With all his absurdities, Berlioz's genius for composition car ried him further towards a new music than Liszt was able to advance in his symphonic poems. These, as has been said in other articles (see Music, sections 8-1o, and SYMPHONIC POEM) are the beginnings of an instrumental music that achieves the same continuity as Wagner achieved in music-drama. But Liszt hardly even began to achieve the right sort of movement ; and his conscientious plan of deriving the whole piece from trans formations of a single figure was quite irrelevant even when it was effective. As a musical illustrator he is clever; but he ties himself down to chronological sequence, which, though it does not conflict with his forms, is always open to Weingartner's ob jection that it cannot control the pace of the listener's thoughts. The composer's first view-halloo may make one listener fancy himself in at the death of the Blatant Beast, while the mind of another will plod to the end, to learn that that event never takes place.
Strauss.—The symphonic poems of Strauss are invulnerable by this objection, even though it is often true of their details. Most listeners will probably identify Don Quixote's tilting at windmills with the passage in which Strauss uses a stage wind machine ; but this represents a later adventure in which Don Quixote and Sancho are seated blindfold on wooden horses and are persuaded that they are flying on winged steeds through the air. Strauss's music, however, does not really depend on this sort of thing at all. His earliest symphonic poems are master pieces of new form and movement : Don Quixote is sectional only because its subject lends itself to an episodic treatment which Strauss has as much right as Humpty Dumpty to call variations, and in it, no less than in Also sprach Zarathustra, Ein Heldenleben, the Sinfonia Domestica and their aftermath the Alpensinfonie, single designs are triumphantly accomplished in music of Wagnerian continuity. It is not necessary that the de
signs should be perfect. Uncles and aunts may interrupt it to say that the baby is the image of its dada or mamma; and the wickedness of critics may devastate pages of the music of the hero who gave them their opportunity when he paused on a domi nant chord to look round for applause ; but local defects do not annihilate fundamental qualities.
Caricature.--One thread remains to be gathered into this ac count. Caricature is a rare and dangerous element in music, but it is as old as Orlando di Lasso. Mozart, besides the subtleties of Cosi fan tutte and the comic parts of Die Zauberflote, pro duced in his Musikalischer Spass, a burlesque of village players and bad composers. On paper the work is a delicious study in the psychology of "howlers," and in its finale Mozart idealises all the nightmare stagnation of the composer whose tempo gets faster and faster while his phrasing gets slower and slower. In performance the effect is even more surprising than analysis would lead the reader to expect. But the Leipzig editors of the parts have crowned Mozart's farce by correcting the mistakes! Caricature enters prominently into Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben; and also into many passages in Mahler's symphonies. Its danger is that it often opens these composers to suspicion when they intend to be touchingly simple.
But nothing is more vexatious than the laying down of a priori limits to what is legitimate for artists. If sermons in the mind of the painter help him to paint, and pictures in the mind of the composer help him to compose, by all means let them get on with the work. (D. F. T.)