before his death, Professor F.J. Child, a scholar of international
fame, told me angrily that Wagner was no musician at all; that he
was a colossal fraud; that the growing enthusiasm for him was mere
affectation, which would soon pass away. He spoke with extraordinary
passion. I wondered at his rage, but I understand it now. It was the
rage of a king against the incoming and inexorable tide.

Nothing is more singular to contemplate than the variations in form
of what the public calls melody, both in notation and in language.
What delights the ears of one generation distresses or wearies the
ears of another. Elizabethan audiences listened with rapture to long
harangues in bombastic blank verse: a modern audience can not endure
this. The senses of Queen Anne Englishmen were charmed by what they
called the melody of Pope's verse--by its even regularity and steady
flow. To us Pope's verse is full of wit and cerebration, but we find
the measure intolerably monotonous. Indeed, by a curious irony of
fate, Pope, who regarded himself as a supreme poet, has since
frequently been declared to be no poet at all. Keats wrote _Endymion_
in the heroic couplet--the very measure employed by Pope. But his
use of it was so different that this poem would have seemed utterly
lacking in melody to Augustan ears--Pope would have attempted to
"versify" it. And yet we enjoy it. It seems ridiculous to say that
the man who wrote _Der fliegende Hollaender and Tannhaeuser_ could not
write melody, and yet it was almost universally said. It seems
strange that critics should have declared that the man who wrote
_Love Among the Ruins_ could not write rhythmical verse, yet such
was once almost the general opinion. Still, the rebellious instinct
of the public that condemned Wagner in music and Browning in poetry
was founded on something genuine; for Wagner was unlike other
musicians, and Browning was unlike other poets.