to express his pain because, being in marble, he dared not distort his
countenance? With Wagner the notion of beauty (_Schoenheit_)[11]
belongs by its very definition exclusively to the arts that address the
sense of sight, painting and sculpture, and from them it has been
transferred to music, but as a metaphor only. To speak literally of
"beautiful music" would be a contradiction in terms.

[Footnote 11: It should be noted that the German and English words,
having a totally different origin, differ somewhat in meaning.
"_Schoenheit_" comes from "_schauen_," and has therefore
reference to the sense of sight, while "beauty" is from the root of
_bene_, _bonus_, and was originally a moral conception, not
a sensual one at all. In modern language the meaning of the two words
is practically identical, but the distinction is very important for
the understanding of Wagner. _Schoenheit_ with him means
_sensual_ beauty.]

The one aim of dramatic technique must always be to obtain the utmost
clearness, truthfulness, and completeness of _expression_. I must
confess that many years ago, when I first began the study of Wagner,
filled with the enthusiastic Hellenism of Schiller, I was not a little
startled at Wagner's apparent insistence upon truthful expression at
the expense of beauty, and could not but feel that it was contradicted
by every movement of his music. No doubt many others have felt the
same hesitation; but there really is no cause for alarm. Wagner's is
the true doctrine. Let us turn for a moment to another art, that of
architecture, where the line of demarcation between decoration and
construction is easy to recognize. Wagner's position, if applied to
architecture, would be that the builder has only to consider how to
construct in the best possible way to attain the purpose for which the