for the base excitement of prurient allusion and
appeal.

It is not pleasant to have to insist that M.
Offenbach has amassed a large fortune and an
universal reputation by his late recourse to the
bad device of double entendre in the stories
selected by him, and in the execution of his
favourite interpreters. His music, in itself
trite and colourless, as compared (to rise no
higher) with the comic music of Adam, though
ingeniously put together, and neatly
instrumented, would die out because of its
nothingness, were not the action it accompanies
spiced with indelicacy by women and men of
the most meagre musical pretensions. His
Grande Duchesse, Mademoiselle Schneider,
salaried as Sontag never was in her best days,
a pretty actress, content, some ten years
ago, to display her less matured charms and
more timid impertinences in that "dirty little
temple ot ungodliness" (as Mrs. Gore called it)
the Palais Royal Theatre, would never have
passed muster in opera had it not been for
certain airs and graces which, till the opportunities
afforded for their display in the prurient
stories which M. Offenbach has set to colourless
music, were confined to such singing
and smoking houses as the Paris Alcazar;
to the significant gestures of Mademoiselle
Theresa, or her shabby imitators in the
open-air shrines of the Champs Elysées.
When the great Lady of Gérolstein leers at
the brutal giant of a soldier whom she
affects, and taps him temptingly on the arm
with her riding-whip, who can resist such an
exquisitely refined piquancy?

Mademoiselle Schneider's real value as a
picaroon actress and singer cannot be better
appraised than by comparing her with a
predecessor made for something higher than
questionable comedy and vaudeville—the lively,
evergreen, Mademoiselle Dèjazet. Though that
lady's choice of occupation was anything but
unimpeachable, the neatness, vivacity, and
variety of her impersonations, and the skill
with which she managed a defective and wiry
voice, made her the completest artist of a
certain disorderly order who has appeared on
the stage in our experience. When her Lisette
(Béranger's Lisette), her Grande Mère, her
young Richelieu, and a score besides of
distinct and perfectly finished creations, are
remembered, it becomes difficult to endure
without impatience triumphs so utterly worthless,
so disproportionately repaid, as those of
M. Offenbach's overrated heroine.

There is one comfort, however, to be drawn
from the present state of affairs, discouraging
as it appears to be. Lower in the setting of
burlesque and in offence to delicacy, stage
music can hardly sink. One step more, a step
necessary to retain the attention of a jaded
public which will no longer be contented with
the present amount of indelicate excitement,
and all honest, decorous, refined lovers of
opera, will protest against further outrage;
while it must prove increasingly hard to
propitiate the Persons of Quality, who delight to
see the devices and delights of low places of
entertainment figuring in the temple of the
most graceful of the arts. The last and not
the least "broad" of M. Offenbach's
perpetrations, "La Princesse de Trebizonde,"
commissioned for Baden-Baden, and produced
there the other evening, failed to satisfy either
the lovers of respectable opera, or those who
patronise covert, or overt impropriety. There
is a point at which that which is diseased,
ceases to produce the old effect, be the
stimulus ever so largely heightened, and
perishes of its own poison; neglected in its
death even by the thoughtless people whose
vacant sympathy had encouraged its wretched
life.

CHAPTER II. IN THE MIST.

    HYPERBOLE soars too high, or sinks too low,
    Exceeds the truth things wonderful to show,

says the old schoolboy's rhyme. We have made
an attempt to sketch modern comic opera,
as dragged in the mire, for the delectation
of many refined and noble personages.
We may now look at the condition of the
musical drama when it is forced upwards into
the mist, beyond any powers of common-sense
or legitimate admiration to follow it or bear it
company. The one extreme could, perhaps, not
have been reached without its being
counterbalanced by another one, of its kind, no less
strange. Slang is, after all, only a familiarised
and vulgar form of bombast.

Among the strangest appearances ever seen in
the world of Music, are the existence of Herr
Richard Wagner and his acceptance by a band
of enthusiasts, many of whom are infinitely
superior in gifts to himself. These bow down
to worship him as a prophet, whose genius has
opened a new and precious vein in a mine already
wrought out. The wonder is as complete a one
as any already enrolled in that sad but fascinating
book—the Annals of Charlatanry.

How, subsequent to the partial success of
his heavy but not altogether irrational Rienzi,
Herr Wagner bethought himself of entering
the domain of supernatural and transcendental
eccentricity, has been shown in the successive
production of his Tannhäuser, Fliegende
Holländer (which contains an excellent spinning
song and chorus), and his best opera,
Lohengrin. The first and the third of these have
gained what may be called a contested position
in some of the opera houses of Germany; but
in those of no other country. This is a noticeable
fact; seeing that the taste for and understanding
of music, becomes year by year less
exclusive, and more and more cosmopolitan
in England, France, and even Italy. The
names of Mozart, Weber, and Beethoven, are
now so many household words in every land
where music is known. The silly folks who
pretend that the limitation of Herr Wagner's
success is the inevitable consequence of
the nationality of the subjects treated by
Herr Wagner, forget, that, in their stories,
neither Tannhäuser nor Lohengrin have more
local colour than Weber's Der Freischütz,