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 sf 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 imaoination. 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 cæsuræ 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 vowel; it is its countenance or physiognomy, and addresses itself to that part of our sense of hearing which Wagner fantastically calls "the eye of our hearing." Granting, now, that our ear is fond of repetition, Wagner would gratify that desire, not by means of the ordinary rhyme, but by means of alliteration, which implies the identity of nothing but the initial consonants, that is to say, identity of countenance in the words. These words, which may be two or three or even more, must all occur in the same verse whose accentuated or essential parts they are. They should express things either congenial or antagonistic, rather than indifferent to each other. "Sweet songsters soar" would be an alliteration of the former, "heaven and hell" of the latter, kind. The three s's would induce the composer to remain in the same key; the two h's, however, belonging to two opposites, just as the note C is common to the widely different keys of G and A flat, would indicate the necessity of a sudden modulation. The German language is particularly rich in proverbial expressions where alliteration takes the place of rhyme, and Wagner may not be wrong in considering it as the only form of rhyme compatible with the genius of the German language. It is certainly the only form of rhyme which is not lost in song.

The external characteristics of ordinary verse are its metre and its rhyme. The metre, as we have seen, is partly lost in declamation and entirely effaced in song, while the rhyme, though perfectly preserved in declamation, spoils declamation by enforcing false accents, and is almost entirely lost in melismatic song. And since both verse-melody and song-melody are by their very nature forced to ignore the metre and the rhyme, the only proper form of musical poetry would seem to be that peculiar kind of rhythmic and alliterative prose which forms the text of the poet's own operas.

The faithful musical rendering of the verse-melody is the music of the future. So Wagner tells us, implicitly at least, when he calls this verse-melody "the intelligible tie between word and sound," "the offspring of music wedded to poetry," excelling either parent in dignity and beauty. But how is this musical verse to be obtained from the data furnished by the poet? We saw that this verse-melody consists in a succession of graduated accents and alliterative sounds. It is, therefore, predetermined by the sense of the words, and Wagner adds, that it must, in its turn, predetermine its musical intonation. But if this is so, what is to become of musical spontaneity? What of the artistic dignity of the man whom we call composer, but who would seem to be nothing more than a translator in the poet's service? Wagner requests us not to be alarmed. Self-limitation and self-denial are fictions which he is too wise to expect from any mortal, and to enforce them would be to alter their nature. They are possible only through love, and love is the relation which, according to Wagner, ought to exist between poet and composer,—not love founded on absolute and equilateral reciprocity, but that mutual yet unsymmetrical love which exists between a man and a woman. The woman's sacrifice is great, but in making it she loses neither in dignity nor in power, but gains in both, her self-sacrifice being in itself the highest display of her innate capacities.

Poetry, then, is the man, music the woman. Each is sterile without the other. But when united in true love, they merge their separate individualities into one perfect being, the dramatic artist. Hitherto the poet has been the writer of librettos, an anonymous and ill-paid slave, and at best but a cavaliere servante to an imperious and capricious mistress. These unnatural relations have caused the decay of the opera, and the divorce from poetry may prove still more injurious to music when displaying her charms outside the walls of the theatre. Music can neither think nor express thought. All she can express is sentiment, but in expressing sentiment she gives shape and countenance to thought, and longs to receive its germs from poetry. Of course, there are different types of womanhood: there is the fille de joie, the coquette, and the prude, and Wagner gives us to understand that these may be taken as the representatives of Italian, French, and German music respectively. But where is the true woman, at once loving and chaste, lovely and modest, adorning her husband with her charms, yet unwilling to attract attention to her own self?

Wagner has the good fortune of belonging to the class which Linné called Monœcia. He is both poet and musician, man and woman. But he can see no reason why poet and musician should not be two separate persons, whose co-operation would no doubt be facilitated by a certain superiority, in age or otherwise, on the part of the poet. Voltaire said, What is too absurd to be spoken is allowed to be sung. But Wagner would say, What is unworthy of speech cannot be worth singing, and what is unfit for song ought not to be deemed worthy of poetic speech. In other words, he would say to the poet, Give up as unpoetical whatsoever cannot be fitly expressed in music; and he would say to the musician, Avoid all musical expressions which are not called for by the poet's intentions, as superfluous, meaningless, unintelligible, and offensive.

