to win over the favour of England to his recognition. His last and greatest work, "Parsifal," carries out his principle, of words and music born together from the same mind, in the most complete manner; and posterity is left to judge of this great musician's efforts.

But Wagnerism had a disturbing effect. It was for a long time an apple of discord among friends in music. The innovations in harmony and melody, so peculiar to Wagner, the dropping of phrases before completion, interrupted cadences, and irregularity of time and rhythm, sequences of altered chords, etc., which lay him open to the charge of defiance of grammar,-are partly due to the very free use of chromatics which are not musically essential, and partly to the exigencies of dramatic action; thus rather supporting the contention that music and drama cannot run perfectly together. Music is a science under fundamental laws, while dramatic action is ever changeable and capricious. Wagner himself says: "I could venture to depict strange and even terrible things in music, because the action rendered such things comprehensible; but music, apart from the drama, cannot risk this, for fear of becoming grotesque."

Exactly. And it is just here that Wagner's music, performed apart from the stage, is necessarily misunderstood, and considered violent and bizarre. Performed among other selections on an ordinary orchestral programme, unless the selections are made with judgment, the music has a disturbing and irritating effect; and "cut," as the term is, by various conductors to make its performance possible by all players, and under all conditions, it leads to barbarism without apology.

This is what many sensitive lovers of music have often felt. And I think it accounts indirectly for many musical irregularities at the present day on the part of composers

of popular music, who consider themselves, perhaps, a kind of new Impressionists, after Wagner-but a long way after him. One feels sometimes positively hurt, and even insulted, at the wild, grossly imitative, purposely ugly music put forth for an utterly superficial and sensationloving public.

And here I would close my remarks on music, except to just name the late Sir Arthur Sullivan, and our present Sir Edward Elgar, as representing for ourselves the fact that even in England serious and genuine students of music are to be claimed who have not bowed the knee to Baal. But that we are in a period of decadence, so far as general taste in music is concerned, I fear must reluctantly be admitted. The present generation can now neither listen to a complete Oratorio without weariness or boredom, nor stand the long, slow, majestic chorales, or solemn old hymns, which used to stir our fathers to spiritual determination and adoring service, as those before them were able to do

Nor is it plainly discernible what the twentieth century is offering us just now, or may have yet in store. We judge of an age, so far as its character is concerned, by what it cares for; by what it demands and accordingly finds supplied to it; while at the same time, those who "cater" for the popular taste, especially in these marvellous days of every possible scientific appliance and of unexampled ease in supplying the popular demand, have it in their power to furnish the best, the very best, if there is sufficient patriotism, sufficient love of humanity, sufficient honour for Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, to make the effort possible without regard to immediate and materialistic returns.

For what we have now said applies all round. There is an anarchism, a restlessness, an impatience of any sort

of restraint, not in music only, but in the drama itself, in literature, especially in popular fiction; and last, not least in the painter's art.

A remarkable book, deservedly to be read, put forth lately by Dr. Neville Figgis, entitled Civilisation at the Cross Roads, has an interesting passage on the so-called Post-Impressionists. "We are not," he says, "here to canvass the artistic merit of this strange new school of painting. But the movement means a good deal. By authorities like Mr. Roger Fry and Mr. C. J. Holmes we have learned something of its aims. We are shewn that it witnesses partly to that Oriental influence which has been pouring in upon Western Art ever since Japan was discovered, and partly to that cult of the primitive which has been growing every year. Here is a deliberate effort to step back into the child's view of the natural world, and to thrust away the lie of the photographic artist, which, rendering every detail, obscures the whole truth, and sacrifices colour and line to what is at bottom mere mechanism. It represents a desire to get away from our sophisticated world to one simpler. I am not

asking how far these men are right or wrong; the point is that they exist. Here, in one important sphere, with interests quite other than religious, men are seen in deliberate revolt against the mental habit of the Western world, as it has developed itself since the Renascence."

What Dr. Figgis here points out seems to answer many questions. But the fact of the Post-Impressionists, and their revolt from the established rules of art, speaks also of another tendency which we may hopefully believe must have its day and perish. I mean the hankering after notoriety, the endeavour to do something in order to "arrive; " by legitimate means if you can; by violent means if you must; but at all hazards to "arrive." It is the spirit of

militancy against order, and of wanton disrespect towards that which men have learned to reverence or to worship, The Post-Impressionists are not the successors of the school of Monet and Manet in France, still less of our English Whistler, and of such men as Solomon, Hacker, Jacomb Hood, and others of the now distinctly rising English school. These men seek to present broad impressions, such as the eye really takes to itself, to the judicious neglect of detail; to give colour its vividness and light, and to present the values and the balancings of the whole picture presented by nature; and this, not as an undue pressing forward of the manner and the method, but as in entire subordination to the beauty and poetry and spiritualization of the scene in contemplation. We thank these great artists for getting away from the error of the pre-Raphaelites, from which our great Millais at length emancipated himself. For, undeniably, England, who can boast of a Reynolds as one of the foremost portraitpainters of the world, has a school of its own to honour and to preserve. Reynolds's "children of artless grace, his women of extreme loveliness, his men endowed with dignity," give his art an interest far beyond the mere portrait. And a visit to our National Gallery, or a recollection of the Art Department of the famous White City Exhibition in London, where the French and English schools were arranged in close proximity, and drew forth warm expressions of interest from foreign as well as home visitors, may satisfy us as to this. It is too true, that for some twenty years past, English art has not been at its best and greatest. The rapid accumulation of wealth in the modern world, the enormously increased expenses of living and the accompanying display and enjoyment of every conceivable comfort, have deadened the demand for high art. If the artist is to live to-day, he cannot, unless he is

rich himself, venture to offer to the world his highest and his best. There is no demand. Instead, year by year an increased display upon the walls of the Royal Academy of portraits only interesting to the wealthy subjects themselves, and often a trial to the painter, as offering no opportuntty for idealization or for the cult of the beautiful, take the place of the noble subject-picture or entrancing landscape that should hang before our eyes. Again! demand and supply. And we devoutly hope that a more spiritual, a more intellectual generation may, in its turn, demand and then welcome a return of our British painter's best efforts, who at least must live if he is to paint at all. Perhaps the very cause just indicated accounts also for the false efforts of the Post-Impressionists. For just now nothing really impresses the British public; and it is that public's own fault that to-day in our world of art there is no great light, while there are a thousand glittering stars.

We have already glanced at Architecture, comparing our own day with medieval England. We do this in full view of the noble cathedral rising in our midst, possessing already one gem in its beautiful Lady Chapel. But of that cathedral even the design has been changed since it was first presented to the world. And I would here commend to your thought some words of Mr. R. A. Cram in The Gothic Quest. He asks: "Can we as architects answer enthusiastically to the call of men who desire a Christian Church bringing to their assistance, not the considerations of a tradesman, but the fire of an artist? Can we come to look upon Architecture as a part of the best language of art, the exalted privilege of which is the expression of the emotions, of the loftiest achievements of the soul of man, as they can be expressed by no other human power?.. I believe we can. At all

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events we must, if we care for our art at all, except as a