of every other composer, with the exception of Wagner with his Elsa. Music can express things that lie outside the range of literature; and perhaps fine and delicate portrait and character painting are things that lie outside the range of music.

In the Dutchman, I have said, we have the North Sea for a background, in Tannhäuser the sultry, scented cave of Venus. In Lohengrin it is the broad, shining river, flowing ceaselessly from far-away lands to the distant sea, and on it the swan floats—the swan which throughout is used as the symbol of the river. In the first act it gives the pervading atmosphere and colour; in the third it recurs with amazing effect in the midst of one of Elsa's paroxysms. Here is the simple phrase by which such magic is wrought:

No changes are made in this theme. It occurs again and again, without wearying the ear; it keeps the atmosphere charged with mystery and suggestions of that far-away land where it is always dawn. It is the calm, refreshing, gently-rippling river; the cool, placid water sliding through many countries, with the swan as symbol and token of all that is strange and beautiful where it has its source. It is less a theme capable of purely musical development to form pattern after pattern of entrancing beauty, like the Grail or Montsalvat theme, than the equivalent in music of tender colour. It never sings out from the orchestra without carrying the imagination for a moment from the scene before one's eyes to the fernem Land. It blends the actual with the dream, and imbues all the drama with a delicious romantic mysticism. I dwell on it because without this prevailing colour and atmosphere the story of Lohengrin is a plain prosaic fairy-tale to amuse children. Further, in the most important musical theme in the opera it is there also—the Montsalvat theme:

The characteristic chords in the second bar cannot escape notice. This motive, one of the sweetest Wagner invented, is long, and less of the nature of a leit-motif—as I have explained the leit-motif—than a passage like the Venus music in Tannhäuser. Just as Senta's ballad of the Flying Dutchman is the germ of that opera, so this is the germ of Lohengrin. It is worked out at great length when Lohengrin's narrative arrives, and he declares his name, parentage, and country. The Swan or River theme can scarcely be called a leit-motif in the elementary meaning of the phrase. For a fair example of this we must go to the passage used by Lohengrin when he warns Elsa that she must ask no questions:

This is never developed at all. It recurs only when Elsa's pertinacious inquisitiveness threatens to rupture their somewhat hastily arranged alliance. Then it sounds out sinister, menacing, and the effect, both dramatic and musical, is overwhelming. Another example is the phrase representing Lohengrin simply as a heroic knight. Save in the finale of the first act, no great use is made of it.

It is unnecessary for me to describe in further detail an opera which is so well known, and can be followed at a first hearing very much more easily than Tannhäuser. While there is a great deal of recitative, there are also many numbers merely joined together in the Tannhäuser manner. Such numbers as the Prayer and Finale of the first act, Elsa's Song and the Processional March in the second, the Wedding Chorus in the last, are simply placed there; they do not grow out of themes, as they would have grown had the opera been written when Wagner was ten years older. The love duet which takes place after the marriage is a series of his most generously inspired melodies. There are enough beautiful and passionate tunes there to make the fortune of half a dozen Italian operas.

After Lohengrin the composer wrote nothing more for some years, though we may be sure he was eternally planning. He was intensely interested in politics. Revolution was in the air, and Wagner had to have his say on that as on every other topic. He made speeches and published pamphlets; and just as his musical schemes seemed wild to such contemporaries as the late Charles Hallé, so his ideas of social regeneration must have seemed Utopian to the point of sheer lunacy to the very comrades with whom he was acting. The explosion came; barricades were thrown up in the Dresden streets, and Wagner sought to bring about a quiet ending to the crisis by appealing to the Imperial soldiers to join with, and not to fight against, their own countrymen. Whether he actually shouldered a musket or not it is hard to say. This much is certain, however: that Wagner did take part in the rising, and that a warrant was issued for his arrest. The fiasco resulted in a great gain to music, and, as far as Wagner was concerned, there was no political loss. Had the insurgents by some unthinkable chance succeeded, he would soon have been on worse terms with them than ever he was with Kings and Imperial personages. They tried revolt because they wished to alter all the conditions under which men lived. Wagner, too, wanted to alter the conditions of life, but mainly with a view of carrying out his operatic reforms. Look where we will in his writings, we see that to be the secret of all his incursions into practical politics. Passionate—a bursting volcano of elemental energy—he was always a man of one idea at a time, and that idea always involved Richard Wagner playing an important rôle, for he was one of the most splendid egoists to be met in history.

ZURICH—PARIS (1849-1861).

He was now, indeed, in a pretty pickle. At Dresden he had an assured livelihood and time to write operas; and, despite his former experience of hunger and want, he threw away his position for the sake of an idea. He afterwards was wont to complain that he only wished to be kept alive in reasonable comfort, and he would in return present the world with masterpieces. Yet he was not content when he was, for a comparatively slight return in daily labour, kept comfortably alive. But, after all, what appears at first to have been an act of madness turned out anything but disastrous in the long-run. It is true that without the generous help of Liszt, Wesendonek and others he could not have lived as he did in Zurich, and, as it was, constant apprehensions of approaching poverty harassed him. The old fear of an empty belly which got into his very blood and bones in the Riga—Paris period now began to show itself in those appealing letters written to his friends when there appears to have been no necessity whatever. He had exaggerated hopes and exaggerated fears. The hopes were realized—as well as anything can be realized in this imperfect world—at Bayreuth; the fears found expression in the begging letters of which advantage was taken by every mean and cowardly spirit without the intelligence to understand his real greatness. Mendelssohn, we are reminded, wrote no such letters; but Mendelssohn, it may be remarked, was always rich, and has no such record of charitable deeds as stands to Wagner's credit. The nearest parallel to the case of Wagner is that of Beethoven in his old age. He, although perfectly well off, scared himself almost to death with his dread of poverty. Wagner's letters written about this time are well worth reading. There is no need to discuss