The musical rendering having to accommodate itself to the verse-melody, and the verse-melody being derivable from the sense and meaning of the words, the musical melody must be considered as something partly derivable from the sense and meaning of the poet's words, and at the same time dependent, though in a different sense, on laws and agencies which belong to the exclusive domain of music. As the common fruit of two trees, it must have two roots, and these two roots are the poet's intention and the laws of harmony and tonality. However plainly inferrible from the poet's words, the melody cannot start into existence without having been predetermined by harmony and tonality, a melody being a tonal melody only in so far as it implies an ideal harmony. If melody is generated by the poet's word, it is shaped and brought to light by harmony, the matrix of music. A succession of harmonies, no doubt, implies a melody in the treble, but such melodies are meaningless, and to make melody derivable from harmony without the intercession of the poet is to impute paternity to a mother. This is the mistake of absolute music, which plays songs without words, composes words without meaning, and sings vowels without consonants. Mendelssohn, the representative of this school, is a musical spinster in Wagner's eyes.

But let us suppose the composer had written his score in perfect accordance with the principles which regulate the relations between himself and the poet; what would be the means of expression at his disposal? We know that the spoken word addresses itself to the understanding, and the sentiment which the word implies but cannot intelligibly express is couched in melodious utterance. But there are shades of sentiment which the human voice, whether speaking or singing, seems insufficient to define in their micrometric distinctness, and there are others which exceed the range of audible utterance in the same way in which the invisible rays of the spectrum exceed the range of visual perception. When the human voice has expressed all that it is capable of expressing in its double capacity as organ of speech and organ of song, there will always remain an unexpressed and inexpressible residue containing these two forms of the unutterable. This is no mystical platitude, the term "unutterable" meaning that which cannot be adequately or intelligibly expressed by speech or song, and which requires other means of expression. And fortunately for the dramatic art, such means exist; they are the gesture and the orchestra. The former (which comprises the dance and the mimic play) expresses that part of the unsung residue which requires visible symbols, the latter that part which requires audible symbols. The gesture or dance is to the orchestra as verse is to melody. Their unity lies in the rhythm, that is to say, in that which is jointly perceived and jointly enjoyed by the eye and the ear.

In the chorus of the Greek tragedy, speech, song, dance, and instrumental music were inseparable. In the modern drama this union has been destroyed, the verse-melody and the gesture being left to the actor, the instrumental music to the orchestra; and where gesture has to be concentrated into dance, the division of labor is carried still further, the dancing being intrusted to dumb performers, while the verse-melody is either entirely suppressed or declaimed by the actors with a minimum of conventional gesture. But this technically necessary division of labor ought not to induce forgetfulness of the primordial union or undue self-assertion of either the dancer or the orchestra. Their function is to co-operate with each other, but to do so not in each other's service, but in the service of the drama, in order to elucidate and carry out that part of the poet's intention which cannot be carried out through speech and song. Hence it follows that the pantomime and the ballet, being founded on an inversion of means and ends, cannot claim to be more than amusements, half childish, half sensuous, disguised under the garb of scenic art. And as to absolute instrumental music or orchestral music having no reference to the drama and as to its being played on the piano or by extra-theatrical hands, it is an art of which Wagner speaks with some reserve, and for whose greatest master, he feels unbounded admiration, but for which we can hardly find a proper place in Wagner's system.

