time against further infection. It is obvious, that if the progress of the work reveals some form of tumor or modification of a tumor not in itself malignant, but akin to malignant growths in the nature of the reaction induced by its presence in the tissues, a great step will have been made. The treatment of cancer will be developed on the lines that have yielded such successful results in other diseases.

One

Already there are some indications that success may be obtained. particular specimen of spontaneous cancer, when used for inoculation, yielded a remarkably large proportion of cases in which spontaneous absorption or recovery took place. The mice in these cases of recovery were protected, although to a lesser degree, against inoculation with tumors from another source. Although the two tumors differed histologically and in their aptitude for transplantation, the conditions necessary for their growth were so similar that recovery from one protected against subsequent inoculation with the other. Finally, an injection of healthy blood in some cases protected mice against subsequent inoculation.

The writer of the report is most careful to point out that the experiments so far do no more than indicate the posThe Saturday Review.

sibility of rendering normal mice unsuitable for the growth of experimental

cancer.

They have not yet enabled the investigators to arrest the growth of experimental tumors with certainty, still less to control the disease when it occurs spontaneously. It is most prudent to warn the public against any premature confidence. But it is equally right that we should congratulate the founders and the staff of the Imperial Research Fund on the striking progress that has been made. A vast amount of new knowledge has been acquired, and a number of guesses and misleading suggestions have been put out of court. Above all, the possibility of experimental inquiry has been established and its methods have been elaborated. There is now going on a continuous, systematic investigation and observation of the natural history of the disease under laboratory methods which make it possible to study the behavior of the same tumor at different stages of its individual history and under the stimulation of different living environments. Whether the end is to be a brilliant, transforming discovery, or a slow approach to the goal, the results of the four years of inquiry have already more than justified the reasonable hopes of those who have been following the progress of the investigation.

It is a futility of criticism that it must necessarily lag behind the art it seeks to explain. When Wagner's "Ring" was produced thirty years ago it aroused storms of discussion. The admirers of the "Master's" music were militant; those who were against him and his works showed a front no less savage; and the shock of battle spread from Germany over the Continent, and

even to America. Nowadays Wagner is fast becoming apotheosized as the one and only god of music-drama. Yet (the irony of the situation!) it is only now that we understand both his weakness and his strength, and that some of us who bore the heat of battle under his banner are beginning to understand that our king could do wrong; indeed, did many things that were wrong. But

most of us have lived long enough to see new recruits join the old standard and fill the gaps where once we stood.

His

A cause which can claim so many adherents must necessarily have some right on its side, and the right with Wagner is, in a word, genius. Ring, also, has many facets, so that even those who are not musicians may perceive in it beauties which specially appeal to them. The lovers of crude metaphysics and of a sentimental panacea for the ills of civilization, find in the story of the Ring inexhaustible material for discussion. The drama itself was written in such a haphazard fashion that Wagner's meaning is by no means clear, and is, indeed, rather contradictory, but obscurity has a certain fascination for some minds. Then the real and overpowering genius of the man as composer will always make itself felt. A large proportion of those who worship at the old shrine of Bayreuth and the newer altars of Munich and Covent Garden are carried away by the music alone. They bathe their souls in the stream of his "endless melody," and shut their minds, and even their ears, to any criticism of Wagner as dramatic musical poet. His musical genius excuses all. But there will come a time even to these when they will begin to see that the weakness of his theory of music-drama had its roots far down in his nature, and then Wagner will be no longer the hypnotizer; his power will have gone, and those enthralled by it may shake themselves free. Many of us have already shaken ourselves free from Wagner worship. We decline any longer to be interested in his muddled metaphysics. But we still consider that he was a great tone-dramatist, however inconsistent his practice may have been with his theory. Are we mistaken in that?

To come to a conclusion on the matter we must view Wagner not only as

a musician, but as a composer whose aim was the expression of drama through music. If we view him as artist the dramatist must not be distinguished from the musician. Those who have not given much thought to the question are inclined to doubt the essential reasonableness of musicdrama, and their argument is to the effect that as the whole is artistically absurd, why trouble our heads whether Wagner was a dramatist at all. His music remains as some of the most beautiful written during the nineteenth century. Admire it, and let criticism be silent. But it can be easily shown that human beings have ever sought for a means of expressing themselves with more poignancy than is possible with words, even when cast in the decorative form of poetry. It is as natural to the human being to sing as to speak. The difficulty is that music becomes an artificial mode of expression when emotions do not transcend the power of speech, and it is hardly possible so to construct a drama that it shall demand musical expression throughout. Wagner himself recognized this difficulty, but it cannot be said that he solved it. Certainly he did not in the Ring. I doubt if it ever can be solved without having recourse to a mixed drama, in which only that would be sung which demands song as its expression. In the old days composers unconsciously recognized this by inserting spoken dialogue. The change from speech to song is not pleasant, however, to the musical ear, and either one or other is apt to sound artificial, as in Beethoven's Fidelio. As a compromise the set recitative was invented, but it sounds intolerably wearisome to modern ears. Wagner's melodious declamation made the expression of opera homogeneous, but it did not really solve the essential difficulty of the art. As a means to this end he invented his orchestral commentary.

