intuition of musical beauty exemplifies the fact are often the first to deny and resent it. 'You talk about beautiful music not expressing things,' one of them will urge; 'why to me the bits of music I most care about express things beyond all words, whole worlds of emotion, and infinity and eternity into the bargain.' Quite so; that is accurate; that is a way they have; and it is just what is not (however much compatible with) the expression of this or that particular emotion-i.e. of that which is proved not to be beyond all words by being accurately definable in words, as gaiety, dejection, yearning, triumph. And whoever remembers the places where he gets this ineffable feeling will find on looking that, while it is only occasionally connected with the sort of definable expression which makes him say, 'That is very melancholy,' or 'That is very jubilant,' it is absolutely invariably connected with a piece of sound-movement of which each unit and fragment in turn has its irresistible rightness, and comes charged with the sense of a necessary 'whence' and 'whither '-that is to say, a piece of objective and organic form. But as long as those who truly enjoy do not exercise this amount of reflection on their enjoyment, then, however clear be their intuition, they will always be in danger,

when they talk about it, of confounding the occaIsional and definable with the essential and undefinable emotion; and of attributing their delight in sonie passage of music, which is as much an individual object as the Venus of Milo, to some perfectly general ground-as that it 'expresses peace' -instead of to the fact of its notes going not any other way but just that one way; which is delightful to them, and able permanently to remain so, just in proportion as genius went to the divining it and fashioning it forth. And as long as this confusion is possible, Wagner and his school can always take refuge in the ad captandum fallacy that the expression of definable emotions and ideas is the one great thing for Music to aim at; can discredit the opposite view as a narrow plea for 'absolute music,' in the sense of music which has no need or power of fusion with poetry and drama; and can ignore the all-essential work of divining and fashioning forth the cogent ways for notes to go, to which the makers of modern music have devoted their whole energy, and which, so far from excluding any more definable sort of expression, will alone lift such expression out of the mechanical into the æsthetic region.1

As Music stands so singularly apart among human interests,

And I would fain pause for a moment on the wanton injustice that is done to Opera itself by not recognising that even here, in the very sphere where Music is summoned to take on the depiction of definable passions to the utmost of her power, the vague but powerful expression of these is but a fraction of what she has done and is ready to do for word and scene; that the emotional element in her which is her own, and therefore unnameable, is not on that account condemned to an isolated existence; that the ethical suggestion may become so fragmentary, or the tinge of special sentiment so faint, as practically to vanish in the atmosphere of purely musical delight, and yet that that delight will glorify and transfigure and seem part of the inmost essence of any at all artistic elements in that to which it is wedded. In that transfiguration, what is serious takes on sublimity, and what is ludicrous gets edged with loveliness; nay, even hackneyed things will become haunting, and com

so the various things that can be said about it always seem to me in a special degree connected among themselves, and incapable of being supplied from analogy. The result is that any omission (and in an Essay of this length very much, of course, has to be omitted) may suggest a flaw. To guard myself against this, and still more against a possible charge of onesidedness and dogmatism, I may perhaps be allowed to refer especially to the chapters on Colour, Expression, Opera, and Criticism, in The Power of Sound.

monplace things possessing. It would be an immense gain if composers would only put to various specimens of music commonly called 'expressive' the simple test of asking how far, if heard in detachment, each would inevitably suggest some particular nameable idea or sentiment and no other; and would thus learn explicitly to recognise how extremely loose and general are the conditions of external reference within which Music, if true to itself, may still be most genuinely dramatic in the sense of enormously intensifying dramatic effect. To those who had thus consciously confuted for themselves the central principle emphasised in almost every page of the Oper und Drama, we might readily concede the advantage of possessing, in word and scene, a definite starting-point, raison d'être, and control, for their inventive stream; without having always to fear the chartered libertinism so characteristic of modern 'dramatic' writing. And truly a theory which would exclude from the stage such music as half the solos in the Beggars' Opera and half the concerted pieces in Fidelio, as 'Batti batti' and the minuet in Don Giovanni, as the prize-song in the Meistersinger and the shadow-song in Dinorah, as the pilgrims' hymn in Tannhäuser and the gipsychorus in Preciosa-inventions whose power to

impress the hearer may be proved in any popular concert-room to lie just in expressing themselves, but which borrow from their stage-concomitants almost as much romance as they lend-is negatively as great an outrage on this joint art of Opera as the positive one which 'unites' Poetry and Music by dogging bald words with intervals flung out of a bag.

Here, then, in the false theory of expression, lay the second great trap. The prosaic fallacy that the essence of Music is vague nameable expressiveness, instead of definite unnameable impressiveness, is only carried out by making the expressiveness itself mechanical and independent of any impressiveness whatever. And the root-fallacy was the more dangerous to Wagner, in that just as colour was the practical, so this is the theoretical mode of excusing and concealing the fitfulness of his enormous musical gift; besides affording scope to that other gift, always a hazardous one to non-literary art, of considerable literary ingenuity. Much might be said about the particular mode of support selected for the theory-the solemn joke of making out Beethoven (poor Beethoven! with his uncouth mutterings and shoutings, driving his invention along the rhythmic tracks where alone melodies will