ams vie with the bird and the dragon; or where the
phantom ship seems as firmly fixed as the practical rainbow,
which so closely betrays the carpenter. In the other ring you
can actually hear the dull jokes of Mimi and the Wanderer,
or hear Walther explain that he has passed a comfortable night
and slept well.

The music to these remarkable scenes, however, does not deign
to stoop so low, but soars in wonderful poetry by itself, thus
rejecting a union which, to speak in the jargon of our day, is
one of the convincing symptoms of decadence; in other words,
it springs from the same impulse as that which has produced
the circus with three rings.

Summing up, I wish to state what I consider the four elements
of music, namely, music that paints, music that suggests, music
that actually speaks, and music that almost defies analysis,
and is composed of the other three elements.

When we were considering the early works for harpsichord, I said
that music could define certain things with quite reasonable
exactitude. Just as in the Egyptian hieroglyphics a wavy line
stands for water, so it can in music, with the latitude that
it can mean anything in nature that we might consider of the
same genre. Thus, the figure in Wagner's "Waldweben" means in
that instance waves of air, and we know it by the context.
His swaying figure of the "Prelude to Rheingold" is as
plainly water as is the same figure used by Mendelssohn in his
"Lovely Melusina." Not that Wagner plagiarized, but that he and
Mendelssohn recognized the definiteness of musical suggestions;
which is more than proved by their adopting the same musical
ideas to indicate the same things.

More indefinite is the analysis of our second type or element
of music. The successful recognition of this depends not only
upon the susceptibility of the hearer to delicate shades of
sensation, but also upon the receptivity of the hearer and his
power to accept freely and unrestrictedly the mood shadowed
forth by the composer. Such music cannot be looked upon
objectively. To those who would analyze it in such a manner it
must remain an unknown language; its potency depends entirely
upon a state of willing subjectivity on the part of the hearer.

The third element, as we know, consists of the spoken word or
phrase; in other words, declamation. In this, however, the
composer cuts loose entirely from what we call language. It
is the medium of expression of emotion of every kind. It is