h as _The Glad Eye_, which really
contain not one-millionth the humour that there is in a noble
comedy like Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_, or _As You Like It_,
or a Shavian play like _John Bull's Other Island_. Man is too
great a thing ever to be of his nature low and banal. We have in
life farce sometimes, comedy very often indeed, but never
banality.

The essay thus concludes:

If we have been flooded with rag-times and musical comedies, the
fault lies in the first place with the French and Italian
composers of the period 1790-1850. Pre-Wagner opera is as low a
concoction as can possibly be conceived. It took all the genius
of the great Bayreuth master to turn things back into their
proper channel. But he has succeeded, and the old style is
moribund. Anyone who glances over the list of living composers
must see that they are all enormously influenced by Wagner's
principle. The last of the old style was Massenet, and he is
dead. We see Richard Strauss, an extreme Wagnerian, only without
the master's full powers; Engelbert Humperdinck, who is a user of
the _leitmotif_ and a most skilled orchestrator, though his
motifs are not so powerful as Wagner's or even Strauss's; Pietro
Mascagni, a Mozartean composer; Bruneau, an extreme Wagnerian;
Glazounov and Mossourgsky have combined Wagner's ideas with
Tschaikovsky's; Puccini at least is a very strong supporter and
admirer of Wagner. It will thus be seen that, with the exception
of Mascagni, Wagnerian ideas have been paid tribute to by all the
leading opera composers of the day. In a word, the Man is here.
Opera, as represented by Richard Wagner's music-dramas, takes its
place on a level with the absolute music of which Beethoven's
work is the noblest example.

Paul found keen pleasure in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, liking
the witty libretto as much as the bright, tuneful melodies. For the
work of Caesar Franck, a gifted Belgian musician who died on the
threshold of manhood, he had profound admiration, and was of opinion
that had he lived Franck would have taken rank with the great masters.
As was to be expected, my son had for Welsh music a strong natural
sympathy. He held that "Men of Harlech" was one of the greatest of all
battle hymns, and that "Morfa Rhuddlan," the ancient Cymric dirge, had
never been surpassed as a piece of