In saying, as we may truly say, that Wagner made music pictorial, it should be remembered that there is nothing new in the aim, only in the continuity of its success.  Haydn, in his “Creation,” evoked landscapes, giving them precision by an almost mechanical imitation of cuckoo and nightingale.  Trees had rustled and water flowed in the music of every composer.  But with Wagner it may be said that the landscape of his music moves before our eyes as clearly as the moving scenery with which he does but accentuate it; and it is always there, not a decor, but a world, the natural world in the midst of which his people of the drama live their passionate life, and a world in sympathy with all their passion.  And in his audible representation of natural sounds and natural sights he does, consummately, what others have only tried, more or less well, to do.  When, in the past at least, the critics objected to the realism of his imitative effects, they forgot that all other composers, at one time or another, had tried to be just as imitative, but had not succeeded so well in their imitations.  Wagner, in his painting, is the Turner of music.  He brings us nature, heroically exalted, full of fiery splendour, but nature as if caught in a mirror, not arranged, subdued, composed, for the frame of a picture.  He is afraid of no realism, however mean, because he has confidence in nature as it is, apprehended with all the clairvoyance of emotion.

Between the abyss of the music, out of which the world rises up with all its voices, and the rocks and clouds, in which the scenery carries us onward to the last horizon of the world, gods and men act out the brief human tragedy, as if on a narrow island in the midst of a great sea.  A few steps this way or that will plunge them into darkness; the darkness awaits them, however they succeed or fail, whether they live nobly or ignobly, in the interval; but the interval absorbs them, as if it were to be eternity, and we see them rejoicing and suffering with an abandonment to the moment which intensifies the pathos of what we know is futile.  Love, in Wagner, is so ecstatic and so terrible, because it must compass all its anguish and delight into an immortal moment, before which there is only a great darkness, and only a great darkness afterwards.  Sorrow is so lofty and so consoling because it is no less conscious of its passing hour.

And meanwhile action is not everything, as it is for other makers of drama; is but one among many modes of the expression of life.  Those long narratives, which some find so tedious, so undramatic, are part of Wagner’s protest against the frequently false emphasis of action.  In Wagner anticipation and memory are seen to be often equally intense with the instant of realisation.  Siegfried is living with at least as powerful and significant a life when he lies under the trees listening to the song of the birds as when he is killing the dragon.  And it is for this that the “motives,” which are after all only the materialising of memory, were created by Wagner.  These motives, by which the true action of the drama expresses itself, are a symbol of the inner life, of its preponderance over outward event, and, in their guidance of the music, their indication of the real current of interest, have a spiritualising effect upon both music and action, instead of, as was once thought, materialising both.