Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/172

 Phantom Ship) presents itself as a sufficiently simple work. In it the author follows almost line for line the incidents of the old mediæval legend, heightening them with straightforward and sometimes beautiful poetic developments. We could read and re-read the text and suspect none of the extraordinary meanings which his commentary would have us discover in them. But had he thought of putting those meanings in it himself? Did he not introduce them after the work was done? There are very strong reasons for thinking that he did so. The strongest is obtained from a comparison of dates. Lohengrin is three years earlier than the year 1848. The Communication to my friends, which gives the commentary on it, is two years after that date. For anyone who knows Wagner's moral history that explains everything. The revolution of 1848 had a deep and violent influence on him, it caused a real crisis in his ideas. Till then his mental activity had been applied solely to his art; on everything else he had held the average opinions of a peaceable subject of the king of Saxony. Here we find him calling in question all received opinions and beginning I will not say to meditate but to dream about the foundations of civilisation and society. The so-called explanation of the meaning of his first dramas is in reality a manifesto of his new thoughts. But as he became from this moment a passionate theorist, without however, ceasing to be a poet, we find him no longer relegating the expression of his theories to the annotations on his dramas; he propagates them in the dramas themselves. That is the new characteristic of the Nibelungen Ring as compared with Lohengrin.

This new bent of his mind, which henceforth re-