of art, as it is of the mere time-server who aims only at tickling the popular ear.  The reason is obvious to a little close thinking:  Ignorance is at once a safeguard against and a promoter of conservatism.  This sounds like a paradox, but the rapid growth of Wagner’s music in the admiration of the people of the United States might correctly be cited as a proof that the statement is true.  Music like the concert fragments from Wagner’s lyric dramas is accepted with promptitude and delight, because its elements are those which appeal most directly and forcibly to our sense-perception and those primitive tastes which are the most readily gratified by strong outlines and vivid colors.  Their vigorous rhythms, wealth of color, and sonority would make these fragments far more impressive to a savage than the suave beauty of a symphony by Haydn; yet do we not all know that while whole-hearted, intelligent enjoyment of a Haydn symphony is conditioned upon a considerable degree of culture, an equally whole-hearted, intelligent appreciation of Wagner’s music presupposes a much wider range of sympathy, a much more extended view of the capabilities of musical expression, a much keener discernment, and a much profounder susceptibility to the effects of harmonic progressions?  And is the conclusion not inevitable, therefore, that on the whole the ready acceptance of Wagner’s music by a people is evidence that they are not sufficiently cultured to feel the force of that conservatism which made the triumph of Wagner consequent on many years of agitation in musical Germany?

[Sidenote:  "Ahead of one’s time."]

In one case the appeal is elemental; in the other spiritual.  He who wishes to be in advance of his time does wisely in going to the people instead of the critics, just as the old fogy does whose music belongs to the time when sensuous charm summed up its essence.  There is a good deal of ambiguity about the stereotyped phrase “ahead of one’s time.”  Rightly apprehended, great geniuses do live for the future rather than the present, but where the public have the vastness of appetite and scantness of taste peculiar to the ostrich, there it is impossible for a composer to be ahead of his time.  It is only where the public are advanced to the stage of intelligent discrimination that a Ninth Symphony and a Nibelung Tetralogy are accepted slowly.

[Sidenote:  The charlatan.]

[Sidenote:  Influencing the critics.]

Why the charlatan should profess to despise the critic and to pay homage only to the public scarcely needs an explanation.  It is the critic who stands between him and the public he would victimize.  Much of the disaffection between the concert-giver and the concert-reviewer arises from the unwillingness of the latter to enlist in a conspiracy to deceive and defraud the public.  There is no need of mincing phrases here.  The critics of the newspaper press are besieged daily with requests for notices of a complimentary