can give
us sensations different than those given us by Wagner's. We have learned
what it is to have music say to us, "It is thus, after all, that you
feel." We have finally come to recognize that we require of music forms,
proportions, accents different from Wagner's; orchestral movement,
color, rhythms, not in his. We have learned that we want an altogether
different stirring of the musical caldron. A song of Moussorgsky's or
Ravel's, a few measures of "Pelleas" or "Le Sacre du printemps," a
single fine moment in a sonata of Scriabine's, or a quartet or suite of
Bloch's, give us a joy, an illumination, a satisfaction that little of
the older music can equal. For our own moment of action is finally at
hand.

So Wagner has retreated and joined the company of composers who express
another day than our own. The sovereignty that was in him has passed to
other men. We regard him at present as the men of his own time might
have regarded Beethoven and Weber. Still, he will always remain the one
of all the company of the masters closest to us. No doubt he is not the
greatest of the artists who have made music. Colossal as were his
forces, colossal as were the struggles he made for the assumption of his
art, his musical powers were not always able to cope with the tasks he
set himself. The unflagging inventive power of a Bach or a Haydn, the
robustness of a Haendel or a Beethoven, the harmonious personality of a
Mozart, were things he could not rival. He is even inferior, in the
matter of style, to men like Weber and Debussy. There are many moments,
one finds, when his scores show that there was nothing in his mind, and
that he simply went through the routine of composition. Too often he
permitted the system of leading-motifs to relieve him of the necessity
of creating. Too often, he made of his art a purely mental game. His
emotion, his creative genius were far more intermittent, his breath far
less long than one once imagined. Some of the earlier works have
commenced to fade rapidly, irretrievably. At present one wonders how it
is possible that one once sat entranced through performances of "The
Flying Dutchman" and "Tannhaeuser." "Lohengrin" begins to seem a little
brutal, strangely Prussian lieutenant with its militaristic trumpets,
its abuse of the brass. One finds oneself choosing even among the acts
of "Tristan und Isolde," finding the first far inferior to the poignant,
magnificent third. Sometimes, one glimpses a littl