a horn that should naturally have
been ten times empty!

If we may translate the personages of this delicious play into
types, Walther must stand for the poet and singer by God's grace,
fresh young Genius, winged bringer of a new message. Beckmesser
for Old School, where it has become fossil, where forms moulded
on life have become void and dry, and rules are held sufficient
without breath of inspiration. Nay, inspiration, which jostles and
disturbs rule, is regarded with suspicion. Inspiration to Beckmesser
is as much an intruder as would be Saint Francis coming to visit
some Prior of his own order long after the spirit animating the
saint had been hardened into forms. Hans Sachs, then, is a sort
of Ideal Critic, with affection and allegiance toward the past,
but with a fair and open mind toward the new. Walther himself could
have no more admirable attitude, more perfect temper, toward Art,
than Sachs. It is only to be hoped that in his maturity he was
as tolerant and broad-minded.

The wise, the gentle Sachs! It is a pity that in listening to an
opera one hears so little of the words, for there fall from his
genial lips precepts which it would be really worth while to impress
upon the memory, among which could there be a more golden than his
word to critics: "When you find that you are trying to measure
by your own rules that which does not lie within the compass of
your rules, the thing to do is to forget your rules and try to
discover the rules of that which you wish to measure!".

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE

I

The Ouverture to Tristan and Isolde is singularly calculated to
create the mood in which the Opera needs to be heard. It discourses
of nothing but love. It is long, it knocks and presses upon chords
lying abysmally below thought, until these vibrate in response,--and
the curtain goes up before an almost helplessly sympathetic listener.

Chief among the emotions expressed in this harmonious setting-forth
of the argument,--rich in sighs, glances, caresses,--is certain
tragic yearning, which seems of the very essence of love, the love
in question; tragic, because it is a thirst which from the nature of
things admits of no satisfaction upon the earth we know, since its
demand is no less than fusion of one soul and flesh into another,
so that each is completely possessed and neither knows any more which
of the two he is; the condition we hear the lovers sigh for later on
their bank of