examples of how he has discarded all the involutions, convolutions, twiddles and twaddles of melody, and gone back to the simplicity and directness of Weber and Beethoven.  His earlier manner and type of tune, the operatic manner of his day, had, I make no doubt, its origin in the advisability, not to say the necessity, of writing so as to please singers who could sing in the Italian style and no other.  Wagner had now ceased to think of singers’ whims.  He had a matter to find utterance for, and he went to work in the most direct way, considering nothing but his artistic aim.  We know he conceived Tannhaeuser at a white heat, and in a condition of white heat wrote the words; and though he afterwards cooled down and had, he said, to “warm up” to his work again, yet he warmed up so effectually that he composed at furious speed, haunted by a terror lest he should not live to complete the opera.  This fervour alone might account for his artistic development in the Tannhaeuser period.  It drove him to find the secret of the one true mode of expression—­the law of simplicity, the unvarying rule that anything more than is needed for the expression of the thing to be expressed is bad art, and, in the long run, ineffective.  With greater simplicity in the melody came the greatest possible simplicity in the harmony.  There is a kind of awkwardness to be found in the music of all the pundits which almost defies analysis.  The progressions are correct enough, are good enough grammar, yet the result is more disconcerting, even distressing, to the ear than a schoolboy’s first efforts.  Of this style of harmony the Italians were masters, and too often in his Rienzi days Wagner, thinking of his “melody” (for at that time by “melody” he meant Bellini melody), showed how little they could teach him in this respect.  With the simpler “melody” went the harmony—­complicated as you like when the occasion called, but never more complicated than the occasion warranted.  Compare with the war-chorus and march in Rienzi the march in the second act of Tannhaeuser, and the difference will be seen.  This march, by the way, ought to have been signed “after C.M. von Weber.”

IV

Tannhaeuser was written in an epoch of long or big works of every description.  Think of the length of the novels of Thackeray and Dickens; think of the interminable Ring and the Book!  Our immediate ancestors were a long-enduring, often long-suffering, generation.  Perhaps they liked good value for their money.  If so, Richard gave them what they wanted.  He himself must have felt he had done so in Tannhaeuser, for fond though he was of his own music, he allowed it to be cut freely.  Even as it stands, the finale of the second act is preposterous:  the ripe and perfect artist who planned Tristan would never have done such a thing.  But with regard to the finales—­and they are all too long—­it certainly appears