Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/141

Friedrich Nietzsche, he succumbed temporarily to the spell of another gigantic personality. We are not concerned with Richard Wagner's musical influence upon Nietzsche, who was himself a musician of no mean ability; what is to the point here is the prime principle of Wagner's art theory. The key to the Wagnerian theory is found, also, in Schopenhauer's philosophy. Wagner starts from the pessimistic thesis that at the bottom of the well of life lies nothing but suffering, — hence living is utterly undesirable. In one of his letters to Franz Liszt he names as the duplex root of his creative genius the longing for love and the yearning for death. On another occasion, he confesses his own emotional nihilism in the following summary of Tristan und Isolde: "Sehnsucht, Sehnsucht, unstillbares, ewig neu sich gebärendes Verlangen — Schmachten und Dursten; einzige Erlösung: Tod, Sterben, Untergehen, — Nichtmehrerwachen." But from the boundless ocean of sorrow there is a refuge. It was Wagner's fundamental dogma that through the illusions of art the individual is enabled to rise above the hopelessness of the realities into a new cosmos replete with supreme [125]