and put it out of sight for ever. The opening strain from Trinity' is partly on a par—every note hits the cadence from a tune well-known for generations. Burn that too my friend!
"That others sin, won't justify our sinning, and to say that original melody is exhausted is nonsense my boy—undiluted nonsense! Mendelssohn might have said the same thing, after Handel and Haydn and Mozart had written, and so had never given us the undying melodies in 'St. Paul,' 'Elijah,' &c. So could Gounod, Dvorak, Sullivan and Cowen now. You are suffering from Wagnerism —same as I did once from Spohrism. Go in for an antidotal dose by studying Mozart and Mendelssohn and Schubert for 6 months; you will then feel despondent—not because no melody can be written evermore, but because you can never write anything like that. That will be healthy despondency and will produce its own reaction. I have often felt in examining your MSS.—and sometimes published works—almost in a temper at your not giving your melodic swing full play. No one can fairly say I am an advocate of melody simply, but I say that the art of Music is like all other arts not made up of some one essential, but of many,—melody undoubtedly being one as, undoubtedly, harmony is another one; the two, however, being still far from making up the whole.
Had I known, I would certainly not have undertaken this 'Ystorm' scoring. Some of the choruses produce very strong effects, but Stephen's habits of thought—melodic and harmonic—are so entirely different to what ordinary Musicians' are, that
