music may not have
affected people as Wagner's music affects them nowadays? What proof
have you got that the strains of Mozart and Gluck, nay, those of
Palestrina, which fill our soul with serenity, may not have been full
of stress and trouble when they first were heard; may not have laid
bare the chaotic elements of our nature, brought to the surface its
primaeval instincts? Historically, all you know is that Gluck's
_Orpheus_ made our ancestors weep; and that Wagner's _Tristram_ makes
our contemporaries sob...."

This is the musician's defence. Does it free his art from my rather
miserable imputation? I think not. If all this be true, if _Orpheus_
has been what _Tristram_ is, all one can say is _the more's the pity_.
If it be true, all music would require the chastening influence of
time, and its spiritual value would be akin to that of the Past and
Distant; it would be innocuous, because it had lost half of its
vitality. We should have to lay down music, like wine, for the future;
poisoning ourselves with the acrid fumes of its must, the heady,
enervating scent of scum and purpled vat, in order that our children
might drink vigour and warmth after we were dead.

XII.

But I doubt very much whether this is true. It is possible that the
music of Wagner may eventually become serene like the music of Handel;
but was the music of Handel ever morbid like the music of Wagner?

I do not base my belief on any preference from Handel's
contemporaries. We may, as we are constantly being told, be
_degenerates_; but there was no special grace whence to degenerate in
our perruked forefathers. Moreover, I believe that any very
spontaneous art is to a very small degree the product of one or even
two or three generations of men. It has been growing to be what it is
for centuries and centuries. Its germ and its necessities of organism
and development lie far, far back in the soul's world-history; and it
is but later, if at all, when the organic growth is at an end, that
times and individuals can fashion it in their paltry passing image.
No; we may be as strong and as pure as Handel's audiences, and our
music yet be less strong and pure than theirs.

My reason for believing in a fundamental emotional difference between
that music and ours is of another sort. I think that in art, as in all
other things, the simpler, more normal interest comes first, and the
more complex, less normal, follows when the simple and normal has
becom