communion with music itself, but also from intimacy with one of the most delightful sidetracks of the art of letters, for it cannot be denied that Berlioz and Ernest Newman and Ethel Smyth would amuse and interest even a tone-deaf Methodist hardware importer.
For there are other kinds of music critics, besides the two varieties which I have described. There is, for instance, the man who writes with a flourish, indulges in "fine writing" and what is "precious," and vocalizes with adjectives. You may not agree with his hyperbolical statement that Grieg and MacDowell were the foremost musicians of the nineteenth century, but you are interested in it because he means it and because he is not afraid to say so emphatically. "Perhaps," on occasion you whisper to yourself chasteningly, "he is right. It may even be possible that Mendelssohn was greater than Beethoven."
Another reviewer slashes violently into some school or other; he drives his sword sharply into the heart of your pet theory, while valiantly defending as good a one of his own; he dips his pen in gall and guides it over paper soaked in wormwood. He despises the new music, any new music, and he consumes nine thousand words in explaining why; he loathes the opera, and he throws all the weight of his influential opinion against it. This man is readable and interesting.
