important thing, and humanity almost seemed to be
dragged in because the human voice was indispensable; but Wagner,
going back to Mozart, restored humanity to its proper place, thus
making his opera into real drama, and kept the fantastic creatures who
haunted Weber's woods and glens and streams only as emblems of the
natural forces that war for or against humanity. Above all, he got rid
of Weber's stage villains--for Samiel is merely the stage villain of
commerce; and, instead of the dusk and shadow in which Weber's fancy
loved to roam, he gives us sunlight and the sweet air. "Lohengrin" is
full of sunlight and freshness; full, too, of a finer mystery than
ever Weber dreamed of--the mystery with which the most delicate German
imagination invested the broad rivers that flowed through the black
forests from some far-away land of unchangeable stillness and beauty,
some "land of eternal dawn," as Wagner calls it. No more Mozartean
music is in existence, save Mozart's own, than that first act of
"Lohengrin," where Wagner, by dint of being Weberish, came nearer to
Mozart than ever Weber came; for Weber never wrote anything which,
regarded as absolute music, apart from its emotional significance, or
the picture it suggests to the inner eye, is so purely beautiful as,
for instance, the bit of chorus sung after Lohengrin concludes his
little arrangement with Elsa. Both the first and the second acts are
full of such melodies, any two of which would prove Wagner to be the
greatest melody-writer of the century; and those critics who say that
Verdi is greater because his melodies are more like Mozart's in form,
would have said, had they lived last century, that Salieri was greater
than Mozart because Salieri's melodies were more like Hasse's in form.
Perhaps the last act might be quite as exquisite on the stage, for it
is even more exquisite in the score; but that we shall not know until
our operatic singers abandon their vanity and their melodrama, and by
reading an occasional book, and sometimes going out into the world,
learn how much they themselves would gain if they always worked with
artistic sincerity.

ITALIAN OPERA, DEAD AND DYING

All art forms are conventions, and all conventions appear ridiculous
when they are superseded by new ones. The old Italian opera form is
laughed at to-day as an absurdity by Wagnerians, who see nothing
absurd in a many-legged monster with a donkey's head uttering deep
bass curses thro