Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/187

 Germans. This combination of philosophy and machinery, of the abstract and string-pulling, makes us want to laugh. But Frenchmen and Germans do not laugh at the same things. The fantastic element when it represents something philosophic or historic is regarded gravely by the Germans, especially if it is on a "colossal" scale. It makes them think.

Let us recognise, however, that all this decorative part of Wagner's operas has not merely a perceptible attraction. It has also an element of poetic value if not in itself at any rate in the allurements that it holds out to the richest inspirations of the musician. Wagner as a musician excels in painting great landscapes; or more exactly in evoking for the imagination the hidden springs and profound rhythms of the natural forces manifested in the powerful undulations of a river's volume, the graceful or majestic course of the clouds, the murmurs of the trees, the play of light and shadow. His fantastic scenes are developed in the midst of these phenomena of nature, which may be said to take no less important a part in them than the characters themselves.

Yet it is very necessary that the latter should hold their own place in the scheme. Whatever influence picturesque or musical considerations may have had on the turn given by Wagner to the story of the Nibelungen, he was bound, since he was making a drama out of it, to be pre-occupied with representing human nature. But to what extent could this preoccupation he reconciled with the double intention guiding the artist's pen, to display a scene of fantasy and to symbolise ideas? Characters who must at one and the same time take part in marvellous deeds of fable, and incarnate abstract ideas, surely cannot possibly