he borrowed his ideas whenever and wherever he saw fit. His indebtedness to Liszt was great, but equally so to Weber, Marschner, and Beethoven; his indebtedness to Berlioz ended with the externals of orchestration. Both Liszt and Wagner learned from Berlioz in this respect. Nevertheless, how useless to compare Liszt to Berlioz or Berlioz to Wagner. As well compare a ruby to an opal, an emerald to a ruby. Each of these three composers has his individual excellences. The music of all three suffers from an excess of profile. We call Liszt and Wagner the leaders of the moderns, but their aims and methods were radically different. Wagner asserted the supremacy of the drama over tone, and then, inconsistently, set himself down to write the most emotionally eloquent music that was ever conceived; Liszt always harped on the dramatic, on the poetic, and seldom employed words, believing that the function of instrumental music is to convey in an ideal manner a poetic impression. In this he was the most thorough-going of poetic composers, as much so in the orchestral domain as was Chopin in his pianoforte compositions. Since Wagner's music-plays are no longer a novelty "the long submerged trail of Liszt is making its appearance," as Ernest Newman happily states the case. But to be truthful, the music of both Liszt and Wagner is already a little old-fashioned. The music-drama is not precisely in a rosy condition to-day. Opera is the weakest of forms at best, the human voice inevitably limits the art, and we are beginning to wonder what all the Wagnerian menagerie, the birds, dragons, dogs, snakes, swans, toads, dwarfs, giants, horses, and monsters generally, have to do with music. The music of the future is already the music of the past. The Wagner poems are uncouth, cumbersome machines. We long for a breath of humanity, and it is difficult to find it outside of Tristan and Isolde or Die Meistersinger. Alas! for the enduring quality of operatic music. Nothing stales like theatre music. The rainbow vision of a synthesis of the Seven Arts has faded forever. In the not far distant future Wagner will gain, rather than lose, by being played in the concert-room; that, at least, would dodge the ominously barren stretches of the Ring, and the early operas. The Button-Moulder awaits at the cross-roads of time all operatic music, even as he waited for Peer Gynt. And the New Zealander is already alive, though young, who will visit Europe to attend the last piano-recital: that species of entertainment invented by Liszt, and by him described in a letter to the Princess Belgiojoso as colloquies of music and ennui. He was the first pianist to show his profile on the concert stage, his famous profil d'ivoire; before Liszt pianists either faced the audience or sat with their back to the public.

The Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein—one naturally drops into the Almanac de Gotha when writing of the friends of Liszt—averred that Liszt had launched his musical spear further into the future than Wagner. She was a lady of firm opinions, who admired Berlioz as much as she loathed Wagner. But could she have foreseen that Richard Strauss, Parsifal-like, had caught the whizzing lance of the Klingsor of Weimar, what would she have said? Put the riddle to contemporary critics of Richard II—who has, at least, thrown off the influence of Liszt and Wagner, although he too frequently takes snap-shots at the sublime in his scores. Otherwise, you can no more keep Liszt's name out of the music of to-day than could good Mr. Dick the head of King Charles from the pages of his memorial.

His musical imagination was versatile, his impressionability so lively that he translated into tone his voyages, pictures, poems—Dante, Goethe, Heine, Lamartine, Obermann, (Senancour), even Sainte-Beuve (Les Consolations,) legends, and the cypress-haunted fountains of the Villa d' Este (Tivoli); not to mention canvases by Raphael, Mickelangelo, and the uninspired frescoes of Kaulbach. All was grist that came to his musical mill.

In a moment of self-forgetfulness, Wagner praised the music of Liszt in superlative terms. No need of quotation; the correspondence, a classic, is open to all. That the symphonic poem was secretly antipathetic to Wagner is the bald truth. After all his rhapsodic utterances concerning the symphonies and poems of Liszt—from which he borrowed many a sparkling jewel to adorn some corner in his giant frescoes—he said in 1877, "In instrumental music I am a réactionnaire, a conservative. I dislike everything that requires verbal explanations beyond the actual sounds." And he, the most copious of commentators concerning his own music, in which almost every other bar is labelled with a leading motive! To this Liszt wittily answered—in an unpublished letter (1878)—that leading motives are comfortable inventions, as a composer does not have to search for a new melody. But what boots leading motives—as old as the hills and Johann Sebastian Bach—or symphonic poems nowadays? There is no Wagner, there is no Liszt question. After the unbinding of the classic forms the turbulent torrent is become the new danger. Who shall dam its speed! Brahms or Reger? The formal formlessness of the new school has placed Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner on the shelf, almost as remotely as are Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The symphonic poem is now a monster of appalling lengths, thereby, as Mr. Krehbiel suggests, defeating its chiefest reason for existence, its brevity. The foam and fireworks of the impressionistic school, Debussy, Dukas, and Ravel, and the rest, are enjoyable; the piano music of Debussy has the iridescence of a spider's web touched by the fire of the setting sun; his orchestra is a jewelled conflagration. But he stems like the others, the Russians included, from Liszt. Charpentier and his followers are Wagner à la coule. Where it will all end no man dare predict. But Mr. Newman is right in the matter of programme-music. It has come to stay, modified as it may be in the future. Too many bricks and mortar, the lust of the ear as well as of the eye, glutted by the materialistic machinery of the Wagner music-drama, have driven the lovers of music-for-music's-sake back to Beethoven; or, in extreme cases, to novel forms wherein vigourous affirmations are dreaded as much as an eight-bar melody; for those meticulous temperaments that recoil from clangourous chord, there are the misty tonalities of Debussy or the verse of Paul Verlaine. However, the aquarelles and pastels and landscapes of Debussy or Ravel were invented by Urvater Liszt—caricatured by Wagner in the person of Wotan; all the impressionistic school may be traced to him as its fountain-head. Think of the little sceneries scattered through his piano music, particularly in his Years of Pilgrimage; or of the storm and stress of the Dante Sonata. The romanticism of Liszt was, like so many of his contemporaries, a state of soul, a condition of exalted or morbid sensibility. But it could not be said of him as it could of all the Men of Fine Shades—Chateaubriand, Heine, Stendhal, Benjamin Constant, Sainte-Beuve—that they were only men of feeling in their art, and decidedly the reverse in their conduct. Liszt was a pattern of chivalry, and if he seems at times as indulging too much in the Grand Manner set it down to his surroundings, to his temperament. The idols of his younger years were Bonaparte and Byron, Goethe and Chateaubriand, while in the background hovered the prime corrupter of the nineteenth century and the father of Romanticism, J. J. Rousseau.

II