Page:The Education of Henry Adams (1907).djvu/367

 and, if necessary, lead it to chaos, but never fall behind. Only the young have time to linger in the rear.

The amusements of youth had to be abandoned, for not even pugilism needs more staying-power than the labors of the pale-faced student of the Latin Quarter in the haunts of Montparnasse or Montmartre, where one must feel no fatigue at two o'clock in the morning in a beer-garden even after four hours of Mouuet Sully at the Theatre Francais. In those branches, education might be called closed. Fashion, too, could no longer teach anything worth knowing to a man who, holding open the door into the next world, regarded himself as merely looking round to take a last glance of this. The glance was more amusing than any he had known in his active life, but it was more,—infinitely more—chaotic and complex.

Still something remained to be done for education beyond the chaos, and as usual the woman helped. For thirty years or thereabouts, he had been repeating that he really must go to Baireuth. Suddenly Mrs. Lodge appeared on the horizon and bade him come. He joined them, parents and children, alert and eager and appreciative as ever, at the little old town of Rothenburg-on-the-Taube, and they went on to the Baireuth festival together.

Thirty years earlier, a Baireuth festival would have made an immense stride in education, and the spirit of the master would have opened a vast new world. In 1901 the effect was altogether different from the spirit of the master. In 1876 the rococo setting of Baireuth seemed the correct atmosphere for Siegfried and Briinhilde, perhaps even for Parsifal. Baireuth was out of the world, calm, contemplative and remote. In 1901 the world had altogether changed, and Wagner had became a part of it, as familiar as Shakespeare or Bret Harte. The rococo element jarred. Even the Hudson and the Susquehannah,—perhaps the Potomac itself,—had often risen to drown out the Gods of Walhalla, and one could hardly listen to the Götterdammerung in New York, among throngs of intense young enthusiasts, without paroxysms of nervous excitement that toned down to musical philistinism at Baireuth, as though the Gods were Bavarian composers. New York or Paris might be whatever one pleased,—venal, sordid, vulgar,—but society nursed there, in the rottenness of its decay, certain anarchistic ferments, and thought