Because of its opportunities for soul expansion, music has ever attracted the strong free sons of earth. The most profound truths, the most blasphemous things, the most terrible ideas, may be incorporated within the walls of a symphony, and the police be none the wiser. Suppose that some Russian professional supervisor of artistic anarchy really knew what arrant doctrines Tschaïkowsky preached! It is its freedom from the meddlesome hand of the censor that makes of music a playground for great brave souls. Richard Wagner in Siegfried, and under the long nose of royalty, preaches anarchy, puts into tone, words, gestures, lath, plaster, paint, and canvas an allegory of humanity liberated from the convention of authority, from what Bernard Shaw would call the Old Man of the Mountain, the Government. I need only adduce the names of Schumann, another revolutionist like Chopin in the psychic sphere; Liszt, bitten by the Socialistic theories of Saint-Simon, a rank hater of conventions in art, though in life a silken courtier; Brahms, a social democrat and freethinker; and Tschaïkowsky, who buried more bombs in his work than ever Chopin with his cannon among roses or Bakounine with his terrible prose of a nihilist. Years ago I read and doubted Mr. Ashton-Ellis’s interesting “1849,” with its fallacious denial of Wagner’s revolutionary behavior. Wagner may not have shouldered a musket during the Dresden uprising, but he was, with Michael Bakounine, its prime inspirer. His very ringing of the church bells during the row is a symbol of his attitude. And then he ran away, luckily enough for the world of music, while his companions, Roeckel and Bakounine, were captured and imprisoned. Wagner might be called the Joseph Proudhon of composers—his music is anarchy itself, coldly deliberate like the sad and logical music we find in the great Frenchman’s Philosophy of Misery (a subtitle, by the way). And what a huge regiment of painters, poets, sculptors, prosateurs, journalists, and musicians might not be included under the roof of the House Beautiful! Verhaeren of Belgium, whose powerful bass hurls imprecations at the present order; Georges Eckhoud, Maurice Maeterlinck; Constantin Meunier, whose eloquent bronzes are a protest against the misery of the proletarians; Octave Mirbeau, Richepin, William Blake, William Morris, Swinburne, Maurice Barrès, the late Stéphane Mallarmé, Walt Whitman, Ibsen, Strindberg; Félicien Rops, the sinister author of love and death; Edvard Munch, whose men and women with staring eyes and fuliginous faces seem to discern across the frame of his pictures febrile visions of terror; and the great Scandinavian sculptors, Vigeland and Sinding; and Zola, Odilon Redon, Huysmans, Heine, Baudelaire, Poe, Richard Strauss, Shaw,—is not the art of these men, and many more left unnamed, direct personal expression of anarchic revolt?