ook for qualities which
Weber did not try to attain, or only in a small measure and not very
successfully. And if we consider carefully the remarks of the best
critics amongst the later masters, Berlioz and Wagner, we can see that
they knew Weber had not attained these high qualities,--that what they
grew enthusiastic over was his astonishing pictorial gift, shown,
first, in the pictures his imagination presented to him, and second,
in the way he projected those pictures on to the music-paper before
him, using the common musician's devices of his day to suggest line,
colour, space, and atmosphere.

The precise provocation of this essay was a certain performance of
"Lohengrin." During the first act the drama proceeded with charming,
almost Mozartean, smoothness; and I was surprised to find that the
smoother it went the more irresistibly the music reminded me of Weber,
until I remembered that "Lohengrin" is Wagner's most Weberish opera,
and that in his youth Wagner heard Weber sung, not as he is sung
now--that is, like an early Wagner music-drama--but as Weber intended
it to be sung, like a later Mozart opera. For Weber stood very near to
Mozart, modern as he often seems. He was born before Mozart died; he
worshipped him, and absolutely refused to speak to Salieri because
Salieri had been Mozart's enemy; and it is easy to see, when once we
rid ourselves of the idea that he was a rudimentary music-dramatist,
that in his music he adhered as closely to Mozartean simplicity as his
very different genius would permit. Perhaps, after all, it is his
greatest glory that he is the connecting link between Mozart and
Wagner, between the greatest composer born into the eighteenth century
and the greatest born into the nineteenth; for the musical-pictorial
art which he evolved from Mozart's technique was used by Wagner with
only the slightest modifications in the making of his music-dramas.
But whereas Weber was a factor in the Romantic movement when it was
most magnificently unreasonable, Wagner came later, and, though he
felt the force of the current, it did not carry him into the
absurdities that weaken--for they do weaken--much of Weber's work.
Wagner has been described as Weber, as Weber might have become; but
the truth is that he was Weber's younger brother, who took Weber's art
and used it to nobler ends with a degree of intellect, dramatic power,
invention, and passion which Weber did not possess. To Weber the
scenery was the