The orchestra may be considered either as an apparatus for expressing harmony,—and in this case it may be fitly replaced by the piano or the organ, — or as an ensemble of instruments of different structure,—and in this case it forms a real alphabet, containing all that is necessary for its own idiomatic utterances. We know from acoustics, that when a violin, a hautboy, and a horn play the same note, the differences of the three sounds are due to the number and relative strength of the consonant harmonics, which in their turn depend on the material and shape of each instrument, that is to say, on its individuality. These consonant harmonics or orchestral individualities are to the human voice what the consonants are to the vowels. The human voice, it is true, has both vowels and consonants, but can dwell only on vowels, while the instrument, even in its long-drawn notes, never ceases to assert its own peculiar character. There are affinities between instruments as there are between consonants, and as we have groups of dentals, labials, and gutturals, it might be interesting to divide the orchestra into similar groups of agnate instruments. The art of instrumentation, therefore, consists chiefly in individualizing or characterizing. It must not be confounded with the art of harmonization, which is theoretical rather than technical. As the organ of harmony, the orchestra has to accompany the verse-melody, that is to say, to justify it as melody. As a chorus of instruments, it has to emphasize the individuality of the actor. Both these functions presuppose sympathy and self-subordination; the orchestra must not distract the hearer's attention, which belongs to the actor; and to avoid this, it must neither compete with the singer in melody nor depend on the singer's treble for harmonic completeness. The office of the orchestra is not to sing melody, nor is it the office of the singer to support or complete harmonies, as though the human voice were only one of the many possible instruments. The great popularity of singing (melody-playing) orchestras, such as we hear in garden-concerts and on military parades, only proves, according to Wagner, that the melodies, though designed for song, were purely instrumental and thoroughly "unhuman." And for analogous reasons Wagner condemns polyphonous singing on the stage, whether in form of duets, ensembles, or choruses. He objects to it on dramatic as well as musical grounds. As something requiring the merging of individualities, polyphony is thoroughly Christian, but thoroughly anti-dramatic. The actors on the stage are all heroes in posse; they may sing together occasionally, but never for the sake of supporting each other harmonically, which would imply that some of them assume orchestral duties towards one man's treble.

Although the orchestra must not play melodies while they are sung by the actor, there is a class of orchestral melodies which Wagner not only tolerates, but to which he attaches the greatest dramatic importance. Certain musical phrases sung by the principal dramatis personæ in solemn and impressive moments, and accompanied by such instruments as befit the individual character of each singer, may be reproduced, in the course of the play, by the same group of instruments, without the vocal co-operation of the singer, whose presence or whose coming on the stage is all that is required on such occasions. Such a melody, though purely orchestral, must remind the hearer of the words to which it was originally sung, of the circumstances under which it was sung, and of the character of the person whose emotions it then helped to express. And not only does it suggest such reminiscences to the hearer, but it tells him that the same reminiscences are passing through the mind of the hero on the stage, whose attitude, gesture, or mimic expression must, of course, be in harmony with this supposition. We all know the strange fascination of associated ideas. A few bars of half-forgotten melody which strike our ear unexpectedly, though quite unobtrusively, may conjure up long-lost images of the past, which we are loath to dismiss again, and it seems strange that this weird, conjuring power of melody has not been used more systematically for dramatic purposes. There are, no doubt, some operas in which this has been done, but the orchestral motives, or phrases intended to be typical of something or of somebody, hardly ever refer to any previous vocal utterance and then remain meaningless, or they are used as mere ushers, as in Verdi's Rigoletto, to announce the appearance of the hero on the stage, when they are apt to become equally meaningless through indiscriminate repetition. In most of these cases they appear as mere tricks when compared with the thoughtfully devised and sparingly used orchestral motives of Wagner, the melody of which is determined by previous song, and the instrumentation of which is determined by the analogies which exist between moral and acoustic qualities, and consequently between personal character and orchestral individuality. This grouping of sound-capacities may not unfitly be called the alliteration of the orchestra, the metaphor being fully justified by Wagner's own comparison between musical instruments and the consonants of the alphabet. And as we have had occasion to point out a similar analogy between alliteration of words and modulation of keys, we may sum up this part of Wagner's doctrines in the following theorem—

The three principal factors of the musical drama namely, the verse, the melody, and the orchestra—have each its principium unitatis and its principium individuationis. The verse is held together by the laws of rhythm or accent, the melody by the laws of tonality, the orchestra by the laws of harmony. But each has the power of expressing special affinities or contrasts among its own constituent parts, — the verse among its words, the melody among its notes, the orchestra among its instruments. The alliteration which connects two words regardless of rhythm and accent, the modulation which joins two keys in defiance of tonality, and the sound-affinities which constitute orchestral groups not required for purely harmonic purposes, are three analogous means of expression, and as they are all eminently suggestive and individualizing they must be considered as the fittest means of defining dramatic characters. With regard to modulation and instrumentation this is no new truth, but the alliterative rhyme and that peculiar form of instrumentation called the orchestral motive are Wagner's own additions, and whatever may be the merits of the former, no man of thouhht and culture will hesitate to admit the high æsthetic value of the latter.

