composer, reforms concerning the technical methods of composition, and reforms concerning the relations between the artists whose joint work the opera is, especially between the composer and the poet. To these must be added Wagner's theories about dramatic poetry, which are interesting enough. But about music pure and simple, about the standards of musical beauty and the improvement of æsthetic culture, Wagner has nothing new to tell us, and we shall soon understand the reasons of this when we hear what position Wagner assigns to music in relation to dramatic poetry, and, for aught we know, to poetry in general.

Following the opposite order of discussion, Wagner begins by saying that it lies in the nature of music to be, not the aim, but the means of expression. Therefore, in the coupling of poetry and music, called opera, the drama being the aim and the music being the means, the latter has to be adapted to the former, not (as is the case in libretto writing) the former to the latter. This is the fundamental principle on which the whole scheme of the reformer is based, and it is, according to Wagner, so obvious and self-evident that he apologizes for proclaiming a mere truism with such emphasis. It would be dishonest to withhold, even for one moment, our own dissent from this doctrine; we shall have to say more. about it hereafter, but we gladly admit its plausibility. The disregard of this principle having caused the decay and death of the modern opera, the opera can only revive through its revindication. The poet must be emancipated from the composer, the composer from the performer, the singer from the orchestra, and all from the tyranny of the public. As it is, the applause of the public tempts the performer to gratify low tastes instead of acting up to the artist's standards; the performer by selfishly showing off his personal attractions forces an uninteresting and irrelevant fact upon the attention of the hearer and generally disfigures the composer's work or veils his intentions; and the composer, thus doubly ill-treated by the performer, tyrannizes, in his turn, over the poet, whom he forces to write contemptible librettos instead of dramas, and to shape his verse according to the requirements of the conventional forms of music. The poet, then, the slave of the servant, of the servi servorum, is now to become the king of kings, and it is not too much to say that the much-abused music of the future turns out, on closer examination, to be the dramatic poetry of the future.

Wagner is particularly explicit in his instructions to the poet, and the second part of his work, which relates exclusively to the reform of dramatic poetry, is justly considered by the author as his literary and philosophical masterpiece. It is brimful of thought, and lifts the reader to the pure heights of æsthetics, without dimming his sight by clouds of transcendental nonsense.

"All arts," says Wagner, "when selfishly isolated, can only address themselves to our imagination," not to our senses. This means that each art taken separately has but a narrow range of expression. Even the plastic arts, which convey these impressions apparently through the eye alone, are powerless to express motion, the most important element of art, except through allusions which would remain unintelligible to us without the aid of our imagination. Descriptive and narrative literature requires the service of the eye only for the reading, not for the perception of the images described and facts narrated, which must be done by our imagination. And as to music, which can express only sentiment, and even that only vaguely, it would seem, according to this standard, the least independent and most helpless of all the arts. There is, according to Wagner, but one form of art capable of conveying all its meanings and intentions through the senses, and without the untrustworthy and often dangerous aid of our imagination. That form is the musical drama. It has all the known means of artistic expression at its disposal, and is therefore "the art par excellence." Not that Wagner advocates the mechanical juxtaposition of arts. He condemns even the melodrama as a mere mixture of speech and music which run parallel instead of coalescing, as they do in the opera, into a new unit which is neither speech nor music, but music spoken or speech sung.

And what are the things to be expressed by this great art which is so rich in means of expression? Action, of course, - human action; not a mere piece cut from that endless string of actions which we call history, nor a succession of such small doings as constitute the events of private life. The actors of history are princes and soldiers, the actors of private life accidental personalities. There the costumes, here the plot, may interest us, but we find human characters fit to be represented as centres of dramatic action, according to Wagner, neither in history nor in private life. The plot may be the ripening process of a character,

but the drama cares nothing for development, which it leaves to the novel; it wants ready-made characters, and only such among the possible types of human nature as are æsthetically interesting. Wagner admits that private life is but "the sediment of history." When viewed in this relation, the bourgeois is transfigured into the citizen, and the citizen may become a dramatic hero. But the multitude of political detail, which is the negation of dramatic unity, is apt to overflow and to destroy its frame, and the citizen is far more likely to become a hero of the hustings than a hero of the stage. Modern literature, in fact, tends far more towards journalistic dilution than towards dramatic condensation. Life itself is becoming easier and more shallow, and with its contrasts and conflicts the tragic element is gradually disappearing from its surface.

