Dr. Hanslick, the
eminent critic and professor of musical history in the University of
Vienna, goes even farther. "There can be no doubt," he says, "that
music had a much more direct effect on the ancient nations than it has
on us." To-day, "the feelings of the layman are affected most, those
of an educated artist least, by music." "The moral influence of tones
increases in proportion as the culture of mind and character
decreases. The smaller the resistance offered by culture, the more
does this power strike home. It is well known that _it is on savages
that music exerts its greatest influence_."
Let us briefly test these sceptical paradoxes in the light of mediaeval
history and modern biography. Is it only among the ancient and
primitive people, and among the musically uneducated, that the divine
art exerts an emotional influence? St. Jerome evidently did not think
so. He believed, at any rate, that music can exert a _demoralizing_
influence, and he taught that Christian maidens should know nothing of
the lyre and the flute. The eminent divine was guided in this matter
by the same process of illogical reasoning of which, later, the
Puritans were guilty when they banished music from the churches.
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