Like all works of art, the musical drama ought to have unity,—not the old unities of space and time, but the unity of that which is the negation of space and time, the unity of action. This unity of contents requires unity of form, unity in the modes of expression. Now let us look at any ordinary opera, no matter whether good or bad, and we shall see at a glance that far from showing this unity of form it is the very negation of all unity, a mosaic of loosely connected or unconnected pieces of music belonging to three or four purely conventional forms accepted and sanctioned by usage. Each of these pieces is an independent whole by itself, and each of these forms is an independent, and, as such, a perfectly legitimate form of art. The recitative has its history and its traditions, so has the air, and so has the chorus. We have seen above that Wagner objects to all forms of polyphonous song on the stage, that he condemns the chorus and the duet or other ensembles as anti-dramatic, and that he wishes to see these forms replaced by musical dialogues, with occasionally overlapping sentences. These dialogues, in fact, form the bulk of Wagner's own operas. They partake far more of the character of the recitative than of that of the ordinary opera air, but differ from both, and their general character can perhaps be best inferred from our remarks on the Wagnerian verse-melody, in which we saw music firmly chained to the verse, and moving timidly along its rough surface, bristling with accents, meanings, and alliterative suggestions. The ordinary opera air is, in Wagner's opinion, an intruder on the stage; it is the popular air in disguise, and ought to be driven into the street again, from whence it came. In Mediæval Italy the popular air was admitted into the palaces, first as a means of amusement, later as a means of vocal display. It has never done more, as a part of the modern opera, than serve these two purposes, which are both foreign to the spirit of the musical drama as understood by Wagner. We cannot wonder, then, that, without banishing the opera air altogether from the musical drama, he reduces it to mere shreds of melody scattered over the musical dialogue, and reserves the full-grown air for those necessarily rare moments in which the lyrical element predominates over the dramatic.

Far less destructive are Wagner's ideas about the overture. Considering that it is a mere piece of "absolute" music, not induced by words, we might have expected its complete removal from the frame of the musical drama. If music is nothing but a means of expression, how can it claim to exist, apart from speech and dance-gesture, except for the sake of recalling previous song? What is the "orchestral motive" but an echo of the human voice?

But Wagner seems to admit that the suggestiveness of instrumental music is forecasting as well as reminiscent, prospective as well as retrospective. Compared with the spectacular and histrionic part of the performance, which is all motion, the part represented by the orchestra seems repose, and we should become more conscious of this contrast if the orchestra were hidden from view by being placed, not behind the scenes, but in a pit of sufficient depth to cover the tops of the fiddlers' bows. This comparative repose which precedes the rising of the curtain is to the ear what the sight of a landscape or a motionless, silent figure is to the eye it fixes our attention and raises our expectation. What the landscape does through its genius loci, and the silent figure through its glance, the orchestra must do through its speechless strains; it must put us into the proper mood for the coming drama. The Germans call mood stimmung, which, literally, means tuning or mode of tuning. We may say, therefore, that the overture ought to tune the hearer's soul according to the poetical clef of the drama, so as to render it capable of sympathetic vibrations. It is obvious that the so-called "orchestral motives" can find no place in such an overture. To make an overture out of shreds of melody taken from the drama itself is to do something which has no meaning, and the proper place for such an overture, if it had any, would be at the end of the opera.

Wagner's ideas concerning the performance itself are implicitly contained in the foregoing review of his doctrine. The practical details being a matter of personal tuition, we have only to make a brief recapitulation of the theoretical generalities. We saw that the musical rendering of the verse-melody must be, to use a profane simile, a close fit. The composer's wings are not clipped by the poet, but they are flapped in strict and deferential conformity with the poet's utterances. In this sense the composer must be realistic, but, the thing to be expressed being ideal, because poetical, its musical expression, though realistic in form, is still essentially ideal.

