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Rh such a man aside for the benefit of an interlojier who had certahi new-fangled notions as to how actors should act, and singers should sing, and players play, appeared to him simply monstrous. By the light of those days all this was reasonable enough ; so is Philistinism always reasonable when it is satisfied with existing things, and declines to make a leap in the dark. And yet how reasonable in a higlier sense, and how simple are the demands which true genius makes, and which Wagner made on this occasion. All he asked for at the Philhar- monic Society was that the musicians should play intelligently, and in the spirit in which the composer had written ; and this, he pointed out, was impos- sible when a long programme of heterogeneous pieces had to be gone tlirough in a single rehearsal. All that he expected of operatic singers at Berlin and elsewhere was that they should think before they spoke, and speak distinctly before they sang ; that they should, in short, identify themselves with the charactei's they represented, and address their declarations of hate or of love to the parties more immediately concerned, instead of shouting them at the upper gods. Against this shouting, the harangue, as he called it, he waged war during all his life, and might have waged war for a centuiy without producing the slightest effect. In short, the much talked of reform of Wagner consists only in applying the most primitive and natural laws of nature to the writing and acting of operas. How reasonable all this, how almost too obvious to require explanation, and yet how impossible to achieve ! The great cause of nature versus conven- tionalism will be continued, the tragic life-drama of genius will be repeated, ad irifimtum, as long as men are the products of custom, the blind worshippers of formulas and of things which, having once been vital, have long lost their vitality. There is indeed no doubt that the established rules and conventions which Wagner and other light-givers try to pierce and devour as with a flame of fire, are as necessary as the lies and hypocrisies of polite society are. If, after the manner of Rousseau's ideal savages, we were all to speak the truth, and tell our neighbours exactly what we thought of them, every dinner- party would become a stricken field of battle. In the same sense, if every man would follow his own sweet will, and despise the example of the persons a trifle wiser than himself who have set the fashion, how unbearably eccentric and absurd and ugly the world would become ! Fortunately genius does not know this. Conscious of its own strength, it looks upon wholesome safeguards as unbearable shackles ; it rolls the stone of Sisyphus up the hill, and is astonished when the solid mass, following the law of gravity, rolls down again, and perchance buries poor genius under its overwhelming weight. For- tunately, I say, for in this battering of walls and this rolling of inert stones the highest faculties of the human mind are manifested and developed. I have called Wagner's life-drama, as revealed in this correspondence with Liszt, a tragedy. That that tragedy had, so to speak, a happy ending, that he lived to see his enemies worsted and his music extolled to the skies, that in his latter days lie had plenty of money and abundance of fame, makes very little difference in the matter. I remember well when, after the first performance of the Nlbelungrii at Bayreuth, AVagner came before the curtain and said to his patrons, ' You have to-day placed me in a position which no artist before me ever occupied.' Quite true, I said to myself; the position is unique of its kind, unequalled for its splendour and for its hopelessness. The great lesson taught by the Festival plays will be listened to by a generation, may be by two ; after that the impulse will slacken and things will return very much to what they were before ; perhaps they are returning at this very moment even at Bayreuth. In a second article I propose to consider the cliaracter of Liszt as shown in these letters. THE PLACE OF POETRY IN A MUSIC-DRAMA. IN the recent extraordinary article on Wagnerism by Mr. Rowbotham in the Nineteenth Century, for which well-meiited castigation was administered in the last number of this Revieio, there is one ques- tion raised which deserves more special attention than it has received in any of the replies. It is of no moment what Mr. Rowbotliam's opinion of Wagner's capacity as a poet may be, but as in his deliverance on this matter he is echoing what has been expressed by abler thinkers than himself, ami as the adverse criticism has never been adequately met, it seems worth while to examine the grounds on which it rests, especially as on the decision depends the answer to the general question of the place which the dramatic poet is to fill in the future, when his work is to be combined with the work of the musical composer. This answer to the general question will, I believe.