Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/162



The war, while banishing the name of Richard Wagner from the posters of our concerts and theatres has restored his works to the agenda of criticism. It has revived on the subject of the Tetralogy, Tristan, and Parsifal, controversies which might have been thought to be dead and which take us back thirty years. We have no reason to complain of that. The "sacred union" has not suffered, and truth can only gain by it. The testing of time renders easier the equitable appreciation of works of art; and in the case of Wagner's work this test has been long enough to give us the advantage of due perspective. We to-day can turn upon this vast and complex monument of poetry, music and theatrical decoration a gaze more free and clear than could our elders, when they saw it rise for the first time before their astonished and dazzled eyes. The time will come, and it will come by victory, when reasons lying deep in the fitness of things which ruled that the author of the Tetralogy must be excluded from our dramatic and musical repertories will no longer exist, and it will then be for considerations of taste to decide whether or no Wagner is to be played, or to what extent he is to be played. But the decision of which public feeling will allow in this matter, the practice that will be established, will have all the more wisdom and authority if they are inspired by a taste that is well informed and thoroughly enlightened on the nature and value of Wagner's