the world and to him:  it is always in the silence of rapture that love is given and returned.  And the gesture, subdued into a gravity almost sorrowful (as if love and the thought of death came always together, the thought of the only ending of a mortal eternity), renders the inmost meaning of the music as no Italian gesture, which is the vehemence of first thoughts and the excitement of the senses, could ever render it.  That slow rhythm, which in Wagner is like the rhythm of the world flowing onwards from its first breathing out of chaos, as we hear it in the opening notes of the “Ring,” seems to broaden outwards like ripples on an infinite sea, throughout the whole work of Wagner.

And now turn from this elemental music, in which the sense of all human things is expressed with the dignity of the 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