wn for himself in the virgin jungle of modern art, and
begged to resist the temptations of the music-drama.

Rentgen loathed the music of Wagner. Wagner had abused Meyerbeer for
doing what he did himself--writing operas stuffed with spectacular
effects. This man of the foot-lights destroyed all musical imagination
with his puppet shows, magic lanterns, Turkish bazaars, where, to the
booming of mystic bells, the listener was drugged into opium-fed
visions.

Under a tent, as at a fair, he assembled the mangled masterpieces of
Bach, Gluck, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and to a
gullible public sold the songs of these music-lords--songs that should
swim on high like great swan-clouds cleaving skies blue and
inaccessible. And his music was operatic, after all, grand opera
saccharine with commonplace melodies gorgeously attired--nothing more.
Wagner, declared the indignant critic, was not original. He popularized
the noble ideas of the masters, vulgarized and debased their dreams. He
never conceived a single new melody, but substituted instead, sadly
mauled and pinched thematic fragments of Liszt, Berlioz, and Beethoven,
combined with exaggerated fairy-tales, clothed in showy tinsel and
theatrical gauds, the illusion being aided by panoramic scenery; scenery
that acted in company with toads, dragons, horses, snakes, crazy
valkyrs, mermaids, half-mad humans, gods, demons, dwarfs, and giants.
What else is all this but old-fashioned Italian opera with a new name?
What else but an inartistic mixture of Scribe libretto and Northern
mythology? Music-drama--fudge! Making music that one can _see_ is a
death-blow to a lofty idealization of the art.

Puzzled by the richness of Rentgen's vocabulary, by his want of logic,
Alixe asked herself many times whether she was wrong and her husband
right. She wished to be loyal. His devotion to his work, his inspiration
springing as it did from poetic sources, counted for something. Why not?
All composers should read the poets. It is a starting-point. Modern
music leans heavily on drama and fiction. Richard Strauss embroiders
philosophical ideas, so why should not Richard Van Kuyp go to Ireland,
to the one land where there is hope of a spiritual, a poetic renascence?
Ireland! The very name evoked dreams!

When Rentgen called at the Van Kuyps' it was near the close of a warm
afternoon. The composer would not stir, despite the invitation of the
critic or the pleading of his wife