Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/664

 that shape every form of musical education. Intelligent pedagogy in every subject needs not simply to provide somewhere for specific historic discipline, but to be shaped and balanced by the encyclopædic view that only historic culture can supply.

History does not deal with the future, though it gives grounds for hopeful optimism. From its point of view, the musical world seems to have been incessantly forced to harmonize two great interests, which are certainly now before us and which are to continue in constant interaction in the future. One of these is the interest of 'high art,' with its technical learning and skill, its delicately sharpened taste, its aspiration to stretch the boundaries of achievement to the utmost. The other is the interest of 'the common people'—always sensitive to music of some sort, yet often seemingly devoid of breadth, depth and intensity of artistic life, and sometimes expressly scornful of the eagerness of an artistic class which it regards as detached and extreme. The chasm between these two interests is certainly obvious to-day. Yet it is surely a lesson of history that it is nothing new and that ways of bridging it have always been possible. Otherwise, music would never have come to the world-wide significance it has. Reconciliation must always be effected by efforts from both sides. The artistic instinct may be trusted sooner or later to forsake the pursuit of the merely curious and esoteric for that which is intelligible and impressive to the typical or average human mind. And the infinite work of education has always been to keep raising the level of intelligence and feeling so that the unmusical may become musical and the musical may become more finely artistic. The 19th century showed a prodigious expansion of the range of advanced musical art, the pendulum of effort swinging at the end toward what seems like an extreme; but, if this be extreme, it will swing back again. It also showed a wonderful awakening of enthusiasm in various lines of musical education, technical and popular. It is safe to say that this side of music will be still further developed, giving to the art in its highest forms atmosphere in which to live and environment in which to work, and making more real what all earnest believers in music desire—that music shall be the delight, the inspiration and the spiritual purifier of all peoples and classes.