But one of the most artificial elements in the old operas was the ballet. Its part in the opera scheme was purely to be a spectacle, and great sums were lavishly spent to make it as gorgeous as possible. It had usually nothing whatever to do with the story, but was useful in drawing an audience of pleasure-lovers who did not take opera seriously. Once upon a time, in London, by an extraordinary unlucky stroke of fate, Carlyle was persuaded to go to hear an opera containing a ballet; whereupon he fulminated as follows: “The very ballet girls, with their muslin saucers round them, were perhaps little short of miraculous; whirling and spinning there in strange mad vortexes, and then suddenly fixing themselves motionless, each upon her left or right great toe, with the other leg stretched out at an angle of ninety degrees--as if you had suddenly pricked into the floor, by one of their points, a pair, or rather a multitudinous cohort, of mad restlessly jumping and clipping scissors, and so bidden them rest, with open blades, and stand still in the Devil’s name!” One remembers, also, “War and Peace,” with its scene at the opera--and Tolstoï’s reference to the chief male dancer as getting “sixty thousand francs a year for cutting capers.” So, looking over the older operas which still hold their place in the repertoire, we think of them as rather absurd, and comfort ourselves with the reflection that to-day opera has outgrown its youthful follies and has become a work of art. III. WAGNER AND AFTER Then came the second great operatic reform,--that of Wagner,--which was supposed to free us from the old absurdities and make of opera a reasonable and congruous thing. This, Wagner’s operas, at the outset, bade fair to be. In “Der Fliegende Holländer,” “Tannhäuser,” and “Lohengrin” there is a reasonable correspondence between the action and the music; we can listen and look without too great disruption of our faculties. Wagner’s librettos are, with one exception, based on mythological stories or ideas. His personages are eternal types--Lohengrin of purity and heroism, Wotan of power by fiat, Brunhilde (greatest of them all) of heroic and noble womanhood. He adopted the old device by means of which certain salient qualities in his characters--such as Siegfried’s youth and fearlessness, Wotan’s majesty, and so forth--were defined by short phrases of music called _leit-motifs_; he made his orchestra eloquent of the movement of his drama, instead of employing it as a “huge guitar”; he eliminated the set musical piece, which was bound to delay the action; he kept his music always moving onward by avoiding the so-called “authentic cadence,” which in all the older music perpetually cries a halt.