The greater part of the following matter has already appeared in
various periodicals--the _Fortnightly Review_, the _Contemporary
Review_, the _Speaker_, the _Chord_, the New York _Musical Courier_,
the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _Weekly Critical Review_, the _Monthly
Musical Record_, and the _Daily Mail_. All have been greatly altered,
however--some practically rewritten. The larger articles--those on
Programme Music, Strauss, and Berlioz--have been made up from sundry
articles that appeared at different times and in different journals;
any one who has tried to weld heterogeneous material of this kind into
one mass will appreciate the difficulty of the work, and will, I trust,
make allowances for whatever awkwardness of form the essays may show
here and there.
I must apologise for the fact that occasionally one essay touches
slightly upon ground that has already been more fully treated in
another. It sometimes happens that two quite different lines of
thought, starting from widely separated points, will converge and meet;
or, on the other hand, that the one æsthetic principle will prove
applicable to different phenomena. I am conscious of this occasional
overlapping in the essays, but there seemed no way of avoiding it; if
an argument was to have its proper force it had to be given in full,
even if for a page or so it duplicated what had already been said
elsewhere.
My thanks are due to the Editors of the journals I have named for their
permission to reprint.