Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/194

 guide; from that time he never ceased to mingle his teaching with everything, to resolve all kinds of problems after his principles. But what is most singular, and what gives one of the most characteristic signs of the gulf that exists between German and French natures, is that Schopenhauer's ideas set their stamp upon the late ardent and painful love passion which he experienced in his forty-third year, and which inspired him to write Tristan. There worked in him, in his sentiments and sensations, a combination of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, and amorous delirium which seems to us far from natural, and yet it acquired an explosive force in this Germanic soul. Schopenhauer's morality counsels the annihilation of desire, promising us as the goal of this effort entrance into some undefined state of divine slumber, some kind of pantheistic paradise in which all the movements of life expire and individuality disappears. And it would seem at first sight that nothing could be more opposed to this passion for the void than the exaltation of love.

But neither Wagner nor his heroes feel it thus. For Tristan and his beloved, love's supreme cry is a summons to the void; the expiration of desire in death is the very object of desire carried to its paroxysm. And this is not as one might suppose a sudden flash of imagination quickly dying out, that crosses their brains under the stroke of sensual madness. It is a steadily maintained idea. It is their one idea. It is the theme of their outpourings. They turn it over and over in all its aspects, which are terribly lacking in variety. They shout to "Day," that is to say Life, to be gone, and to "Night," which is the Kingdom of Death, to descend upon them and