The Elizabethan writers--not only the dramatists, but the
authors of romances--interspersed their blank verse or their prose
narration with short lyrical poems, just as in the days of Mozart the
airs and concerted pieces in an opera were connected by wastes of
recitative that were most aptly called 'dry'; and as it was left to a
modern poet to tell, in a series of lyrics succeeding one another
without interval, a dramatic story such as that of _Maud_, so was it a
modern composer who carried to completion, in 'Tristan und Isolde', the
dramatic expression of passion at the highest point of lyrical
utterance. It is no more unnatural for the raptures of Wagner's lovers,
or the swan-song of ecstasy, to be sung, than for the young man whose
character Tennyson assumes, to utter himself in measured verse,
sometimes of highly complex structure. The two works differ not in kind,
but in degree of intensity, and to those whose ears are open to the
appeal of music, the power of expression in such a case as this is
greater beyond all comparison than that of poetry, whether declaimed or
merely read. That so many people recognise the rational nature of opera
in the present day is in great measure due to Wagner, since whose
reforms the conventional and often idiotic libretti of former times have
entirely disappeared. In spite of the sneers of the professed
anti-Wagnerians, which were based as often as not upon some ineptitude
on the part of the translator, not upon any inherent defect in the
original, the plots invented by Wagner have won for themselves an
acceptance that may be called world-wide.
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