to win, but to force his way: to insult taste into
that sort of terrified silence which despotism
mistakes for sympathy—to mystify those who
are appalled at sounding words, by a liberal use
of the jargon of solemn nonsense. That all
these cheap and easy innovations were provoked
by the mechanical phlegm of a set of
manufacturers, who, in Germany more than in any
other musical country, in their works substituted
letter for spirit, ad nauseam, is not to be
questioned by any one who has glanced at the
bales of waste paper that fill the music-
publishers' warehouses.

Considering the flaws and specks in
Beethoven's latest music as the starting-point of the
movement, the first name among those moderns
who have helped in German music to confound
good and evil, is that of Robert Schumann: a
dreamy heavy bewildered man, not without
generous aspirations, and a satisfactory amount
of scientific preparation, but whom clearness of
purpose and vision seem to have largely
forsaken whenever the work in hand was one of
any length or importance, and in whom the
instinct for Beauty seems to have been
extraordinarily weak. That man shall run the risk of
being pilloried as a malevolent bigot, who shall
venture in certain German circles (and these
made up of intelligent and sincere persons) to
declare that very little of the mass of music
bearing Schumann's name has any real value,
save those slight trifles thrown off for children
and young persons at an early period of his
career, which he lived to disown with
transcendental contempt. Want of freshness in idea,
want of simplicity in treatment, a resolute
determination to be eccentric (that most commonplace
of follies), a lumbering uncouthness where
animation was aimed at, affectation where
tenderness and pathos might have been looked for
—these characteristics, witli more or less
mitigation, distinguished Schumann's symphonies,
his cantatas, his overtures, all, in short, of
his compositions on an extended scale. His
songs, which are in high favour with those who
are advanced in cloudy connoisseurship, are
stale, strained, and sickly, as compared with
the best by Schubert, and Mendelssohn, and
Lindblad the Swede (the last far too little
known in England). In his pianoforte music,
such real fancy as it contains is confined to
the titles of the pieces. As for affording
the player on the instrument any scope for
special display, that, of course, was too base
and trivial a concession for a high-minded
transcendentalist to stoop to. Yet this was the
musician for whose sake the composer of the
Midsummer Night's Dream music, and of St.
Paul, and Elijah, and the Italian and Scottish
symphonies, and the Antigone choruses, was,
almost before he was cold in his grave, decried
as having been shallow, superficial, amiably
worldly (Mendelssohn, worldly!), an artist with
a factitious reputation fast wearing out, totally
incapable of depicting the anxiety of the great
German mind, or expressing the honourable
determination after unity at home (implying
antagonism and antipathy for the stranger without
its gates), which it is the privilege and
mission of the German art of the nineteenth century
to display and to develop. Nothing can be much
more curious to the English stranger who is
not prepared to "stand and deliver," because
the giant in his path (but half seen) has a false
air of bravado, and a real disproportionate over-
awing ugliness, than to study the tone of
enthusiastic idolatry in which the music of
Schumann has been treated in the journals, and
in the schools, and in the societies, of Germany.

There was no want of persons eager to follow
up or partake in the work of musical destruction,
consciously or unconsciously began by
Schumann—to throw form to the winds, to
instal discord on the throne of harmony, to
be mystical in defence of " inner meaning," and
that " concealed melody," which speaks to none
save the initiated. One of these persons merits
a separate mention. Though Richard Wagner
be living, this mention may be made without
indelicacy, since never did man court
notoriety for himself and his system more
importunately—more audaciously, it might be
added—than he has done, in word and in deed.
That he was endowed by nature with a certain
wild talent and ambition, dangerously approaching
genius, his most systematic detractors cannot
deny. That he fell on life in the midst of
a period of upheaving and confusion—analogous
to that which produced what Goethe called
"the literature of despair" in modern France—
is no less evident. After a few constrained
attempts at conformity with the fashions of the
day—his opera of Rienzi showing unmistakable
traces of the influence of Meyerbeer—it seems
to have become clear to Herr Wagner, that,
as an orderly citizen in the world of art, he
could only hold a second-rate and imitative
place; whereas noise and stir, power to injure,
and, haply, power to gain, were to be got out
of open rebellion. Accordingly, he snatched
up the besom of destruction, and began to
"thrash about" with it (to borrow an
American phrase) so violently, that the soberest
people could not avoid turning their heads to
inquire into the cause of the hubbub. He
turned one real quality, possessed by him
beyond most of his comrades, to account, with
excellent adroitness. Think what we may of
his music, as poor in contrivance, meagre in
melody, stale, inflated, tedious, reminding the
ear (as was well said by a wit) of a concert of
"broken crockery," rather than of " harp, and
pipe, and symphony," there is no denying to
Herr Wagner the possession of poetical power,
not common to the writers of opera-books. In
appreciation of what is lyrical and picturesque
in national legend, he is excellent. He has the
divining-rod, let him have misused it ever so
flagrantly, as his later opera-books unfortunately
prove. His first trial of it may be said to have
been made in the Flying Dutchman, the opera
by him which followed Rienzi, and which he
brought (words and music) to Paris some years
ago. The Parisian powers recognised the bold