The prospects of dramatic art would be altogether hopeless under these circumstances, if Wagner had not discovered that that which threatens art with extinction may still be made available for tragic purposes. Napoleon said to Goethe: "What fate was to the antique world, politics are to our modern world." To escape fate, which is nothing but natural necessity misunderstood, the Greeks founded the political state, which is necessity willed and enforced by man. And as this was the origin of the Greek tragedy, there is no reason why the opposite process might not lead to similar results in our own days. The state is Wagner's Carthage. It has to be destroyed, not violently, but gradually. We fly from the compelling state no longer to fate, but to the natural, the purely human, and by asserting, not our individuality as such, but what is purely human in it, against the state, we make tragedy. The struggle between the written and the unwritten law, between ethics and morals, between custom and truth, between order and passion, can only cease with the existence of the state. The complete destruction of the state would be the complete revindication of human nature, but as the destruction must always be attempted and can never be complete, the process which generates the tragic must be an everlasting one. Even retrospectively it is apparently eternal, and the endless task of the future we find achieved in the remotest past. Socrates destroyed the state, and his own death, because tragical, does not shock or distress us. Antigone defied the state and died, but Kreon, the

personification of the state, "became man" again on seeing his son expire on Antigone's grave.

Thus, and in this sense, we find myth to be the Alpha and the Omega of history. It is its beginning and its end, just as sentiment is the beginning and the end of reason. Myth, when sprung from the depths of human consciousness, must renew and reproduce itself forever amid the influences of actual life, and such a myth, when fitly and intelligibly embodied in a drama, is the highest work a poet can achieve.

All this refers to the poetical conception and is purely æsthetical, though it belongs to literary, not to musical, æsthetics. When we come to the consideration of the principles which, according to Wagner, ought to guide the poet in his written utterance of the idea thus conceived, we become at once aware that we have been led into a domain no longer purely literary, but forming a kind of neutral ground between absolute poetry and absolute music. The poet writes in verse, not in prose, and verse properly declaimed and not scanned, that is to say, accentuated according to the real meaning of the words, not according to a fictitious prosodic value of its syllables, is in itself a sort of melody which Wagner calls verse-melody. Verse differs from prose in terseness; in prose the rhetorical accents, that is to say, the essentials, are few and far between, the elimination of non-essentials causes a crowding of - accents in verse, but it can hardly ever happen that these accents are equal in intensity throughout the sentence, or that their maxima and minima should alternate in regular periods like the so-called long and short syllables of a metre. There being no periodicity in the rhetorical accents and sub-accents, and there being a fixed periodicity in the metrical accent, it follows that declamation and metre are antagonistic to each other. Wagner does not seem to be aware of the peculiar charm which this antagonism may give to the verse-melody in skilful declamation, but he is unquestionably right in saying that in musical song the prosodic metre is lost. The bar, one might say, corresponds to the foot of the metre, and the pauses to the casura of the verse, and there are further analogies to be found in the natural limitation of all rhythm, whether musical or spoken, to two fundamental forms,— the even and the odd, the binal and the ternal. We cannot pass over more than two unaccentuated syllables, so that iambics and

dactyls, and, of course, their variations- the trochæus, the anapæst, and the amphibrachys - are the only possible constituent elements of a rhythmic sentence, whether sung or spoken. Notwithstanding this analogy, we are bound to admit the fact that, with the exception of the church choral and the dramatic recitative, modern music ignores and effaces the verse, so that, without hearing the actual words and repeating them without the music, one can rarely, if ever, recognize the metre of the verse through the rhythm of the music.

Modern languages have, according to Wagner, no real prosody, and consequently no metre. The accent is a rhetorical, not a metrical, necessity, and the verse owes its existence to the physiological necessity of drawing breath. The French and the Italians seem to know this, their verse being a string of a fixed number of syllables without the slightest reference to prosody or accent. But as all external or audible difference between prose and verse would thus disappear, the ear was conciliated by the invention of the rhyme, which has the additional advantage that the first rhyme, by inducing the expectation of the second, insures and enhances the attention of the hearer. The whole contrivance, however, appears to Wagner thoroughly childish. To accentuate a mere terminal syllable in a word whose radical remains unaccentuated, and in a verse where nothing can be accentuated, and to do so with the sole intention of tickling the hearer's languid ear, may well be called a frivolous proceeding; but Wagner does not tell us on what grounds he would condemn the institution of the rhyme in those languages in which not the terminals but the radicals form almost always the accentuated part of the rhyme. Here too, however, we must agree with him in admitting that the rhyme is generally lost in music. Rhyme implies not only the identity of the two vowels, but that of the following consonants. But in song the most audible part of a compound syllable, besides its vowel, is not the terminal consonant, but the consonant preceding the vowel. The terminal consonant may react on the vowel by predetermining its length or intensity, but the longer the singer dwells on the vowel, the less distinctly audible will be the terminal consonants, and an essential element of the rhyme must thus be lost. The initial consonant, on the contrary, can never be lost in song; we hear it with, if not before, the