Wagner's admirers should, for him, plead guilty to the worst that can be said: he is everything that his most bitter critics say, but he is so much more that his faults and follies sink into ashes before the divine fire of his genius, and we still have the gold. Inconsistent, paradoxical, preposterous--why, yes, of course! Still he is the greatest poet of passion the world has ever seen--don't cavil--passion's consistency consists in being inconsistent. "Every sentence must have a man behind it," and so we might say, "Every bar of music must have a man behind it." That harmony only can live which once had its dwelling-place in a great and tender heart. The province of art is to impart a sublime emotion, and that which affects to be an emotion, no matter how subtly launched, can never live as classic art. Honesty here, as elsewhere, must have its reward. Be yourself, though all the world laugh. I will not say that Wagner was--he is. The man himself in life was often worn to the quick by the deprivations he had to endure, or the stupid misunderstandings he encountered, so at times he was impatient, erratic, possibly perverse. But all that is gone--his mistakes have been washed in the blood of Time--only the good survives. The best that this great and godlike man ever thought, or felt, or knew, is ours--he lives immortal in his Art. [Illustration: PAGANINI] PAGANINI For lo! creation's self is one great choir, And what is Nature's order but the rhyme Whereto the worlds keep time, And all things move with all things from their prime? Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre? In far retreats of elemental mind Obscurely comes and goes The imperative breath of song, that as the wind Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows. --_William Watson_ PAGANINI Some time ago, after my lecture one night in Boston, I bethought me to call on my old friend Bliss Carman. I expected he would be sleeping the sleep of the just, but I was prepared to rout him out, for although my errand was from a fair, frail young thing, and trivial, yet I was bound to deliver the message--for that is what one should always do. But the poet was not abed--he was pacing the room in a fine burst of poetic fervor, composing "More Songs From Vagabondia." The songs told of purling streams, hedgerows, bathers lolling on the river-bank, nodding wild flowers, chirping pewees, and other such poetic properties, which the singer conjured forth from boyhood's days, long since gone by.