In Tschaikowsky there is none of the quieting of thought.  The only healing for our nerves lies in abstract thought, and he can never get far enough from his nerves to look calmly at his own discontent.  All those wild, broken rhythms, rushing this way and that, are letting out his secret all the time:  “I am unhappy, and I know not why I am unhappy; I want, but I know not what I want.”  In the most passionate and the most questioning music of Wagner there is always air; Tschaikowsky is suffocating.  It is himself that he pities so much, and not himself because he shares in the general sorrow of the world.  To Tristan and Isolde the whole universe is an exultant and martyred sharer in their love; they know only the absolute.  Even suffering does not bring nobility to Tschaikowsky.

To pass from Wagner to Tschaikowsky, from “Parsifal” to the Pathetic Symphony, is like passing from a church in which priests are offering mass to a hut in which peasants are quarrelling, dancing, and making love.  Tschaikowsky has both force and sincerity, but it is the force and sincerity of a ferocious child.  He takes the orchestra in both hands, tears it to pieces, catches up a fragment of it here, a fragment of it there, masters it like an enemy; he makes it do what he wants.  But he uses his fist where Wagner touches with the tips of his fingers; he shows ill-breeding after the manners of the supreme gentleman.  Wagner can use the whole strength of the orchestra, and not make a noise:  he never ends on a bang.  But Tschaikowsky loves noise for its own sake; he likes to pound the drum, and to hear the violins running up and down scales like acrobats.  Wagner takes his rhythms from the sea, as in “Tristan,” from fire, as in parts of the “Ring,” from light, as in “Parsifal.”  But Tschaikowsky deforms the rhythms of nature with the caprices of half-civilised impulses.  He puts the frog-like dancing of the Russian peasant into his tunes; he cries and roars like a child in a rage.  He gives himself to you just as he is; he is immensely conscious of himself and of his need to take you into his confidence.  In your delight at finding any one so alive, you are inclined to welcome him without reserve, and to forget that a man of genius is not necessarily a great artist, and that, if he is not a great artist, he is not a satisfactory man of genius.

I contrast him with Wagner because it seems to me that Wagner, alone among quite modern musicians, and though indeed he appeals to our nerves more forcibly than any of them, has that breadth and universality by which emotion ceases to be merely personal and becomes elemental.  To the musicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, music was an art which had to be carefully guarded from the too disturbing presence of emotion; emotion is there always, whenever the music is fine music; but the music is something much more than a means for the expression of emotion.  It is a pattern, its beauty lies in its obedience to