Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/195

 wrap them round. They dream of the delights of perfect union by the annihilation of individual conscience. They analyse these delights with unrestrained and minute dialectic; they harp on them with a kind of incandescent monotony.

I would not be thought insensible to the charms of the love music in Tristan. I am, I imagine, as much touched by it as anyone. It has enchanting passages, in which the musician's inspiration is softened and humanised, in which the breath of night and the beatings of the heart seem to join in giving out a melody full of tenderness. But ought these celebrated passages to make us forget all those others quivering with a strident and sterile frenzy, that makes up for the eloquence of which it is incapable by the fury of repeated blows? Should they conceal from us the general spirit of the work? Oh, that spirit! let us not hesitate to reject it, to banish it far, very far, from us; for we are the children of humaner races who have ever found in natural healthiness and happy fulness of heart the true sources of beauty.

As regards Parsifal, its Christian aspect has caused the novelty of this drama as a feature in Wagner's work to be much exaggerated. Wagner composed a large part of it out of his oldest ideas. In it we meet again the Knights of the Grail, who had already inspired not only his Lohengrin, but also a certain apocalyptic vision of universal history, a cloudy legend of the Ages (the Wibelungen) outlined immediately after 1848, of which the Holy Grail forms the mystic centre. And what is Parsifal but Siegfried, a Siegfried chaste and ascetic, it is true, but still deriving from his candour as a "primitive," and from his childlike and utter ignorance of laws and men