His association of the landscape with song suggests that music, like these imagined outdoor exchanges, represents a more direct or ideal form of communication than language, an idea that Woolf’s writing repeatedly explores. She was fascinated by, but wary of, the idea that music was a form of total expression, a model that writing could aspire to or imitate. Here, Mr Carslake’s comparison of the painting to an ‘old English song’ celebrates music’s expressivity and capacity to confer order on its listeners, but also evokes the extensive contemporary nationalist writing about English folk song, landscape and early music by the composers and teachers of the English Musical Renaissance. Mr Carslake remarks that he has recently attended the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, at which English folk songs and military marches were performed: he found it ‘very tiring’ and ‘believed it was not being a success’. These bathetic details undercut nationalist and military music, suggesting that he, like Woolf herself, was repelled by it. Yet Mr Carslake's belief that music confers ‘proportion’ on the listener echoes the catchphrase used by the unfeeling doctors treating shell-shocked war veterans in her contemporary novel Mrs Dalloway, using music to suggest a more troubling aspect to his fantasies about communication: his ‘desire […] to be sure that all people were the same’ and ‘very simple underneath’ is both crudely reductive, as he partly recognises, and indicative of empathy and a wish for real connection with others.