ence issuing from the theatre or afterwards, they have made no strong or permanent impression, and as mere rhythmical jingle they do not deserve even so mild an adjective as pretty. With regard to the less numerous class of Offenbach's melodies which have spread and lived among the people, it must be experience again which settles whether or not they belong to the third of the above classes. There are persons who seem to have the power of getting pleasure from an enormously wide range of melody; and as far as I can judge, it would be in no way true to say (as some will say) that the width is in the inverse ratio of the depth. Moreover, there are degrees between strong love and indifference, and acquaintance with a higher style of music may reduce without annulling earlier partialities. From my own experience and such other as I have had access to, I should say that a small minority of Offenbach's melodies possess an enduring charm of fine (occasionally even very fine) quality; but these, though among the number which the people find out and the critics might find out by watching the people, are usually swept along with all the rest into the category of pretty jingle.'

It may probably strike the unmusical reader as very singular that diamonds should grow in the gutter, and that such an infinite distance should separate the best and worst work of a particular composer. But this fact naturally connects itself with the fundamental peculiarity so often mentioned. We have seen with regard to the auditor how, melody's utterance being direct, it is a matter of hit or miss, and how, if it misses, there is no intermediate range of ideas to act as a buffer to his dislike and contempt, because he does not see any lofty conception at which, in spite of partial failure, the artist was obviously aiming: so that while in the case of a picture we may see that a figure is out of drawing, but may still be able to eliminate this element of annoyance and take pleasure in the general spirit, in the case of a melody we simply have an unanalysable feeling of discomfort caused by looking for emotional beauty and finding none. So in production, a painter or poet will hardly do any first-rate work unless he possesses in his neutral regions elevated habits and ideas, and these will so far act as artistic ballast that while at all the same man he will hardly produce any quite unworthy work. This outer region of mental habit in relation to the penetrating art-instinct might be compared to the earth's atmosphere of air and vapour, suffused with warmth and colour by rays which they in turn tend to preserve from dispersion: whereas a melody of surpassing charm may dart into the mind without affecting or being affected by any such conditions, or entailing any sort of assimilation.

2. My next point is the influence of fashion in England on music, and so on musical criticism; for though confined chiefly to London, it tends to stereotype a certain set of performances and to conceal music's true position in the nation. The press has an air of following the prevalent taste; but it acts mischievously when on extraneous grounds

it assumes in the public an interest which has little true vitality. It needed no special insight of Wagner's to detect the weaknesses and absurdities of the general run of Italian operas, nor can he feel it a compliment that his own operas have become to a certain extent fashionable among those who still find their favourite digestive in the tunes he most despises and in the acrobatic feats of high soprano voices. It is curious how the whole level of things seems to alter as soon as one enters Covent Garden. The enormous size of the theatre, to begin with, casts a blight over everything that is not spectacle, and the extraordinary dreariness of seeing a few beings straying about in the distance on that Sahara of a stage, or seated on an oasis of a sofa, and talking about the dullest intrigues in recitativo secco, perhaps accounts for its appearing high humour when Figaro hops on one leg, or makes a dab of soap over the face of the man he is shaving. It is small wonder if artists fail in making emotional or amusing what is so essentially dull and puerile; the wonder lies in an audience which can be satisfied by cake with so very few plums in it, and which, so far from crying out (as Wagner says) for perpetual melody, will sit through a whole scene of this kind for the sake of a single one. No audience untrammelled by fashion and precedent, in a performance of its own choosing, would stand even for five minutes being bored in a foreign language; and as to my certain knowledge there are many whose occasional visits to the opera result in a feeling of bewilderment as to whether they or the rest of the world are mad, I think it is important that the fact of there being audiences who do stand it should not be misunderstood. The misfortune is, not that people's ears should be bored (as any one who watches carefully may see that they are bored) by such an opera as Aida, but that their newspapers should make them believe what bores them to be fine stuff, worthy of its mise-en-scène; so that either they persuade themselves they are enjoying the music, when all that really impresses them is the voices and the spectacle, or else, still more disastrously, they get to dissociate the idea of fine music from that of tunes to be loved. It would of course be absurd to deny that there is a nucleus of art to make an object for a fashionable gathering. The repertory contains some operas of dramatic interest, a few of high musical beauty; even where neither element is independently interesting, the combination may produce here and there exciting scenes, and afford occasional points to gifted artists: but I am concerned with the musical pleasure, and at the staple of Italian operas and fashionable concerts this is almost entirely sensuous and bound up with the voice. It is professedly the singers, not the music, who are the object of attraction, and different parts and songs are the permanent trapezes on which they are to exhibit their skill. The rage for foreign artists, and the humiliating fact that English ones find it expedient to adopt Italian names, are indications of the same tendency. The consequence is that, if the whole musical pleasure could be summed up, the result for most

