child. He takes the orchestra in both hands,
tears it to pieces, catches up a fragment of it here, a fragment of it
there, masters it like an enemy; he makes it do what he wants. But he
uses his fist where Wagner touches with the tips of his fingers; he
shows ill-breeding after the manners of the supreme gentleman. Wagner
can use the whole strength of the orchestra, and not make a noise: he
never ends on a bang. But Tschaikowsky loves noise for its own sake; he
likes to pound the drum, and to hear the violins running up and down
scales like acrobats. Wagner takes his rhythms from the sea, as in
"Tristan," from fire, as in parts of the "Ring," from light, as in
"Parsifal." But Tschaikowsky deforms the rhythms of nature with the
caprices of half-civilised impulses. He puts the frog-like dancing of
the Russian peasant into his tunes; he cries and roars like a child in a
rage. He gives himself to you just as he is; he is immensely conscious
of himself and of his need to take you into his confidence. In your
delight at finding any one so alive, you are inclined to welcome him
without reserve, and to forget that a man of genius is not necessarily
a great artist, and that, if he is not a great artist, he is not a
satisfactory man of genius.

I contrast him with Wagner because it seems to me that Wagner, alone
among quite modern musicians, and though indeed he appeals to our nerves
more forcibly than any of them, has that breadth and universality by
which emotion ceases to be merely personal and becomes elemental. To the
musicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, music was an art
which had to be carefully guarded from the too disturbing presence of
emotion; emotion is there always, whenever the music is fine music; but
the music is something much more than a means for the expression of
emotion. It is a pattern, its beauty lies in its obedience to a law, it
is music made for music's sake, with what might be called a more
exclusive devotion to art than that of our modern musician. This music
aims at the creation of beauty in sound; it conceives of beautiful sound
as a thing which cannot exist outside order and measure; it has not yet
come to look upon transgression as an essential part of liberty. It does
not even desire liberty, but is content with loving obedience. It can
express emotion, but it will never express an emotion carried to that
excess at which the modern idea of emotion begins. Thus, for all its
suggest