building is intended, and elegance of external appearance must be
subservient to that. If he do this skilfully, so that every part is
seen to unite harmoniously with all the others to form an organic
whole, there will emerge quite of itself a gracefulness, an artistic
beauty, founded in truth, which are high above all intentionally
constructed decoration. It is the beauty and truth of nature, that of
adaptation to an end. There is no question of sacrificing euphony,
melody, or anything at all; on the contrary, the doctrine declares
that by right adaptation the expressive power and beauty of every part
will be enhanced. The notion that Wagner's music is unmelodious had
its origin in the bad musical ears of his early critics.

The arts of design, i.e. painting, sculpture, and the kindred arts,
are in space alone, and movement is excluded from them. The arts of
expression, gesture, poetry, and music are all arts of movement in
time. The first named, therefore, must necessarily take external
beauty (_Schoenheit_) as their sole guide and must confine their
attention exclusively to the superficial appearance of the objects
they imitate. They can only arrive at the inner character indirectly,
through its external manifestation, and in the hands of an inferior
artist the step is an easy one to pretence and falsehood. Defective
construction can easily be hidden beneath an outer covering of
graceful forms which distract the eye from noticing the weakness and
falsehood beneath. We need only look around us at the decoration of
any modern drawing-room to find gross examples of such perversion of
art. This explains Wagner's mistrust--noticeable especially in his
earlier writings--of the arts of design with their principle of
beauty. An artist who possesses true poetic inspiration will be in no
danger of falling into errors of this kind; with him external beauty
is expression of inner goodness, as it is in nature, who never covers