contenting to all the world, and, besides, akin to the essence of pagan
poetry. The poet was needed to celebrate all the phases of its meaning
and beauty. This is true of all flashes of evolutionary truth. As in the
ancient epics, an idea once real to the world may be enshrined in a
design of immortal art.

To-day we are perhaps in too agnostic a state to be absorbed by such a
contemplation. The subject in a narrower sense is true at most to those
who will to cherish the solace of a salvation which they have not fully
apprehended. And so the Liszt symphony of the nineteenth century is not
a complete reflection of the Dante poem of the fourteenth. It becomes
for the devout believer almost a kind of church-liturgy,--a Mass by the
Abbé Liszt.

Rare qualities there undoubtedly are in the music: a reality of passion;
a certain simplicity of plan; the sensuous beauty of melodic and
harmonic touches. But a greatness in the whole musical expression that
may approach the grandeur of the poem, could only come in a suggestion
of symbolic truth; and here the composer seems to fail by a too close
clinging to ecclesiastic ritual. Yet in the agony of remorse, rising
from hopeless woe to a chastened worship of the light, is a strain of
inner truth that will leave the work for a long time a hold on human
interest.

Novel is the writing of words in the score, as if they are to be sung by
the instruments,--all sheer aside from the original purpose of the form.
Page after page has its precise text; we hear the shrieks of the damned,
the dread inscription of the infernal portals; the sad lament of lovers;
the final song of praise of the redeemed. A kind of picture-book music
has our symphony become. The _leit-motif_ has crept into the high form