, thence to bring up his priceless pearls of harmony.
According to the Kant-Schopenhauer philosophy, of which Wagner was a
disciple, objects or things in themselves do not exist in space and
time, which are mere forms under which the human mind beholds them. We
cannot conceive anything except as existing either in space or in
time. But there is one exception, according to Wagner, and that is
harmony. Harmony exists not in time, for the time-element in music is
melody; nor does it exist in space, for the simultaneousness of tones
is not one of extension or space. Hence our harmonic sense is not
hampered by the forms of the mind, but gives us a glimpse of things as
they are in themselves--a glimpse of the world as a superior spirit
would behold it. And hence the mysterious superterrestrial character
of such new harmonies as we find in the works of Wagner and
Chopin--which are unintelligible to ordinary mortals, while to the
initiated they come as revelations of a new world.

Without feeling the necessity of accepting all the consequences of
Wagner's mystical doctrine, which I have thus freely paraphrased, no
one can deny that the attitude of a composer in the moment of
inspiration is closely analogous to that known as clairvoyance. The
celebrated vocalist, Vogel, tells an anecdote of Schubert which shows
strikingly how completely this composer used to be transported to
another world, and become oblivious of self, when creating. On one
occasion Vogel received from Schubert some new songs, but being
otherwise occupied could not try them over at the moment. When he was
able to do so, he was particularly pleased with one of them, but as it
was too high for his voice, he had it copied in a lower key. About a
fortnight afterwards they were again making music together, and Vogel
placed the transposed song before Schubert on the desk of the piano.
Schubert tried it through, liked it, and said, in his Vienna dialect,
"I say, the song's not so bad; _whose is it?_" so completely, in a
fortnight, had it vanished from his mind. Grove recalls the fact that
Sir Walter Scott once similarly attributed a song of his own to Byron;
"but this was in 1828, after his mind had begun to fail."

There is no reason for doubting Vogel's story when we bear in mind the
enormous fertility of Schubert. He was unquestionably the most
spontaneous musical genius that ever lived. Vogel, who knew him
intimately, used the very word _clairvoyance_ in referrin