that quality distinguished supreme art, and, indeed, the art of Mozart is, in its kind, supreme.  It has an adorable purity of form, and it has no need to look outside those limits which it has found or fixed for itself.  Mozart cares little, as a rule, for what he has to express; but he cares infinitely for the way in which he expresses everything, and, through the mere emotional power of the notes themselves, he conveys to us all that he cares to convey:  awe, for instance, in those solemn scenes of the priests of Isis.  He is a magician, who plays with his magic, and can be gay, out of mere pleasant idleness, fooling with Papagenus as Shakespeare fools in “Twelfth-Night.”  “Die Zauberfloete” is really a very fine kind of pantomime, to which music lends itself in the spirit of the thing, yet without condescending to be grotesque.  The duet of Papagenus and Papagena is absolutely comic, but it is as lovely as a duet of two birds, of less flaming feather.  As the lovers ascend through fires and floods, only the piping of the magic flute is heard in the orchestra:  imagine Wagner threading it into the web of a great orchestral pattern!  For Mozart it was enough, and for his art, it was enough.  He gives you harmony which does not need to mean anything outside itself, in order to be supremely beautiful; and he gives you beauty with a certain exquisite formality, not caring to go beyond the lines which contain that reticent, sufficient charm of the Mirabell-Garten.

NOTES ON WAGNER AT BAYREUTH

I. BAYREUTH AND MUNICH

Bayreuth is Wagner’s creation in the world of action, as the music-dramas are his creation in the world of art; and it is a triumph not less decisive, in its transposition of dream into reality.  Remember that every artist, in every art, has desired his own Bayreuth, and that only Wagner has attained it.  Who would not rather remain at home, receiving the world, than go knocking, humbly or arrogantly, at many doors, offering an entertainment, perhaps unwelcome?  The artist must always be at cautious enmity with his public, always somewhat at its mercy, even after he has conquered its attention.  The crowd never really loves art, it resents art as a departure from its level of mediocrity; and fame comes to an artist only when there is a sufficient number of intelligent individuals in the crowd to force their opinion upon the resisting mass of the others, in the form of a fashion which it is supposed to be unintelligent not to adopt.  Bayreuth exists because Wagner willed that it should exist, and because he succeeded in forcing his ideas upon a larger number of people of power and action than any other artist of our time.  Wagner always got what he wanted, not always when he wanted it.  He had a king on his side, he had Liszt on his side, the one musician of all others who could do most for him; he had the necessary enemies, besides the general resistance of the crowd; and at last he got his theatre, not in time to see the full extent of his own triumph in it, but enough, I think, to let him die perfectly satisfied.  He had done what he wanted:  there was the theatre, and there were his works, and the world had learnt where to come when it was called.