Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/177

 the programme of such and such a political revolution) start from the same point; they are to say truth the same ideology, considered in two different applications and lending itself with equal facility to either. In what name does Germany attack the tradition of the old European and classical culture? In the name of the inspirations of primitive humanity. In what name does the spirit of revolution attack institutions and laws in general? In the name of primitive rights. The kinship of these two movements of ideas is very close and obvious, and it explains why, among the nations of Europe, Germany is the only one in which the revolutionary spirit has not weakened the national spirit. For the great welders of imperial unity, when they have become the masters of public opinion, it is an undertaking based on nature and the affinities of things to turn the current of one of these ideas into the other, to attract the revolutionary movement into the nationalist movement, and to capture for the profit of the latter the moral energies and forces of sentiment engaged in the first. At the point of history with which we are now concerned, this work is only faintly foreshadowed. The revolutionary spirit which stirs Wagner is still cosmopolitan. But there would not be many changes to make in the terms of his message to convert the writings containing its expression into regular manifestos of proselytic Germanism.

Being the work of the ideologue as much as of the poet, the Nibelungen Ring or Tetralogy generally passes for a very obscure composition. And I am far