terms of music. But music, according to Wagner, must ask not stand alone: it can only reach its full value when iew it unites with other arts in the drama. Drama is in pp itself originally a picture silent within ourselves,' and ri all resources of art, such as words, gestures, pantomime, ut must co-operate to make this picture visible. These are hy the exterior attributes of drama, but the deepest mean-ar ing, the 'purely human,' can only be expressed by music. Music, however, cannot ever become drama by itself, fi because it will never be able to paint for the eye or the imagination. This remark of Wagner is astonishing b when we reflect that the main current of modern music since his day has followed the idea of the programme. Wagner will never grant that programme music can be successful. A programme,' he says, 'provokes rather than silences the disturbing question "why?" It can never express the meaning of the symphony; this can only be done by the scenic representation of the dramatic action itself.'

It is for this reason that he accuses Beethoven of 'vigorous error,' but he considers that by this vigorous error the inexhaustible power of music was made manifest to the world. It is easy to see that though Wagner tried to balance his judgments so as to include all the arts, his enthusiasm always carried him in favour of music. His whole object in writing the treatise, 'Opera and Drama,' was to show that with the aid of modern music the drama would attain a meaning undreamed of hitherto. In the third part of 'Opera and Drama,' he devotes much space to the discussion of elementary principles which must be observed when verse is united to music. The two ways that emotional expression may be intensified are by metre and melody, and Wagner shows how we have lost the expressive metres of the early language and introduced the borrowed iambic verse of the Greeks. The Greek metres were caused by the choric dance which they accompanied, but they have lost their power because poetry has been separated from the dance. In Wagner's scheme the poet and the musician meet together to part no more, and together they make up the perfect artistic man.

Mr. Ainslie Hight deserves a meed of gratitude for his clear exposition of Wagner's dramatic theories-8

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Waask of great difficulty when we remember Wagner's bewildering terminology. In his prose writings he Dappears like Hercules in the presence of Omphale: he rse writhes and tortures himself, trying to squeeze sense parout of refractory words, borrowed from German metaphysicians. But the blatant extravagance is only on the epe surface; all he says is logically reasoned from the edpremises, and Mr Hight's book on Wagner will do well if it stimulates people to study more closely the theoretical works of Wagner in their endeavour to comprehend his full significance in the history of music and drama. We der must not put him down any more as an idealist who tried to launch into the empyrean. Wagner was a practical man who had studied music and the drama e with a thoroughness that nobody has surpassed. In our days, when the art of drama is advancing towards new methods of expression through the agency of men like da Reinhardt and Mr Gordon Craig, his ideas will not seem so vague or unpractical. His nobler idea that art is no recreation fit for boudoir or drawing-room but must be undertaken seriously and men's lives given for it, is sadly needed now when commercial drama rules the stage.

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We have considered Wagner's theories on Music Drama, and it now remains to speak of his influence over the Opera during the past forty years. If we look at the question superficially we shall be inclined to hold that the master's influence was not very great. The general mass of the public has remained callous to the passionate arguments of Opera and Drama.' The old popular opera still holds the stage, as if defying the silver-armoured Lohengrins and Parsifals. We can assign a reason to this. Opera appeals to the public in a variety of ways. It satisfies some people by its sweet Italian melody, easy to be sung by the prima-donna ; others it charms by the opportunities it offers to the great virtuoso, for the age of Farinelli and his baroque 'fioriture' of vocalism is not yet dead; others again in fewer numbers go to opera with minds ready to enjoy the orchestra, as if the whole performance were a symphonic poem. The real point in the matter is that in opera, music is the principal factor, and here we arrive at the first contradiction of Wagner's theories. Vol. 245.-No. 485.

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Wagner, as we saw, argued that music must not interfere with the drama; but his arguments have never told forcibly because he himself was the first to break them. As Mr Newman proves in his excellent final chapter on 'Wagner and Super-Wagner,' the master's work was really the greatest glorification of music the theatre had ever seen. He increased the scope of music, and cut out of drama many elements that give the word 'drama meaning apart from music. His wonderful development of the powers of the orchestra has revolutionised the whole art of opera. If we go to hear the characteristically Italian works of Puccini or Mascagni with their sugary melodies, we are struck by the influence of Wagner on their orchestral scores. It is as if they had digested all the master's tricks of orchestration and popularised them. In operas like 'La Tosca' or 'The Girl of the Golden West,' while commonplace dialogue is bandied about between the characters, the orchestra discourses in the pseudo-Wagner idiom. This idiom sugared over by the popular composers like Puccini has bewitched the sensibility of the modern public. No more will people remain satisfied with the melodious aria and duet of Verdi or Massenet; they want that morbid orchestral accompaniment which extracts the last ounce of sentiment from the trivial. Wagner during the course of his evolution tried to refine away from music-drama all the non-musical matter, and at last he produced Tristan' when, as he said himself, he 'immersed himself in the depth of soul-events pure and simple. Life and death, the whole significance and existence of the external world, here turn on nothing but inner movements of the soul.' It is now, forty-two years after Wagner's death, that we can examine our consciences and state truly our impressions towards the Wagnerian drama. Many of the scenes that used to charm us as young enthusiasts have faded; their pasteboard properties lie dust-ridden in the lumber-room of our minds. It is difficult to avoid a yawn during many scenes of the 'Ring,' when the Wanderer in blue cloak and slouch hat repeats 'ab ovo' the tiresome history we had heard in full on the previous night in 'The Valkyrie.' The dragon with its bulbous, electric-lit eye has ceased even to appear grotesque, the burning hall of the Gibi

