possessions and asks himself, what he used not to ask himself: “Why do I live?” I do not lament this change as a disaster. I merely wish to point out the difference and to show why the music of to-day must differ from the music of yesterday. Those who believe that music is a purely abstract art (mere negation this, which I have abundantly shown to be empty of reality) will be shocked at the dependence of music upon man’s life; but the great composers themselves knew better: “The error in the art-genre of opera consists in the fact that a Means of Expression (Music) has been made the object, while the Object of Expression (the Drama) has been made a means.” Those words of Wagner’s show clearly that to Wagner, as Mr. Newman aptly puts it: “To invent a theme for its own abstract sake, to pare and shape it till it was ‘workable’ and then to weave it along with others of the same kind into a pattern of which the main lines were predetermined for him by tradition--this was something he could not imagine himself doing, and that he scoffed at when he found the Conservatoire musicians engaged in.... Wagner always protested against the current fashion of performing Beethoven’s symphonies as if they were nothing more than agreeable or exciting musical patterns.” My preceding chapters will have made it quite clear why Wagner’s instinct was right, although his mode of expression is so inexact as to be often confusing and misleading.[7] What Wagner means is that intellectual forms or _death-shapes_ are given no significance by being manipulated, dove-tailed, and re-arranged by the intelligence working from rules and examples. It is “life” that gives significance, a spiritual urge into creation, and where this is absent there is no artistic creation. We may perceive by his use of the word “drama” that Wagner’s conception of “life” was a limited one; but he could only express the life that was in him and his soundness lay in his recognizing this. But we shall not make the mistake of inventing an artificial and unilluminating distinction between Wagner as a dramatic or programmatic composer and, for example, Mozart or Bach as absolute composers. The difference between all these composers (including Beethoven) lies mainly in inner feeling, in spiritual life, in the individual _psyche_--not in their musical faculty as composers. It was natural to each one of them that his vital activity should run into the form of sound-patterns. It is this idiosyncrasy which has made them all musicians and not poets, sculptors, or painters. But this peculiarity is only a physiological bias for--to quote Mr. Newman again, since he is a musician and what he says will be more appropriate here than the words of a poet or sculptor, besides being admirably clear--