screams, or even musical imitations of real screams.  That would be to step beyond the boundaries of art; for neither real screams nor their imitations are beautiful, and—­if a truism may be pardoned to complete a nice sentence—­without beauty there can be no art.  In spite of much nonsense that has been written and talked, Wagner never sacrificed beauty.  Those foolish tales which I used to read in my youth—­of how Wagner appropriately, if daringly, sustained discords through long discordant situations—­what are they but the blatherskite of long-tongued persons who could talk faster than they could think?  Wagner would not sacrifice beauty.  He made the characters say, in notes as well as words, what they had to say; he always got the colour and atmosphere of the scenic surroundings into the music.  By inspiration and marvellous workmanship he made each phrase serve a double purpose:  it expresses the emotion of the person who sings, it gives the atmosphere in which the person is singing.  More than anything else, it is this that gives his music its individual character.  Such music is bound to remain for ever fresh.  So long as trees and grass, rain and sunshine, running waters and flying cloud-scud are things sweet to man’s thought, so long will the music of Wagner’s operas remain green, always new and refreshing, full and satisfying.  He often achieved the task, or helped himself to achieve it, by showing us Nature in sympathy with the human mood of the moment (see the second scene in Tannhaeuser, the last act of Tristan, the whole of the last act of The Valkyrie); but he succeeds equally well without these touches of his unrivalled stage-craft.

Further back I referred to Wagner’s earlier and later use of the leit-motif. In its naive, primitive simplicity the device is certainly not highly artistic.  When our academic gentry use it in their festival oratorios, they are supposed to show themselves very advanced.  But what purpose, musical or other, is subserved by arbitrarily allying a musical phrase to a personage or an idea and blaring it out whenever that personage or idea comes to the front?  Wagner early realized the uselessness of the proceeding, and, as I pointed out, in Tannhaeuser there are no leit-motifs, though passages and parts of passages are repeated.  In Lohengrin it is used rather for a dramatic than a musical purpose.  By the time he wrote Tristan he had learnt the splendid artistic uses to which a rather commonplace device could be put.  The differences between the leit-motif in Lohengrin and the leit-motif in Tristan are two:  in Tristan they are more significant—­indeed, they are pregnant to bursting—­and more fully charged with energy and colour; also they are not stated and restated in their elementary form as in Lohengrin, but continually subjected to a process of metamorphosis.  This last mode of developing a theme he probably learnt