chungen, with the pyre ready for Brünnhilde's self-sacrifice, no longer produces the Aristotelian 'terror.' The truth is that the Wagnerian stage has ceased to attract our gaze, so occupied are we in creating our inner stage to the accompaniment of the majestic sweep of the orchestra. The Wagner orchestra resembles one of those magic forests where every trembling branch whispers its harmony. The rustling leaves hypnotise us by their sound; we wander deeper and deeper into the maze; the music of the forest swells more and more like an eddying flood. Brief fragments of melody, slight rhythmic patterns, take human semblance before our inner eye as we create the drama. Siegfried blowing his horn as he goes down the Rhine, Hagen's sinister conversation with Alberich, the Rhine maidens crying out for their goldor else we hear the spells of Klingsor's garden, and in the distance watch the approach of the 'pure fool.' How misguided of poor Nietzsche to call Wagner the great miniaturist in art, and to forget that the countless miniature leading motives' fit into a huge, glorious Byzantine mosaic of harmony! Wagner makes his deepest appeal in the concert hall where there is no stage to distract our thoughts and nothing to hinder the free working of the imagination guided by the emotions. If Tolstoy had not seen 'Siegfried' performed on the stage he would never have rushed from the theatre and penned that sarcastic criticism in his book, What is Art?' To appreciate Wagner as the great musician descended from Bach and Beethoven, we must forget all the prose that Wagner ever wrote and all that others have written about him. In his theories, at any rate, he was remarkably deficient in imagination. He had all the German student's love for preciseness and definition, and this led him to adopt coarse, realistic methods and repetitions, and to leave as little as possible to suggestion. But there was also the other Wagner, the lord of noble thoughts, the inspired musician, spinning his web of sound. This Wagner, according to Mr Newman, made opera evolve towards the symphonic poem. There is no doubt that this is true, in spite of Wagner's claim that the symphonic poem was a less perfect art form than music drama, as it left the imagination to supply characters and events upon which the

music is founded. Wagner's music ceaselessly evokes images in the mind which are destroyed by the real stage. He is always flying in the face of his Own theories by means of the 'leit Motif'; he asks us to see more in our imagination than is on the stage. If we look at Wagner's greatest works as supreme symphonic poems we shall see the force of the statement that the ideal symphonic poem is the unalloyed quintessence of opera, and that the average opera is merely a symphonic poem puffed out to three acts. Thus 'Ein Heldenleben ' of Strauss has two characters, and in forty minutes the symphonic poem gives us everything. If it were transformed into an opera, minor characters would have to be brought in to make it long enough. In his operas Strauss has left the problem where he found it. Whereas Wagner made a valiant attempt to choose exactly the right libretto for his music, Strauss has set real plays to music such as the 'Salomé' of Wilde, and the 'Electra' of Hoffmansthal. He has, however, derived one essential quality from the Bayreuth master, the faculty of realising that the orchestra has an existence independently of the play, and that its functions in fact resemble those of an ideal Greek chorus, which comments from the composer's point of view on the drama.

In our criticism on Wagner we noticed how realistic he was, in spite of his frequent lapses into the histrionic. Opera has always been incurably romantic and has tended to look at the world through rose-coloured spectacles. Wagner dealt a heavy blow at this romantic unreality, and the same course has been followed by the Russian opera composers, Rimsky-Korsakov and Moussorgsky. Moussorgsky, who considered that the whole problem of art was to feed upon humanity as a healthy diet which has been neglected, produced in 'Boris Godounov' the worthiest successor to the Wagner musicdrama. In that great work the composer has used the orchestra to express all that cannot be actually expressed by the singers on the stage. Like Wagner, Moussorgsky realised that a special kind of drama was required for music. How different is his method as a musical realist from that of Puccini! It was as if he had taken as his inheritance some of the best qualities of the Bayreuth

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