a vague atmosphere continuous, we have seen that normal ears will never for long forget their instinct of closer attention. A forgetfulness which would be a reductio ad absurdum of Opera if engendered by an exciting libretto, is not likely to engender itself under the influence of a dull one. And where the attention does not get what it can musically assimilate, the only scope offered to it will be in discovering such appropriateness as it may in the purely external character of the sounds; in observing, e.g., that the instruments have a little bit of flurry when the sentiment is violent, calm down again when the sentiment is slow, or take lugubrious steps when the sentiment is doleful; and in recognising here and there the labelling phrases. And it can scarcely need proof that such abstract qualities as recognisability and appropriateness, in things which are neither pleasurable nor useful, do not come even within the outer circle of the æsthetic.

Clearly, then, if sound is to get beyond the barren stage of being readable, if it is to become artistically expressive and not merely crudely symbolic, it must take on something of its own, i.e., it must take on independent musical character by developing definite musical contour; just as

VOL. II.

D

the crude symbol of early pictorial art might be developed, say, into definite human contour. And of the presence and the interest of such contour the unreasoning ear is the sole arbiter. Its arbitration, too, is decidedly despotic, and its scrutiny of the strictest. For, first, it must be remembered that the ear has a rare way of attending to one thing at a time. It cannot shift about like the eye from point to point, and grasp in a moment a multitude of relations. The section of the series now being evolved before it is what engrosses it; and even in the most elaborate work, the sort of relations it may perceive in that section to other more or less contiguous sections are broadly reducible to the two simple ones of recurrence (with or without modification) and contrast. And secondly, the things attended to by the ear being things per se, and having their life in independence of that outer life from which our knowledge and ideas are gathered, are, even when most suggestive of that outer life, yet wholly lacking in those instantaneous glimpses down numerous vistas of association which word after word opens up in Poetry. This is enough to suggest how it is that, while in Poetry and Painting neutral and even ugly things may be grouped round beautiful things

or minister to a fine strain of thought, in the presence of which their presence is perceived and accounted for, in Music what is ugly and incoherent reveals itself in unrelated nakedness. And the ear's strictness is thus at once accounted for and justified. It must take kindly to the strains which salute it, and find in them the coherent stuff that it wants, before it will at all credit them with emotional messages or pass those messages on further. It must frankly enjoy the label before it will permit the slightest artistic appreciation of the labelled idea. Only give it its due, and it will open the channel with astounding, almost with indiscriminating, readiness to every sort of artistic association and fusion. But no outside signs of expression, no noisy stamps of determination, no spasms of exaggerated intervals, will take it in ; no juggling with the labels, or mixing them up together, will move it to more than scornful amusement, unless the juggling be the true magician's juggling, and produce the musical magician's prime result-beauty. And inasmuch as this beauty is essentially an attribute of form, and musical forms are built, just as much as human ones, out of definite elements, the substitution in Opera of the dramatic stream for the symphonic structure-how

ever rightly descriptive of the general arrangement of the larger musical sections-is a perpetual trap. For that most intimate and organic sort of structure which lies in the constant vital necessity of each bar as it stands to its neighbours as they stand, can never be abandoned while the ear holds the keys of emotion-a musical ear being nothing more or less than one which is percipient of such structure.

Here again, then, is the place for self-questionings à la Rousseau. We need not go even this short way in the examination of the claim of structureless sound to be dramatically expressive, before asking ourselves whether expressiveness so produced is what we like. The personages of the Ring make many pages-full of remarks which are simply typical of their dull and disreputable characters, but which -since words and music profess to well up from the same inward source-it would be self-stultification to say cannot be set to notes; and as it would be highly inappropriate to give them beautiful notes, Wagner has appropriately given them ugly ones. Let the hearer discover for himself how far the abstract fact that they satisfy that condition is a nourishing piece of imaginative food; or how far, under the surrender of the musical sense to

hours of sustained incoherence, it becomes really a subject for delighted contemplation that the story is also a trifle higgledy-piggledy, and much of the dialogue very unsuited to fine rhythmic setting. And if he is so fortunate as to be able for a time to take refuge in passive self-abandonment to the shifting tides, and can forget to care what particular ways the notes go, so long as he feels that a good number of them are going, let him still consider how far this formless effect, this relapse to the vaguest, most general, and least musical of musical attitudes, testifies to the 'bold regeneration' that we hear so much about, and is calculated to 'be the fair beginning of a time' in Art.

And here we have really merged into the assertion and vindication of our second cardinal point -Music's constant and characteristic independence, alike at its highest and lowest, of ideas and emotions known and nameable outside itself. The reason why Wagner has been safely able to ignore this elementary fact in musical psychology is this— that the clear perception of it demands something quite alien both to the actual impressions of the art, and to the habits of mind of most of those impressed—namely a moment or two of deliberate analysis. For want of this, those whose every