In view of hearing good music, breathing a musical atmosphere and being glorified into artists, vast numbers of American girls seek foreign musical centres.  They are apt to go without suitable equipment, mental or musical, and with inadequate pecuniary provisions.  They expect to attain in a few months what they are doomed to discover would take years to accomplish, and cannot fail to suffer for the blunder.  Many of them return home disappointed in their aims, and ruined in health.  Many of them are stranded in strange lands.  A crusade should be started against indiscriminate going abroad for music study, without thorough preparation in every respect.

The fact is, a free, true, fearless hero, such as Wagner found in his Siegfried, is needed to slay, with his invincible sword, the dragon of sordid materialism, and awaken the slumbering bride of genuine art.  A storm-god is wanted to swing his hammer and finally dissipate the clouds that obscure the popular vision.  Some one has called for a plumed knight at the literary tournament, with visor down, lance in hand, booted and spurred for the fight with prevalent errors.  One is equally needed at the musical tournament.

III

The Musical Education That Educates

There is a musical education that educates, a musical education that refines, strengthens, broadens the character and the views, that ripens every God-given instinct and force.  It arouses noble thoughts and lofty ideals; it quickens the perceptions, opening up a world of beauty that is closed to the unobservant; it bears its fortunate possessor into a charmed atmosphere, where inspiring, elevating influences prevail.  Its aim is nothing short of the absolutely symmetrical development of the spiritual, intellectual and physical being, in view of making the well-rounded musician, the well-balanced individual.

The profits derived from a musical education are proportionate to the investment.  Careless work, an utter disregard of principles, in other words, a mere dabbling with music, will afford but superficial results.  It is precisely the same with a haphazard pursuit of any branch of art, science, or literature.  Through music the soul of mankind may be elevated, the secret recesses of thought and feeling stirred, and every emotion of which the individual is capable made active.  In order to attain its full benefits it is imperative to use it as a profound living force, not as a mere surface decoration.

“The musician ever shrouded in himself must cultivate his inmost being that he may turn it outward,” said Goethe.  A true musical education provides culture for the inmost being.  It tends to enlarge the sympathies, enrich social relations and invest daily life with gracious dignity.  Those who gain it beautify their own lives and thus become able to make the world seem more beautiful to others.  Those who are never able to give utterance to the wealth of thought and feeling it has aroused in their hearts and imaginations are still happy in possessing the store.  After all, our main business in art, as in life, is to strive.  Honest effort meets with its own reward, even where it does not lead to what the world calls success.