CHAPTER V WAGNER AND THE MUSIC DRAMA It is quite proper to devote a chapter to Richard Wagner, for his later works are not only examples of the most skillful and purposeful employment of the contrapuntal and instrumental resources which he, in common with his contemporaries, inherited from the past, but they show how audacious genius may safely pursue its purposes out beyond beaten paths into unexplored regions of tonal expression. Why may genius do this, which is so uniformly fatal to the less gifted? It is because of its comprehensive grasp of logical sequence and its intuitive choice of adaptable means. Ripe genius is a definite talent which has been subjected to exhaustive discipline, which is familiar with traditions, and takes full cognizance of pedantic forms, but is guided by an art feeling engendered by this knowledge, and not by the knowledge itself. It is a law unto itself. It conceives a picture, a poem, or a musical sentiment, and communicates it to us through means that are often as unfamiliar as is the effect of the whole original; for it usually avoids the ruts of travelled ways, its clear view of the objective goal enabling it to follow the less frequented stream-side or mountain-top paths. Wagner was, in the last thirty years of his life, a ripe genius. He was the sixth of our musical high-priests, and he filled the art temple with a characteristic song incense which will pervade its atmosphere as long as human passions continue to furnish art impulse. There is a class of pedants who still take satisfaction in calling Wagner's music artificial; but these short-sighted critics cannot or will not properly survey the field of his activity and its fruits. No human mind could, unless impelled by natural, sequential feeling and virile imagination, write even one of his later dramas without manifold exhibitions of weakness in redundancies and lapses in significance. The fact that Wagner's works, from the "Meistersinger" on, show few, if any, such barren moments, adequately evidences their natural growth from musical germs. A great creator always incites a large number of lesser lights to imitate his methods, but few of them do so successfully. Wagner is not, however, answerable for the vague effects of his dramatic means, when they are transplanted into Wagnerish overtures and symphonic poems. He evolved situations that made these means legitimate and significant; isolated, they fall into bizarre artificiality. Although we cannot fail to be influenced by the elements which Wagner added to tonal resources, they, like all other elements, must be applied because most adaptable to the development of the musical scheme in hand, and not because of their newness.