PRELUDE

Summary

It may be asserted that National Music, with its origin, its features, its uses, has been too much neglected as a subject by scientific teachers and historians, who have seemingly agreed to consider it in the light of raw material, the examination of which could only interest minute analysts or else practical manufacturers. This is a mistake. National music is not raw material, inasmuch as every natural production, from the moment when man has tended and shaped it, however rudely, has been thenceforth, once for all, separated from the condition of the brute ore in the mountain; or of the tree, the seeds whereof were sown by the wind, and its body dwarfed by drought or bent by storm, but from which no human hand has pruned a branch, and round the roots of which the earth has never been stirred by labour.

The subject, again, has been handled ingeniously and earnestly by antiquaries who have not been professional musicians. But antiquarianism is apt, as a pursuit, to seduce the keenest and calmest of observers; and in no respect more largely than in making them partisans. I am neither scientific nor antiquarian ; but the characteristics and beauties of national music have long and deeply engaged me, and its charm has found its place in my every enjoyment of the complete art; has run like a thread through my every experience of home delight and foreign travel. Thus, what I have to offer are not a few impressions, scrambled together in the haste of the moment, but are the result of many years of comparison and experience.