all thought of music and language as one has actually experienced them. 'Melodies' which last a whole evening; ‘infinite form'; union of Poetry

and Music, each at its highest,' while yet both emanating from a single inventive source—or if from two, at any rate from a dramatist with music sufficiently on his brain to be able to accept Wagner's dictum that the sole test of worthy dramatic writing is suitability to be sung throughout, and from a musician in whom literary sensibilities are so dominant as to render him barren of notes, until fertilised by the minutest verbal details of the poem where his melos is 'implicit '; a consequent mutual interdependence of words and notes extending to the 'finest ramifications' of the phrases; the sufficiency of alliteration, if unintermittent, to keep 'feeling on a four hours' stretch of poetical excitement; the deliverance of Music from the burden of time and the materially-based laws of rhythmic stimulation, which have held it in such timid awe; the abandonment of the difficult search-difficult even to the facile Haydn, and to Beethoven matter for raving and stamping—after those rare combinations of sound which shall arrest and fascinate the attention, and which are unnecessary now that every variety of human emotion turns out to be expressi

ble in sound-material at a moment's notice by a vague sort of poetic inspiration, and can be turned on and off as easily as the horns or the big drum. It all seems so comfortable for all concerned, till one remembers that the greatest melodies in the world, though years may have gone to their making, vary in length between a few seconds and a few minutes; that form is as essentially finite in time as in space; that even taken in its loosest and most ambiguous sense, and with the aid of devices and modes of amplification which are out of the question in Opera, a musical form could not well be made to cover half an hour-while, in its more vital and definite sense, a few score of bars are the limit of the stretch in the direction of infinity which it will stand without either (1) going back on its own phrases, or (2) changing to something else, or (3) falling to pieces; that no considerable musician, with the possible exception of Wagner himself, has ever shown himself so much as a tenth-rate poet, and that not one in a hundred of even his most conscientious alliterations has any relation to feeling at all; that while by far the greater part of first-class dramatic poetry is eminently unsuited, an immense amount of less noticeable verse is eminently suited, for dramatic musical setting; that notes and words, being things

absolutely disparate, can artistically concur only by both doing their independent duty from their independent resources, and so ‘ramifying' into phrases of independent significance and independently coherent growth; that in Music the spiritual power is so rooted in the temporal, that definite and unchangeable relations of time-length, felt as such, belong to the inmost nerve and fibre of musical vitality; that Music will artistically express human emotion only on the one condition that she shall first artistically impress human ears; and that there is no royal road to that impressiveness, by which a composer can shirk the pursuit of definite (and therefore extremely finite) forms in the dim region of rhythmically directed impulse, or the fashioning forth from the shapeless material, often by slow degrees, of that which he may first have divined only in shadowy outline. And here every clause shears off a glory from the brilliant Wagnerian phantasy, and substitutes a piece of dry truth. Every clause, too, if fully traced out, would become only truer and drier, and might demand the reader's attention to abstract-looking terms like 'key,' and 'tonality,' and even to more distinct technicalities. like 'modulation' and 'diminished sevenths'; in place of the familiar words and concrete images

and vivid glimpses of life and nature with which the critic of visual art can light up his page. Not that there would be any difficulty in proving to the most casual reader that, in mechanically whistling 'Tommy, make room for your uncle,' he has been exhibiting the essential meaning of tonality and modulation as truly as if he had written a symphony; or that the amused surprise at the choralelike parody of the same melody in a recent London burlesque

Slow.

&c.

was ample guarantee for the general susceptibility to the artistic use of diminished sevenths. But it will be enough here to refer as a basis to two cardinal distinctions; of which one marks off Music as an art from other arts, and the other defines the two great elements of which Music itself consists. Music, then, is, first and foremost, a presentative and not (like Poetry, Painting, and Sculpture) a re-presentative art; its distinctive function being unceasingly to present us, and uniquely to impress us, with things peculiar to itself, and unable to draw their impressive quality from any extraneous source,

and in that sense always 'absolute,' to whatever further connections they may lend themselves. And its elements are abstract form and abstract colour, i.e. form and colour which occur nowhere outside it.

There is something so stale in the very look of these distinctions that I almost blush once again to write them down; yet the full point of them, which was never so important as now, is almost habitually missed. Everybody knows, indeed, that the melodic and harmonic combinations of Music cannot portray particular scenes and people in the same way that the forms of Painting can; everybody recognises, too, that a tune is an arrangement of notes, and something different from the particular sort of tone-colour or timbre of the particular instrument on which the notes are rendered. But press these axioms a little further, or expand them into truths only just less elementary, and what sort of recognition do they get? Do not nineteen out of twenty concert-books practically deny that in music, at its highest, no less than its lowest, the freedom from obligation to portray or represent extends just as much to emotions as to scenes and people, and that the most distinctive impressions made by music are