best singers
procurable, and gives us Vogl and Sucher, who undoubtedly were
delightful in their parts twenty years ago; and it would be shocked to
learn that its good faith is questioned so far as lady artists are
concerned. Whether it is fair to question it is another matter. In
Germany feminine beauty is reckoned by hundredweights. No lady of
under eighteen stones is admired; but one who is heavier than that,
instead of staying at home and looking after her grandchildren, is put
into a white dress and called Sieglinde, or into a brown robe and
called Kundry; and a German audience accepts her as a revelation of
ideal loveliness through the perfection of human form.

The Germans are devoid of a sense of colour, they are devoid of a
sense of beauty in vocal tone, and I am at last drawing near to the
conclusion that they have no sense of beauty in instrumental tone.
Throughout this cycle the tone of many of the instruments has been
execrable; many of them have rarely been even in approximate tune. The
truth is that the players do not play well unless a master-hand
controls them; and a master-hand in the orchestra has been urgently
wanted. Instead of a master-hand we have had to put up with Master
Siegfried Wagner's hand (he now uses the right), and in the worst
moments we have wished there was no hand at all, and in the best we
have longed passionately for another. I do not propose to discuss his
conducting in detail. Under him the band has played with steady,
unrelenting slovenliness and inaccuracy; the music has been robbed of
its rhythm, life, and colour; and many of the finest numbers--as, for
example, the Valkyrie's Ride, the prelude to the third act of
"Siegfried," the march in "The Dusk of the Gods"--have been
deliberately massacred. One cannot criticise such conducting: it does
not rise near enough to competence to be worthy of criticism. But one
has a right to ask why this young man, who should be serving an
apprenticeship in some obscure opera-house, is palmed off on the
public as "the best artist procurable"? He scarcely seems to possess
ordinary intelligence. I had the honour of being inadvertently
presented to him, and he asked me, should I write anything about
Bayreuth, to say that he objected very much to the Englishmen who came
in knickerbockers--in bicycle costume. When I mildly suggested that if
they came without knickerbockers or the customary alternative he would
have better reason to complain, he as