and even passion; and sometimes rose to the
occasion in a manner which, whilst the imagination of his contemporaries
remained on fire with the novelties of dramatic music, led them to
overrate him with an extravagance which provoked Wagner to conduct a
long critical campaign against his leadership. Thirty years ago this
campaign was mentably ascribed to the professional jealousy of a
disappointed rival. Nowadays young people cannot understand how anyone
could ever have taken Meyerbeer's influence seriously. Those who
remember how his reputation stood half a century ago, and who realize
what a nothoroughfare the path he opened proved to be, even to himself,
know how inevitable and how impersonal Wagner's attack was.

Wagner was the literary musician par excellence. He could not, like
Mozart and Beethoven, produce decorative tone structures independently
of any dramatic or poetic subject matter, because, that craft being
no longer necessary for his purpose, he did not cultivate it. As
Shakespeare, compared with Tennyson, appears to have an exclusively
dramatic talent, so exactly does Wagner compared with Mendelssohn.
On the other hand, he had not to go to third rate literary hacks for
"librettos" to set to music: he produced his own dramatic poems, thus
giving dramatic integrity to opera, and making symphony articulate. A
Beethoven symphony (except the articulate part of the ninth) expresses
noble feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner added
thought and produced the music drama. Mozart's loftiest opera, his Ring,
so to speak, The Magic Flute, has a libretto which, though none the
worse for seeming, like The Rhine Gold, the merest Christmas tomfoolery
to shallow spectators, is the product of a talent immeasurably inferior
to Mozart's own. The libretto of Don Giovanni is coarse and trivial:
its transfiguration by Mozart's music may be a marvel; but nobody will
venture to contend that such transfigurations, however seductive, can
be as satisfactory as tone poetry or drama in which the musician and
the poet are at the same level. Here, then, we have the simple secret of
Wagner's preemminence as a dramatic musician. He wrote the poems as well
as composed the music of his "stage festival plays," as he called them.

Up to a certain point in his career Wagner paid the penalty of
undertaking two arts instead of one. Mozart had his trade as a musician
at his fingers' ends when he was twenty, because he had se