nights would be a painful one for the most expensive entertainments of the largest city in Europe, for even on the next day the pleasure given by recollection and reproduction in imagination would continually be just nil. However agreeable to dilettanti after dinner, the pleasure of being tickled ceases absolutely with the tickling; and even putting the roulade business aside, when music depends for its whole effect on the moment of performance and on being sung by beautiful voices, simple addition shows how small is its total æsthetic value. Luckily, though fine voices are rare and expensive and belong to the moneyed classes, fine tunes are common and cheap, and belong, or may belong, to the people. If any doubt, I would ask them to sit in the empty stalls and watch the pit and gallery at the next performance of the Beggars' Opera.

3. Analogies between the arts must always be drawn with great caution, and some of the terms which are applied to several different arts may be a fruitful source of confusion. The word tone, for instance, is so applied; it can hardly be misunderstood when used about painting, but in music it is used either of the quality of sound, the element of musical colour (as when we speak of the tone of a first-rate violin or violinist), or of the sound itself, the element of musical form, without emphasis on quality (as when we speak of the tone-art), or more definitely still of a certain accurately measured degree in the scale of such sounds (as when we speak of tones and semitones). The consequence is that such a phrase as gradations of tone may lead to most important misconceptions. I have heard a critic of high authority maintain that painting has a superiority over music, because its gradations of tone are infinite, whereas those of music are limited by the fact that the degrees are at fixed distances. The question as to the superiority of one art over another becomes worse than useless when involved with what is nothing less than a total confusion between colour and form. The gradations of tone which are infinite in painting are of course gradations of light and colour, and the correct analogue to them in music is quality of sound-tone, in the sense that a violin has a penetrating tone, or an oboe a nasal tone-the effects of which are called, even in ordinary parlance, musical colouring. The gradations of tone in music which

3 It may be remarked that no physical analogy between the coloured spectrum and the range in pitch of musical sounds has any bearing on our perception of artistic phenomena. Differences and relations in the pitch of notes are clearly an element of musical form, and have no connection with colour or quality of sound; whereas differences and relations in the elements of the spectrum are matters of colour pure and simple, and have no connection with form; visual form being perceived by a process which is quite independent of the colour-sense and has no parallel in the ear, namely by the mechanical shifting of the eye in rapidly carrying it along the lines of objects.

Musical harmony is a totally unique element, and presents a common difference from both pictorial and instrumental colour. In colouring subjects and forms with the two latter, enormous variety of treatment is possible: while the ways of har monising a melody are limited, and one or two are almost sure to be decidedly

consist in fixed degrees are the notes of the chromatic scale, the formal elements of melody just as much as faces and limbs are the formal elements of figure-painting, and straight lines and curves of architecture. And this mistake led naturally to a still more fatal

one.

