deny Wagner the astonishing sense of dramatic effect he had from the beginning; to play it as Seidl played it is to prove that the conductor appreciates the perfection of artistic sense that led, compelled, Wagner to set the miraculous vision of Lohengrin against a background made up of such stormy scenes.  Had Seidl kept his vigour for the stormy scenes, and given us a finer tenderness in the prelude, the love-music, and Lohengrin’s account of himself, his rendering would have been a flawless one.

And even as Seidl interpreted it, the supreme beauty of the music, the sweetness of it as well as its strength, were manifest as they have never been manifest before.  “Lohengrin” is surely the most beautiful, the fullest of sheer beauty, of all Wagner’s operas.  Some thirty or forty years hence those of us who are lucky enough still to live in the sweet sunlight will begin to feel that at last it is becoming feasible to take a fair and reasonable view of Wagner’s creative work; and we shall probably differ about verdicts which the whole musical world of to-day would agree only in rejecting.  Old-school Wagnerites and anti-Wagnerites will have gone off together into the night, and the echo of the noise of all their feuds will have died away.  No one will venture to talk of the “teaching” of “Parsifal” or any other of Wagner’s works; the legends from which he constructed his works will have lost their novelty.  The music-drama itself will be regarded by the Academics (if there are any left) with all the reverence due to the established fact, and possibly it may be suffering the fierce assault of the exponents of a newer and nobler form.  Then the younger critics will arise and take one after another of the music-dramas and ask, What measure of beauty is there, and what dramatic strength, what originality of emotion? and in a few minutes they will scatter hundreds of harmless and long-cherished illusions that went to make life interesting.  In that day of wrath and tribulation may I be on the right side, and have energy to go forward, giving up the pretence of what I can no longer like, and boldly saying that I like what I like, even should it happen to be unpopular.  May I never fall so low as to be talked of as a guardian of the accepted forms and laws.  But even if it should prove unavoidable to relinquish faith in Bach, in Beethoven, in Wagner, yet it is devoutly to be hoped that it will never be necessary to give up a belief in “Lohengrin”; for in that case my fate is fixed—­I shall be among the reactionaries, the admirers of the thing that cannot be admired, the lovers of the unlovable.  But indeed it is incredible that “Lohengrin” should ever cease to seem lovely—­lovely in idea and in the expression of the idea.  The story is one of the finest Wagner ever set; it remains fresh, though it had been told a hundred times before.  The maiden in distress—­we know her perfectly well; the wicked sorceress who has got her into distress—­we know her quite as well; the celestial knight who rescues