But it may be said, If Michael Angelo was self-conscious, it was because he first caught the infection of modern times. Life, the world, the nineteenth century, are self-conscious through and through. It is impossible to be otherwise. It is impossible for a world which has lived through what ours has, which has recorded its doings and sufferings and speculations for our benefit, ever to be naive or spontaneous in anything. Inspiration unsought and unquestioned is a thing of the past. Study, reflection, absorption, eclecticism,--these are the watchwords of the future. If this were granted, many would still think it an open question whether art of the highest kind would in the future be possible or not. But is by no means necessary to grant it, for we have had in the most learned and speculative of nations an art in our century--still surviving, indeed, in our very midst--the growth of which has been as rapid and the flowering as superb as the growth and bloom of sculpture in Greece or of painting in Italy. I mean, of course, music in Germany. And if we think a moment we shall see that its growth was as unpremeditated, its direction and development as unbiassed by theories, its votaries as untroubled with self-consciousness, as if they had been archaic sculptors or builders of the thirteenth century. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, what sublime unconsciousness of their own personality as the personality of artists and as influencing art! Does Richard Wagner seem at first sight to be a glaring exception 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.