That was to be the medium in which all the constituents of opera would find solution. By keeping the vocal writing free from a melody which was only natural when the emotion expressed demanded music, he thought he had hit on a plastic musical speech which would blend easily with the orchestra. In moments of tension the vocal part I could become more melodious; and when there was not this impetus the orchestra could discourse on the dramatic ideas. This discovery, never actually formulated by Wagner, is to be traced in his

music-drama from

Tannhäuser to Parsifal. In some ways the device made Wagner what he is; in others it marred his work as musical drama.

For Wagner was almost an egomaniac. All artists are egotists, it is true, but he pushed egotism to its farthest limits. The orchestra, as he used it in the Ring and Tristan, became a temptation he could not withstand. It enabled him to discourse at length upon the dramatic ideas and situations, to point a moral here, and to emphasize an emotion there. The ordinary dramatist (poor creature!) has to express himself in the terms of drama, through his dramatis persona. All kinds of important points have to be left to the imagination of the audience, and there is no means of telling it precisely what should be felt. Wagner's orchestra gave a loquacious man, with a constitutional desire to impose his ideas on the world, an imposing pulpit. In his music-dramas you may trace his gradual slavery to his orchestra, until at last it would seem that his instrumental Chorus was the end for which his dramas came into existence. The dramatis persona dwindled into the background; the whole scheme of his dramas was conditioned by his need of expressing himself. He prolonged situations beyond all reason so that he might deliver his orchestral

comment at the proper length for musical effect. From the Ring, onwards, the dramatis persona no longer carried the drama, but were borne along by the egotistic comments of the dramatist. The characters no longer expressed themselves, but were expressed by the author. The compositions were not dramas, but epic musical poems cast into dramatic form.

Nor did Wagner stop to consider the right proportion between voice and orchestra. The singers were to be the slaves of this Alberich of music, and the old-fashioned Wagnerian hailed their degradation with delight. The more Wagner's vocal treatment departed from old-fashioned opera the greater was the joy of the early Wagnerite. Neither he nor his master inquired whether the drama got itself expressed in this topsy-turvy style. The only fact, worth noting was that some tremendous music had been written, and if the singer suffered, so much the worse for him. I have never yet met a Wagnerian who could clearly explain why the master should have shown such a disinclination to allow his dramatis persona to sing a melody when it was considered quite appropriate that the dramatic idea should be expressed in melody by the orchestra. One might almost imagine that Wagner was jealous of his own characters. The conventional answer is that we must hear the vocal and orchestral music as a whole. The rejoinder is obvious. The orchestra has no real place in the drama at all, and it must be artistically wrong to condition the speech of the protagonists by an invisible chorus.

The weaving up of the voice with the orchestra, so pleasing to the musician, is directly opposed to drama. It means that the voice will have no independent life of its own. If you attempt to sing one of Wagner's big scenes without the orchestral comment

Only

you will find that the expression is absolutely incomplete. In many cases the vocal parts, if detached from the score, are without emotional meaning of any kind. Add the orchestra, and you obtain the frenzied excitement which Wagnerians consider is perfect art. There must be something wrong in such a method when applied to drama. And Wagner did not improve an essentially false conception of the proper position of the voice in musicdrama by writing the bulk of his orchestral music as if it were an independent symphonic poem, for he thus created a Procrustean bed on which the expression of the dramatis personæ had to be stretched to fit the expression of the composer himself. here and there in his music-dramas is the orchestra sufficiently plastic to adapt itself to the dramatic emphasis the voice should be allowed to make. It is strange that Wagner with his experience as a conductor of operas did not learn that the human voice is the most wonderful instrument in the world, and that when it comes to the expression of emotion no orchestra can hope to vie with it. The very timbre of a fine voice has an emotional significance. The problem for the operatic composer was not the problem Wagner attempted to solve, but that of using the human voice and all its wonderful qualities in a music-drama which should have more artistic reason than the old-fashioned works. They pandered to the vanity of singers, and the composer had to write with an eye to vocal display. But from curing the ills from which opera suffered to the invention of a dramatic expression in which the voice played a minor part was an unnecessarily long step. It meant that the thrilling power of the singing voice had to be sacrificed in deference to a composer's egotism.

