imitations of real screams. That would be to step beyond the boundaries
of art; for neither real screams nor their imitations are beautiful,
and--if a truism may be pardoned to complete a nice sentence--without
beauty there can be no art. In spite of much nonsense that has been
written and talked, Wagner never sacrificed beauty. Those foolish tales
which I used to read in my youth--of how Wagner appropriately, if
daringly, sustained discords through long discordant situations--what
are they but the blatherskite of long-tongued persons who could talk
faster than they could think? Wagner would not sacrifice beauty. He
made the characters say, in notes as well as words, what they had to
say; he always got the colour and atmosphere of the scenic surroundings
into the music. By inspiration and marvellous workmanship he made each
phrase serve a double purpose: it expresses the emotion of the person
who sings, it gives the atmosphere in which the person is singing. More
than anything else, it is this that gives his music its individual
character. Such music is bound to remain for ever fresh. So long as
trees and grass, rain and sunshine, running waters and flying cloud-scud
are things sweet to man's thought, so long will the music of Wagner's
operas remain green, always new and refreshing, full and satisfying. He
often achieved the task, or helped himself to achieve it, by showing us
Nature in sympathy with the human mood of the moment (see the second
scene in _Tannhäuser_, the last act of _Tristan_, the whole of the last
act of _The Valkyrie_); but he succeeds equally well without these
touches of his unrivalled stage-craft.

Further back I referred to Wagner's earlier and later use of the
_leit-motif._ In its naive, primitive simplicity the device is certainly
not highly artistic. When our academic gentry use it in their festival
oratorios, they are supposed to show themselves very advanced. But what
purpose, musical or other, is subserved by arbitrarily allying a musical