elements themselves, to all
other operatic music, in which, however noble the music as music (think
of Gluck, of Mozart, of Beethoven!), it is for the most part fettered to
a little accidental comedy or tragedy, in which two lovers are jealous,
or someone is wrongly imprisoned, or a libertine seduces a few women.
Here music is like a god speaking the language of savages, and lowering
his supreme intellect to the level of their speech. The melodious voice
remains, but the divine meaning has gone out of the words. Only in
Wagner does God speak to men in his own language.

CONCLUSION

A PARADOX ON ART

Is it not part of the pedantry of letters to limit the word art, a
little narrowly, to certain manifestations of the artistic spirit, or,
at all events, to set up a comparative estimate of the values of the
several arts, a little unnecessarily? Literature, painting, sculpture,
music, these we admit as art, and the persons who work in them as
artists; but dancing, for instance, in which the performer is at once
creator and interpreter, and those methods of interpretation, such as
the playing of musical instruments, or the conducting of an orchestra,
or acting, have we scrupulously considered the degree to which these
also are art, and their executants, in a strict sense, artists?

If we may be allowed to look upon art as something essentially
independent of its material, however dependent upon its own material
each art may be, in a secondary sense, it will scarcely be logical to
contend that the motionless and permanent creation of the sculptor in
marble is, as art, more perfect than the same sculptor's modelling in
snow, which, motionless one moment, melts the next, or than the dancer's
harmonious succession of movements which we have not even time to
realise individually before one is succeeded by another, and the whole
has vanished from before our eyes. Art is the creation of beauty in
form, visible or audible, and the artist is the creator of beauty in
visible or audible form. But beauty is infinitely various, and as truly
beauty in the voice of Sarah Bernhardt or the silence of Duse as in a
face painted by Leonardo or a poem written by Blake. A dance, performed
faultlessly and by a dancer of temperament, is as beautiful, in its own
way, as a performance on the violin by Ysaye or the effect of an
orchestra conducted by Richter. In each case the beauty is different,
but, once we have really attained beaut