In like manner the performer must, with realistic accuracy and befitting self-denial, endeavor to reproduce with his technical means what the artist has produced with his æsthetic means. But he cannot faithfully carry out the artist's intentions without being able to perceive or to infer these intentions, that is to say, without æsthetic culture. Here too, then, we have but apparent realism, a realistic performance being a faithful and intelligent rendering of ideal meanings. The true performer, whether actor, singer, or player, must be a person of moral and intellectual training. What is proverbially called theatrical must disappear from the theatre, and false pathos must be replaced by that ideal naturalness which is intentional but appears unconscious. The artist knows the unconscious, the actor represents it. Nor must the singer be a mere vocal virtuoso, allowed to ignore the rules of dramatic action and of good behavior, so long as he pours forth sweet melody. The grotesque conventionalities established among "absolute" singers are deservedly ridiculed by Wagner, who admits, however, that the composers are partly responsible for them. It is the structure of the opera air, the repetition of its couplets, which induces the singer to walk from one side of the proscenium to the other and to address the public instead of turning towards his interlocutor. And while the orchestra indulges in long preludes, interludes, and ritornelli, what can the embarrassed singer do but rush to the back of the stage, as if to see whether somebody is coming, or feign a whispering conversation with another actor, or look up to heaven with a senseless and uncalled-for show of distress? And when he has sung his air that is to say, the composer's air with additions and variations, and when he has effectually proved, by the length of his penultimate note, how painfully long he can hold his breath, he earns well-merited applause and bows his thanks. He may be encored or called again to the honors of the proscenium, which will necessitate more bows and deprecating gestures, and when at last he retires from the stage, we rejoice that the noisy intermezzo is over, but find to our distress that the spell is broken and our illusions are gone. In a reformed theatre there will be neither applauding nor encoring, neither bowing nor undue display. The capacity of a singer's lungs can interest nobody, and his vocal powers are interesting only in so far as they suffice for his special task, not in so far as they exceed these requirements. The excess of these powers may be displayed in concert-halls. The thing to be displayed on the stage is the artistic perfection of a musical drama, not the technical accomplishments of its performers.

But the actors, singers, and players are not the only performers. No theatrical performance is complete or even possible without the co-operation of the scene-painter, the scene-shifter, and the costume-tailor, to mention only the most important factors of what is commonly called the mise-en-scène. When we remember that Wagner considers the musical drama to be the highest and most perfect form of art, and that he defines a perfect work of art as that which speaks to us through our senses, leaving little or nothing to our imagination, we can easily understand why he attaches a greater importance to the mise-en-scène than would seem to be consistent with the poetical and thoroughly idealistic character of his whole doctrine. His stage realism is as thoroughgoing as the realistic accuracy which he expects from the singer, the actor, and the player; whether it is equally justifiable is another question. The æsthetic effect, he argues, must be complete, and to make it complete, the scenic illusion must not be destroyed by awkward failures and other relapses from a realm of poetic fictions into a world of coarse realities. In the theatre we ought to find a refuge from this world of realities, and not be rudely reminded of it by the flaws of the performance and the shortcomings of the scenic apparatus. We hardly know how to qualify this part of Wagner's theory. It seems idealistic in its aims and realistic only in the choice of means. But it is doubtful whether these means can produce the desired result. An excessive perfection of stage-thunder and stage-lightning, though insufficient to curdle the milk in the neighboring dairies, is amply sufficient to draw the spectator's attention from the work of art to a clever piece of mechanism, and is therefore far more likely to destroy the desired totality of effect than the well-known imperfection of these performances, whose conventional meanings and symbolical intentions are readily understood without impelling the spectator to conscious reflection. It is clear that admiration must be fully as mischievous as ridicule in such cases. The group of Laocoön could not impress us as it does, if the scales of the serpent had been chiselled with obtrusive accuracy; and that thousands of pictures are spoilt and æsthetically ruined by an uncalled-for exactness in the delineation of embroidery-stitches, flower-petals, and other accessories, is a fact well known, though rarely admitted in these days. But Wagner has the misfortune of having, like Faust, "two souls, alas! within his breast." His reflective power is fully as strong as his artistic intuitions. Had he followed the latter, he would have been the last man to advocate stage realism. But it was the logical consistency of his system that led him into error whenever false premises had crept into it. He himself denounces the electric sun in Meyerbeer's Prophet which shines upon the just and the unjust with such fierce impartiality. That sun, it may be said, is not even realistic, but simply painful through the failure of attempted realism. But he denounces it, not as a failure, but as an uncalled-for attempt, and in an eloquent passage of his principal work openly condemns all scenic effects not called for by the dramatic situation as "absolute effects," that is to say, as "effects without a cause,"—which being logical absurdities must be æsthetic monstrosities. It is one of Wagner's false premises that a true work of art should leave little or nothing to the imagination. We know that in the Greek tragedy death, murder, and all that was deemed revolting or indecorous was brought before the public through the medium of description or narration. Who cares to see the smothering of Desdemona? and what is the use of having an imagination, if it cannot be made to save us the painful necessity of witnessing the accomplishing of a deed which is essential to the drama only as an accomplished fact? And if this is a legitimate use of our imagination, the legitimacy of stage realism becomes more than doubtful.

