But what is all this hurly-burly about? What are the
ideas? Look at them. There are, after all, but three, or it may be
four, notes in a chord, and a melody is--well, a melody; an
unmistakable sort of thing, one would think, although so hard to
define. What is there here of harmony or of melody that would be
valuable for its own sake? Strip this music of all its instrumental
elaboration, tone down its noisy self-assertion, and look at the bare
ideas as they can be played with two hands upon a piano-forte, or with
four strings in a quartet, and what are they worth? Would a circle of
cultivated musical people sit entranced by them if they were played
upon an old harpsichord! No, I take it. And if not, their worth is
little.

Instrumentation, and all manner of elaboration--orchestral and
choral--is of value only when it enhances and sets forth ideas,
melodies, harmonies--in a word, musical forms which in themselves have
the value which belongs to beauty and expression. Else, like the gift
of tongues without the spirit of love, it is literally sounding brass
and tinkling cymbals. There is in some of this work--notably in
Wagner's--an evidence of sustaining power which deserves and commands a
certain respect. But such sustaining power, so applied, is like figures
of caryatides supporting some poor decadent frieze. They bend and
strain and keep it up. But why, we are tempted to say to them, do you
strain to keep up that poor, commonplace stuff, which would not be
looked at if it stood not upon your heads? Let it fall! You are all
that keep it from tumbling into a dust-heap and seeming the rubbish
that it is. It seems to be a consciousness of their deficiency in
melody and in emotional expression which drives such composers of the
present day as aim to write in the higher style to make their music
"interdependent, logarithmic, differential, integral, and
corroborative," and to strive to make up in intellectual elaboration
what they lack in inspiration.

This condition of things in music is not to be bettered by endeavor.
Genius alone can do that, when brought into contact with the power of
appreciating genius. And genius, although conscious of its power, is
ever ignorant of its tendency, and never works but for its own ends;
while those who hear and understand its utterances do so with no higher
purpose than the delight they bring them. When I hear a man talk of
doing something to elevate his art, however much I may respect