Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/170

 affinity to the being of Elsa. Thanks to the power of this 'unconscious conscience,' as I experienced it myself with Lohengrin, I arrived at a comprehension growing more and more intimate of feminine nature; I succeeded in plunging myself so completely in the feminine being that I expressed it in a manner worthy of that complete penetration in my Elsa the lover. I could not prevent myself from finding the latter absolutely justified in the final explosion of her jealousy, and it was precisely that explosion which for the first time enlightened me thoroughly on the purely human essential quality of love. This woman who, with a clear vision of what she is doing, hurls herself to her doom out of regard for the necessary essential quality of love—who, given up to the feelings of an enthusiastic adoration, wills to go under if she cannot possess her well-beloved in his entirety; this woman who, from the fact of her contact with Lohengrin was destined just so to go under, only by the same stroke to give him over to his destruction: this woman who acts thus and cannot act otherwise, who by the explosion of her jealousy passes from a state of charmed adoration to the essential plenitude of love, and who in going under reveals its essential quality to the man who did not yet understand it: this magnificent woman before whom Lohengrin was to disappear, because from the point of view of his special nature he could not understand her—this woman I had now discovered, and the first arrow that I launched towards the noble object, already foreshadowed but not known, of my discovery, was my Lohengrin, to whose loss I had to consent in order to remain true to my aim of the true feminine, which is to bring redemption to me and the entire world, when before it masculine egoism,