Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/171

 even under the noblest form, shall have broken itself, being itself annihilated. Elsa the woman—Woman till now not understood and now understood, that very necessary essential expression of pure sensitive spontaneity—has made of me a thorough revolutionary. She was the spirit of the people, of which I too as artist felt the need, for my redemption."

You do not quite follow? But it is partly that the German language is terrible, with all those amphibious words in whose signification sensation and idea mingle and encroach on each other in a manner so confused that it is practically impossible for us to translate them; for, to the honour of our intellectual and moral civilisation we have not their equivalents in French. In this flux of invertebrate phrases, one conception, which if not clear is at any rate very strongly tendencious, yet allows itself to be discerned. Reason, knowledge, experience, deliberate thought, all the "conscious" and organised forms of our inner life, imprison us in the bonds from which we must "deliver" ourselves by some undefined yielding to the suggestions or intuitions of pure and instinctive sensibility, as man "delivers himself" of himself in the bosom of a woman, delivers himself of egoism in the bosom of love. And sensibility, emancipated from reflection is identified with what Wagner calls the "spirit of the people," an ideal of all innocence, kindness and genius.

There you have something muddy, and moreover disquieting. Let us meet it with healthy French laughter.

Despite these explanations by Wagner, Lohengrin (and one must say the same of Tannhäuser and the