A BELATED CRITIC OF WAGNER.
IT an unimaginative geologist were suddenly con- fronted in the street by a Pterodactyl from the Oolite, liis emotions could hardly be stranger than those aroused in the musician who finds a magazine article of no earlier date tiian last niontli declaring that the Wagner movement lias proved a bubble. Wliat do these unshapely old-world products here ? botli surprised persons may justly exclaim. The seas of change have long swept over their race ; a new spirit has breathed on the once perturbed waters; new lands have arisen bringing fortli things fairer to see, and of decenter manners. How, then, lias the law of evolution been evaded . The startled musician must seek his answer from Mr. J. F. Rowbotham, who stands sponsor to one survivor of the unfit — the Saurian of the Wagner floods. So far as may be guessed, Mr. Rowbotham cherislied the creature into life ten or fifteen years ago when a good many snappish members of the same species were about, then permitted it to lapse into a sort of preliistoric slime, where dreamless and dark it lay, until one fine morning, by a violent effort, it was rescued and led down the highways of an astonished world, with the help of the editor of the Nineteenth Century. If this theory does not please, there is another. At a period not yet very remote Mr. Rowbotham was an interested observer of the activities, social and intellectual, that derived their stimulus from Wagner's personality and writings ; in his sojourn- ings he met a numerous apostolate spreading un- orthodox doctrine with a zeal not untouched by fanaticism ; he may have taken up arms against the zealots, and got a little damaged in the combat. Then years pass and kindly oblivion wraps Mr. Rowbotham round. In the fulness of time he emerges, rubs his eyes, shakes up his faculties, finds no one quarrelling about Wagner, and promptly con- cludes that the whole thing was a portentous bubble, which has burst. The possibility that silence may mean consent does not strike him ; so lie proceeds to blow the bubble afresh in his own masterly fashion, j ust to show us how it looked. He restates the old charges in the old way ; he musters the original prejudices with the dew of freshness still upon them ; he restores in their pristine form the fantastic ideas once created in unprepared minds by the phrase the ' Music of the Future.' The result is an article having the rare value of a piece of ancient history written with all the force of living convic- tion. To the student of dead disputations it must be jiriceless. Imagine a contemporary of ficcini miraculously preserved to tell us to-day, with the fulness and veracity of an eye-witness, what the Paris of 1780 thought of Gluck : so may we gain an idea of the service rendered by Mr. Rowbotham. jMuch use it will be observed may be made of this inability to admit that the lying down of contro- vei'sial din occasionally signifies tacit acceptance of the thing once disputed. Let this only be pleaded : no one sliall arise to argue from the absence of daily asseveration that Queen Anne is dead that therefore that royal personage must be alive. Of course Mr. Rowbotham had the option of a much liigher office than that of illustrator by lime- light of past ignorances and -antipathies. It is too soon by many a day to expect a final estimate of so potent a centre of assthetic disturbance as Wagner ; but it is not too soon to begin first studies. The sheer mass and momentum of Wagner's energies would have carried him to excess, as they have carried the initiators of every new movement ;, vio- lence of opposition begat violence of assertion ; and a rather well-stocked armoury of dislikes, personal and national, was matclied by a public dislike which had the advantage of concentration. Perhaps it was to Wagner's individual loss, and not ultimately to the great gain of the world, that he possessed a great faculty of literary analysis and construction ; able, not only to render himself in musical tone, but also to give a cool intellectual statement of the motive and purpose of the inner vibration. To his loss, because it fostered the impression that here was a man with- out any native gift of melodious speech setting out ambitiously to argue and hector the world into accepting music which the ear resented. Mozart and the elders had piped but as the linnets sing, why should Wagner philosophise . Not to the world's great gain, because the main value of art theories is in their demonstration ; and a few operas such as Trhtun would have had more convincing power than any number of jiages of the grosser dialectic. A critic of Wagner, who made it his business to sift this dialectic without fear and without favour, would not go luirewarded. But Mr. Rowbotham has not the stuff'of sane criticism in him. To put the matter mildly, he seems to labour under a congenital incapacity to appreciate, or even to tolerate, great genius at the distance of less than a hundred years. If he could have admitted the possibility of a new impulse, such as he elsewhere acknowledges in history, being communicated to the musical art
