In our modern days we too often, Procrustes-like, make our ideas to fit the forms.

We put our guest, the poetic thought, that comes to us like a homing bird from out of the mystery of the blue sky--we put this confiding stranger straightway into that iron bed: the 'sonata-form'-- or perhaps even the 'third-rondo form,' for we have quite an assortment; and should the idea survive, and grow, and become too large for the bed, and if we have grown to love it too much to cut off its feet and thus _make_ it fit (as did that old robber of Attica), why then we run the risk of having some wiseacre say, as is said of Chopin: 'Yes--but he is weak in sonata-form'! ...

Form should be nothing more than a synonym for _coherence_.

No idea, whether great or small, can find utterance without form; but that form will be inherent in the idea, and there will be as many forms as there are adequately expressed ideas in the world." Concerning programme-music he wrote at length.

"In my opinion," he says in one of his lectures, "the battle over what music can express and what it cannot express has been carried on wrong lines.