Musical Motley

Excerpt: . . . Composition, it is rather curious that while I was writing on our too great readiness to admire everything a classic does, merely because he is a classic, someone in the Times Literary Supplement should have been regarding much the same fallacy--more particularly in poetry and painting--from a slightly different point of view. The thesis of the Times writer is that at this or that stage in every art, professionalism--by which he means the mere way of saying things that a period or