Musical colouring having been confused with, and put in the place of, musical form or subject, this latter had to be accommodated with some habitat; and this was found by identifying it with the verbal statements or sentiments with which the music might happen to be connected-a confusion due perhaps in its turn to an ambiguity in the word subject, and equivalent to identifying a Gothic cathedral with the Apostles' Creed. As a legitimate consequence any music which is not set to words was supposed to have no subject (all it had being colour), and the enjoyment of it to be as purely sensuous as the enjoyment of mere colour without form in the fold of a piece of drapery. It is this same identification of melodic subject with mere sonorous and sensuous beauty which we have seen implied in Wagner's view, that music, to be complete, must express some preconceived poetical idea. Fortunately, however, it is a law of our being that in the apprehension of form we find a sense of active grasp and self-realisation entirely distinct from sensuous enjoyment: hence the possibility of a permanent and solid nucleus for the associations which have gone to make up so much of our deepest feelings in art, and hence the power of vivid and fruitful reproduction in memory. The fixed degrees and proportions, which were objected to as limitations, are of course as essential to form as they are alien to colour: to them is due the power of melodic subjects to exist and to be to us as divine utterances. Nor is the word utterances' to be taken metaphorically, though it is hard to explain what it implies to one who lacks the perception. A splendid melodic phrase seems continually not like an object of sense but like an affirmation, not so much prompting admiring ejaculation as compelling passionate assent. That musical sound of a formless and indefinite kind should give us this sense of having an import is as impossible as that the human face should do so without definite proportional and symmetrical lines, or that a picture should strike us as religiously expressive which represented only clouds and jelly-fish.

4. So much for a confusion of words: let me now give a specimen of a confusion of thought. And indeed music's independence of logical coherence seems fated to extend into what is written about it: its own utterances not admitting of direct confutation and confronting with reality, people are particularly apt to catch up vapouring

better than others; so that often a particular harmony or set of harmonies appears, not as one of several possible adornments, but as an unalterable means of defining the form, and a necessary element in the meaning. In contrapuntal writing, where the harmony is formed by several distinct voices or parts, it becomes of course still more identified with form.

and sonorous phrases about it, and to mistake them for sense. Wagner in his letter to M. Villot-where he gives a popular account marked by great literary ability of his theory of opera--speaks of the impossibility that the hearing of a symphonic piece of music should entirely silence the persistent and distracting question 'Why?' which we are constrained to ask. When I first read this quickly through, it seemed to me to express a view which might be entertained or rejected; for my own part, though often finding the 'Why' a most real and oppressive question in some music where there seems no necessity for the notes to go one way more than another, I am not conscious of it in music which seems to me utterly beautiful: but I thought Wagner's experience might be different, and that in accordance with it he was perfectly right to suggest alliance with drama as the way to silence the importunate question; because in his own words the dramatic interest raises the sympathetic sentiments of the spectator to a state of ecstasy where he forgets that fatal "Why," and so on. So far then apparently so good. But a few pages further on I found the following paragraph :

The interest in Lohengrin rests entirely upon a process in the heart of Elsa, which touches all the secrets of the soul-the duration of a charm that spreads with convincing truth a wonderful happiness over all surroundings, depends entirely upon her refraining from the question Whence ?'-the question bursts like a cry of despair from the deep anguish of a woman's heart, and the charm has vanished. You divine how strangely this tragical 'Whence?' coincides with the theoretical 'Why?' of which I have been speaking!

I was somewhat staggered by this, as the comparison seemed to confound the discomfort caused by prolonged speculative failure in impossible regions with that caused by unsatisfied curiosity about an external detail. The 'Why?' which we may ask during an instrumental performance is a continuous questioning as to the course and value and upshot of something which is not bound together and rendered intelligible by ordinary laws of logical coherence. Now if Elsa were a profound psychological study of a woman who, while in happy circumstances, was driven by her nature to be always examining and doubting the grounds of her happiness, and who was for ever attempting to read the riddle of her hourly life by getting to some imaginary external standpoint, there might be some reason in comparing her to a person whose pleasure in a symphony is dimmed and distorted by side-questions as to the secret of the charm and the internal necessities of the structure, and by a vain longing to seize the intangible or to get behind his impressions and see what they are made of; and such a character, though impossible in an opera, might in itself be interesting. But Wagner's Elsa has no secret selfquestionings at all; she simply wishes, with female curiosity, to know an external fact which she has been told not to ask about, and in the external fact itself and the prohibition there is no more significance