restores to it in this respect its full liberty. It provides us with the surest rule for appreciating at their true worth the influence exercised by this part of Wagner's art over the musicians who succeeded him, and the imitation and frequent attempts to go one better to which it has been subject on their part. It is not denied that for the detail of orchestral technique, and of the employment of instruments, an artist of the present day has a great deal to learn from Wagner, but that is not the point. There are methods discovered by Wagner as a great master of orchestral technique which may perfectly well be incorporated in an orchestral whole whose features will yet be not in the least Wagnerian. We are considering here these general features, we are considering, not the recipes of orchestration, but taste in orchestration; in particular we are enquiring whether there ought to be a tendency to augment Wagner's orchestral mass, or only to preserve it, or on the other hand to aim at restraining and lightening it. The reply is not in doubt. The Wagnerian type of orchestration is closely bound up with the nature of Wagner's ideas, and it is a profound mistake to orchestrate in the same spirit or to wish to go one better than him in the same direction, when one has not—when it is impossible one should have—ideas to express that have any kinship with his. That is impossible not only to Frenchmen, but to sincere artists of any nation. Wagner's dramatic and poetic ideas taken as a whole make a blend of extremely singular, and even entirely individual quality, full of artificiality and far removed from nature.
Wagner's extraordinary power of imagination (and never before was such imaginative power set working,
