infirmity of the Italian opera. And the poetry will be of the kind
fashionable with some literary people under the name "lines for
music," the principle of which seems to be Voltaire's: _Ce qui est
trop sot pour etre dit, on le chante_. Once the principle of
organic unity is conceded as the first and most vital condition of a
work of art, the rest of Wagner's doctrine follows directly. The
governing whole is the drama, the thing to be enacted in its actual
representation on the stage, and the different elements, gesture,
music, words, are the instruments of its expression, to be so
co-ordinated together that each shall express just that which it alone
is able to express and no more. The first outcome of the union when
rightly and skilfully effected is to impart the one quality which is
the final and only aim of all artistic technique--clearness of
expression. The new drama can represent not only higher ideas, but can
express them more intelligibly than that which uses words alone.

It will now perhaps be asked why these three particular arts and no
others have been selected for dramatic purposes. Because they are the
three ways in which all living beings utter their thoughts. They have
belonged together from the beginning, and still do so; they have
parted company for a time, but have never been divorced.

Before considering this it will be well for me to explain some terms
which I shall have to use in the following. Poetry has commonly been
divided into "lyric", "epic," and "dramatic"; these terms answer to
three different phases of expression. Lyric poetry is the purely
subjective emotion of the poet uttering itself in words. Epic poetry
on the other hand deals with things and people external to the poet.
The drama is, as we have seen, not poetry at all; the actors perform
the acts themselves, using words only to explain the reasons for their