it presently won throughout Europe.  That, I say, is not a matter for the twentieth century to worry about; but the twentieth century is bound to marvel over the obtuseness of the middle nineteenth in not recognizing the advent of the greatest power that had yet meddled with high and serious opera. (I do not mean that Wagner’s was a greater musical power than Mozart’s and Beethoven’s.  But Mozart never had a libretto to compare with Wagner’s; and Fidelio, though serious enough in all conscience, is not an opera at all.) In three years, 1842-45, the growth of Wagner’s strength was astounding, incredible.  One sees at once how the old stage devices have departed from the libretto, and with them the fragmentary and jerky style of music; the intermittent inspiration of the Dutchman is replaced by an unchecked torrent of inspired music.  All the little suggestions of Bellini and Donizetti are clean gone; the amorphous melody of the Dutchman is gone, or metamorphosed by being charged with energy, colour and meaning; every phrase has character, and communicates a very definite shade of feeling; in every phrase we feel how intense has been the inner thought and emotion, and with what terrible directness these are communicated to us.  I say terrible directness because it is in Tannhaeuser that we first find the godlike Wagner hurling his thunderbolts.  It was Spohr who spoke of the godlike or titanic energy of the music, and this energy finds expression, not as it did in Rienzi, in noisy orchestration, big ensembles and thumping rhythms, but, in a far greater degree than in the Dutchman, in the stuff of the music itself.  We find no more lumpish harmonies and basses of leaden immovability:  the basses stalk about with arrogant independence, and the harmonic progressions, even when most daring and perilous, are superbly poised.  The old awkwardnesses, due to the endeavour to copy and to be original at the same time, have disappeared.  Wagner wrote Tannhaeuser entirely to express and to please himself:  he had given up the notion of being original; he was bent only on being himself.

He boasted that here, at last, was a sheer German opera.  Well, that is not in itself very much.  Personally, I would rather be an Englishman than a German; and few of us will be prepared to accept the view that because a work of art, or so-called work of art, happens to be by a German, it must therefore be a great work of art, or even a work of art at all.  Richard never lived down the tendency, natural in one, I suppose, of a conquered tribe (the Saxons), to incorporate and identify himself with his conquerors, and he glorified everything Prussian as German, and everything German as perfect; but, even so late as 1852, I cannot imagine that he quite understood what he meant when he held forth on the subject of German art, its non-existence, and—­of all things—­its supremacy.  He certainly felt very keenly what many members of