That the orchestral idiom is one thing, and the vocal idiom another, has

escaped general attention, I think. The volume of sound which an orchestra produces, its variety of tone color, and its suggestion of titanic emotion are just the very qualities which the human voice lacks. If the orchestra is to be given full scope the voice has no power against it. The measure of music-drama must surely lie in the Vocal expression of the dramatis persona. If the orchestra is to set the standard, as with Wagner, the voices to be heard at all must attempt to be superhuman. It is not merely a question of drowning the voice by mere volume of sound. It cuts much deeper than that. By weaving his voices with the orchestra Wagner just enables his singers to make themselves heard at rather less effort than might be imagined, but the tremendous speech of the orchestra reinforces the voice with a curious effect. It has been the secret of Wagner's power, and no doubt it is still a secret to many of his admirers. Emotions which would have been "ordinary" become titanic in volume and apparent stress. Had Wagner been a poor craftsman he would have pitted his voices against his orchestra, and so have lost his power of hypnotizing his public. But the skill with which he wove his voices with his orchestra obviated that disaster. Yet this very effect of bigness, of titanic emotions expressed by singers and orchestra, is not really artistic. It is another proof of the composer's egotism. A dramatist and an artist would surely have aimed at conditioning his material to his subject. Thus in Tristan und Isolde he had to express the most passionate and idealistic love of man and woman. Did he try to move us by a poignant musical illustration of that love, keeping it on the plane of poetry and yet not allowing it to lose its human proportions? As long as there is no passionate outburst to express the music is magical in its ap

peal, but immediately a crisis is reached Wagner himself rushes in with his orchestra and builds a climax of frenetic sound round the voices until all human feeling is sacrificed to exaggerated passion. Tristan and Isolde are no longer a man and a woman, but some strange monsters of this musical Frankinstein's creation.

Yet with all his love of theatrical ranting, Wagner himself has shown us here and there in his music-dramas what the combination of drama and music might be. There is an instance in the first act of Die Walküre, when Sieglinde takes pity on the fugitive Siegmund; again, in the second act of the same opera, when Brunnhilde warns him of his doom; in Tristan when the hero asks Isolde to follow him to the sunless land, and in the magical music of the opening of the third act; in Götterdämmerung when Brunnhilde comes face to face with the treachery of Siegfried. In all these instances the orchestra has ceased its The Fortnightly Review.

superheated commentary and has deigned to heighten the dramatic situation by characteristic music, without exaggerating the emotion so that the voices have to exaggerate too. Here Wagner shows himself a true musical dramatist and not a composer who will sacrifice all reality of feeling for the sake of building up a meretricious "big" situation. Unfortunately, it is these big situations the ordinary Wagnerian loves, while it is precisely that side of Wagner which is least genuine and poetical, for in his desire to make a stupendous theatrical effect he not only invented a form of art which has grave æsthetic faults, but also marred his drama by never leaving anything to suggestion, and by exaggerating emotion until it loses all genuine appeal. Opera must retrace its steps. It must aim at making its drama condition the style of its music, and the dramatis persona must no longer be merged in the orchestral background.

E. A. Baughan.

The day of the true sea-fisherman is not yet. The sport in which he takes pleasure is understood only by seafishermen. The salmon-fisher, working his shining fly in the foam-flecked current of broad, dark rivers; the angler who describes himself by the quarrelsome title of "dry-fly purist," and who disparages any form of fishing less exact and difficult than the sending of tiny flies properly cocked over the trout and grayling of glass-clear chalkstreams; even the roach-fisher with his dainty quill sailing leisurely round the eddies of Thames backwaters,-to these "sea-fishing" is a thing apart, hardly to be mentioned among decent methods of taking fish, not a dignified, and scarcely, indeed, a legitimate, occupa

tion. To them the man who goes seafishing is one who dangles a line from a pierhead to catch small flat-fish and eels, or who attempts to do the same thing from a rowing-boat, in which case he is generally seasick. His tackle is coarse and ugly, his whipcord line is half as thick as a cable, he weights it with a prodigious plummet of lead, his hooks and swivels would scare any right-minded fish into the next parish, and his baits are large and unclean. Above all his other failings, he does not use a rod. When he hooks a fish, there is none of the delightful uncertainty of playing a game of two or three pounds weight on delicate tackle: merely he hauls in his cable with so much for breakfast at the end