Wagner reproaches the modern public at large with æsthetic degeneracy. They seem incapable of grasping the unity of a work of art which requires concentration and dote on the plurality of details which insures distraction. And as if the scenic and orchestral details were not sufficient, the audience itself and the dress-circle must furnish additional materials for the play-goer's distraction. He wants the pleasure of distraction, not the labor of concentration. Wagner knows this foible of the modern Mæcenas. He endeavors, in fact, to intellectualize him by darkening the theatre and forcing him to concentrate his attention on the strongly illuminated stage. But having secured it there, he unwittingly undoes his work again and sensualizes him through a mistaken and exaggerated stage realism. By thus ministering to the lower wants of the spectator, Wagner distracts him and seems to defeat his own object, which was to insure concentration.

We cannot afford to follow up this criticism any farther. The system of musical philosophy which we have endeavored to trace in the foregoing pages is altogether too grand for mere hole-picking. It is impossible not to be impressed with its compactness and richness in truths. We admire the former and feel grateful for the latter. Yet, invulnerable though this system seems at first sight, we are inclined to believe that its fundamental principle either hides an error or errs through incompleteness. And the following theoretical digression will not only justify our suspicion, but may assist us in forming an independent opinion on at least two points, which Wagner's system seems incapable of settling or explaining satisfactorily,—the relation between song and speech, and the existence of instrumental music.

We know that whatsoever has the power of pleasing, either sensually or uesthetically, must be a unum e pluribus, whatever else it may be besides. This is no adequate definition either of the beautiful or of the agreeable, but unity and plurality are essential to both. When the component elements are equal in kind and in degree, they cannot form a unity so long as their plurality is perceived as such. But when their plurality ceases to be perceptible, as is the case with the vibrations of ether, their indistinguishableness constitutes their unity, and this relative unity is then translated by us into a quality, which we call green or red. In like manner we hear sound when we cease to be able to count or to perceive as plural the vibrations of air. These simplest perceptions, then, involve a partial loss of consciousness, which furnishes that unity which a succession of indifferent elements could not have furnished. But when the elements are not indifferent and indistinguishable, when they differ in degree if not in kind, then their unity, in order to become a pleasing perception, must lie in the commensurateness of their differences or in the simplicity and intelligibleness of their proportions. Two successions, for instance, the velocities of which are to each other as one is to three, are perceived by us as dactyllic rhythm without our being conscious that there are two successions to whose commensurateness alone the unity of our perception is due; and the same may be said of two or more sounds whose intervals enable them to form either a harmony or a melody. The perception of a rhythm or musical interval is therefore of a higher order than the simple perceptions of color or sound, because the generating elements are no longer co-ordinate and indifferent, but subordinate to one another. If we now go a step further and combine elements which differ in kind as well as in degree, forming a variety rather than a plurality, we may have some difficulty in making them coalesce to a unity; and it is with these difficulties that the province of æsthetics begins; in other words, the conditions under which heterogeneous elements can coalesce to a unity are no longer physiological, but psychological,—no longer verifiable by sensual pleasure, but by æsthetic gratification.