on to
such a rule--seem to strive more than any other artist in any branch of
art to be critic as well--seem, perhaps, to be most notably
self-conscious even in an age of self-consciousness? The most highly
gifted of the generation as an artist, his musical talent developed
spontaneously, irresistibly. It had thus developed before he began to
reason about it, to justify in theory that which had approved itself in
fact. His power lies in the union we find in him of musician and
dramatist. His dogmatizing and theorizing expatiate not on the way he
works in either art, but on the propriety of combining the two. Not his
theories, but his artist's instinct, taught him how to do it as it is
done in the _Meistersinger_. His theories try to explain his work, but
by just so much as his work is consciously founded on his theories, by
just so much is it less perfect than it would have been had he preserved
his unconsciousness. The fact of his self-consciousness tends in many
eyes to mark him as the rearguard of a line of artists, the pioneer of a
generation of critical musicians. May Liszt perhaps serve as a sample of
such--learned, critical, self-conscious, productive, but unoriginal? And
the worst sign in Germany is less that the young musicians copy Wagner
than that they copy him not instinctively and by nature, but
theoretically and of deliberate intent, exalting his theories to rank
beside his work.

It seems at first strange that, music being at once the glory and the
recreation of the whole German nation, and a knowledge of it being
native to the vast majority of individual Germans, there is little
existing musical criticism--none as compared with the abounding German
criticism on every other branch of art and every other subject under the
sun. The field offered here to the cobweb-spinning German brain is wide
and attractive. It seems strange that it should be as yet uncultivated,
unless we fall back on the theory that art at its vitalest is of
necessity uncritical, and that where an inborn love of, and aptitude
for, an art exists with a daily enjoyment of its technical perfection,
we shall be least likely to find it elaborately criticised
theoretically. Where practice is abundantly satisfactory theories are
superfluous.

Below, though still in the same category with, the musical gift of the
Germans we may cite the literary gift of the English. For though this
may not be the greatest literary epoch of England, yet it will