itself to the major scale, the minor scale being a dependency.  The major and minor modes or scales had sufficed for two or three centuries of music, but the time of their exhaustion was approaching, and the musicians of the future would have to return to the older scales.  He refused to admit that they did not lend themselves to modulation, and he answered, when Evelyn suggested that the introduction of a sharp or a flat was likely to alter the character of the ancient scales, that she must not judge the ancient scales by what had already been written in them; it was nowise his intention to imitate the character of the plain chant melodies; she must not confuse the sentiment of these melodies with the modes in which they were written.  It might be that in adding a sharp or a flat the musician destroyed the character of the mode which he was leaving and that of the mode he was passing into, but that proved nothing except his want of skill.  His opera was written not only in the three ancient modes, but also in the ordinary major and minor scales, and he believed that he had enlarged the limits of musical expression.