out of the petty hubbub of the Rheingold, or drift despairingly amid the turmoil of the second and third acts of the Götterdämmerung, too helpless themselves to help even a drowning ear.1 I mean passages of genuine musical invention that can be welcomed and clung to; passages in which the ear's path seems new indeed, but preordained; whose mastery the ear owns in the process, not of being dragged about at their mercy, but of itself mastering them. And these, for all the treating them as belonging to 'one large melody,' and concealing their transience by the avoidance of frank full-closes, are often just as much scattered morsels

6

1 The list of ninety motives set out in that wonderfully humorous little book, Guide through the Music of R. Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung'—which, not content with the dusky harmonies of the cooking-motive and the coaxing crawling-motive,' familiarised us with the spook' and with the mysteries of 'brangling' and 'brustling '—is made up in great part of minute fragments of note. combination, arbitrarily selected and interpreted, and having no pretension to any melodic character-some of them moreover occurring only once, so that it seems impossible to find in what possible sense the term Leit-motiv can be applied to them. The manner of demonstrating the relationship and transformation of various members of this list may be perfectly exemplified, without the use of music-type, by the following extract from an almost equally amusing work, the Benjamin Franklin Primer: Nag is an English term derived from the Latin equus, a horse, from which we get equine. Equi is dropped, and the final e changed to ag for euphony.'

as if they were embedded in recitativo secco—just as much the plums of Wagner's as of Verdi's confectionery. Music of the most individual and haunting kind it would indeed be absurd to demand throughout a long operatic scene. But there are many grades from the order of excellence which ensures vivid and loving remembrance to that which merely ensures pleased and active recognition on acquaintance; and sufficient individuality to satisfy the latter test is surely the least we can accept in the majority of the musical sentences of any scene that aspires to the dignity of healthy popular art.

'But how splendid the plums can be when we get them!' Yes, indeed; that is what so greatly complicates the Wagner question; simply because no musician approximately so great as he on his day has had approximately so few days. Professing to 'spread melody' over interminable dramas, over libraries of music-paper, he is really the tit-bittiest of composers, as St. James's Hall delights to find. What may be the accurate measure of his greatness, as judged by his best efforts, we need not here particularly inquire: a valid answer must depend not on argument but on evidence, scarcely yet attainable, as to the width, the depth, and above

all the permanence of the effect. It may be worth remarking, however, that for those whose personal instincts on the matter are equally removed from both extremes of current opinion, the setting of this best work of his in the very highest class is, just because of their genuine admiration of it, a more vexatiously puzzling phenomenon than the description of it as simply dull and unmelodious. In Tristan, for example, which contains considerable tracts of exciting and, for Wagner, unusually sustained beauty, is not the cloying quality at least as distinctive as the exciting, the sense of strain and mannerism at least equal to that of achievement? To the melody, even at its finest, there clings a faint flavour of disease, something over-ripe in its lusciousness and febrile in its passion. And this effect is strangely cumulative. Steadily through the whole evening one feels a growing sense of being imprisoned in the fragrance of a musical hot-house, across which the memory of some great motive of Handel's or Beethoven's sweeps like a whiff from breezy pinewoods by the sea. Or take a more compact instance, where, even if there lurk a certain strain of coarseness, there is certainly no hint of disease, the familiar overture to Tannhäuser-a piece of such

superb popular qualities that, had Music done nothing greater, she might well hold up her head among the arts. Only-when one thinks of the Leonora? How the sphere of musical possibilities, which seemed so wide and perfect, breaks up on a sudden to unfathomable depths and heights; to ignore which is surely no true compliment to the lesser work.

The pursuit of such comparisons would carry us too far, even were it possible to make it profitable. Keeping to Wagner himself, one may still find the problem sufficiently puzzling, and the innocent question, 'Are you a Wagnerite?' the hardest in the world to answer in anything under five minutes. How singular is the art in which it is even possible for so lovely a will-o'-the-wisp as that burden of the 'Rheingold, reines Gold' to lead on the trustful ear into so blind a morass; lightened indeed by some melodic rays from the fire-god, but not to be forgotten or forgiven even when, after two hours' eclipse, the 'pure gold' of the earlier strain flashes out on the further side! How strange

must be the conditions of invention, for the brain that had filled the air of Europe with the haunting delight of the march in Tannhäuser to produce afterwards in the same genre, as an elabo

rate masterpiece for a great occasion, anything so turgidly tame, so saliently flat, as the main 'subject' of the Huldigungsmarsch! To do Wagner justice, however, he has often shown himself tolerably knowing as to where the plums come: in the Walküre, for instance, he has sweetened one of the longest of operatic love-scenes with the flavour of a single one, and has spread out another, like jam, through pretty well the whole of the Meistersinger -which alone would go far to account for the just popularity of those delightful works. But it is this very fineness of the plums which is a chief aid to disguising their paucity. It enables the composer to take advantage, not only of the long habituation of the operatic public to not dreaming of finding more than a small fraction of their repast artistically exhilarating, but also of their modesty; in that, finding a certain amount of exhilaration of a fine quality, they are always ready to attribute the sparseness of it, not to his want of invention, but to their own want of insight. Then, too, those opposite modes of listening, the drifting and the alert, which we just now distinguished, though typical are not constant. Few ears perhaps exemplify either of them for long together. They shift and alternate almost as uncertainly as sense