Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/193

 movement of their hearts and their youth was already throwing them into each other's arms. But sooner than yield to it, sooner than commit a triple felony against a husband who is his king, and who has entrusted to his honour the protection of his beloved wife, Tristan, and with him Yseult drawn in to share his sacrifice, would prefer to die. A violent solution, and very short, so to speak.—An infinitely preferable one, I will not say from the moral point of view, but from the point of view of art, which would gain from it far greater richness, real pathos and variety, would be the struggle of will against desire. But it is not even this solution which is adopted. It is a worse one. Inspired by a criminal devotion, the nurse Brangaine substitutes for the poison prepared for the joint suicide the irresistible love philtre. These noble lovers, imagining they are drinking death from the cup, drink delirium. When they put down the empty cup they have lost their moral liberty, that is to say their moral grandeur itself. They step down from the ship drunk and staggering with passion. They are no longer masters of themselves. They become frenzied victims of hallucination. Their souls undergo a terrible simplification.

And the philtre not only delivers them over to this fury of a passion whose sinful character they are no longer capable of realising. It has another effect on them, not less inhuman but far more extraordinary; it gives them over without any intellectual protection to the extreme suggestions of Schopenhauer's philosophy, or at least the philosophy of Schopenhauer as interpreted by Wagner. The reading of this philosopher had marked an epoch in his life; no sooner had he made his acquaintance than he swore by no other