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 Monoecia. 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 VOL. CXXIV. NO. 254.

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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 bands, 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 (melodyplaying) 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 antidramatic. The actors on the stage are all heroes in posse; they