ge
and looms lurid like the spirit of the Brocken. Recently a vaudeville
"turn" of Hamlet has been presented, where the gravediggers do their
gruesome tasks to ragtime; and on every hand we behold the Lyceum giving
way to the McClure Continuous, Lim.

Wagner abhorred the mere tune for the sake of tune. "You can not produce
art and leave man out," he said. All art must suggest something. Mere
verbal description is not literature: it is only words, words, words; a
picture must be charged with soul, otherwise a photograph would outrank
"The Angelus." Music must be more than jingling tunes and mincing
sounds. And thus we find Wagner at thirty years of age boldly putting
forth "The Flying Dutchman," with music not written for the text, nor
text written for the music, but words and music created at the same
time--the melody mirroring forth the soul of the words.

In this play Wagner for the first time sacrificed every precedent of
musical construction and all thought of symmetrical form, in order to
make the music tell the tale. "The Flying Dutchman" is to opera what
Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is to poetry, or Millet's "Sower" is
to painting. There is strength, heroic strength, in each of these
masterpieces I have named, but the "Dutchman" needs a listener, "Leaves
of Grass" requires a reader who has experienced, and the "Sower" demands
one who has eyes to see, before its lesson of love and patience and the
pathetic truth of endless toil are bodied forth.

Whitman's book was well looked after by the local Antonius Ash-Box
inspector of the day, its publication forbidden, and the author
incidentally deprived of his clerkship at Washington; Millet did service
as the butt for jokes of artistic Paris, and was dubbed "The Wild Man";
Wagner's play was hooted off the stage.

* * * * *

Every man is but a type representing his class. Of course the class may
be small and one man may even be its sole living representative: but
Wagner had his double in William Morris. These men were brothers in
temperament, physique, habit of thought and occupation.

Wagner wrote largely on the subjects of Art and Sociology, and made his
appeal for the toiler in that the man should be allowed to share the
joys of Art by producing it. His argument is identical with that of
William Morris; and yet the essays of Wagner were not translated into
English until after Morris had written his "Dream of John Ball," and
Mo