Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/198

 is a hundred times more clouded and more puerile than what may be observed in the most unbridled French visionaries. It fittingly corresponds with the dream of a mystic revelation rising from the depths of nature to bring to these evils their remedy.

Visions like these have lost their power to attract. But there exists to-day a widespread tendency which is only too closely related to the most general tendency of Wagner's ideas, though it presents itself under more insidious, learned and subtle forms. I refer to a certain contempt for reason, thought, and experience, a certain pretension to eliminate from the formation of human opinions and beliefs, from the creation of works of the mind, the share taken by operations of reason and the guidance of criticism. All Wagner's written work breathes this feeling. What is it that gives all these redeemers of either sex their virtue? What is it that makes them agents of regeneration and salvation, revealers of truth? It is their ignorance, the fact that they are all instinct and sensibility, that they are "life" and pure spontaneity, with no element of knowledge. We have heard enough harping on this strain underlying more involved expressions. I am still waiting for those who take pleasure in it to show us or produce, in any art form they please, anything successful, consistent, and not stillborn, that is not based on the calculations of strong and close reasoning.

This is the most irritating aspect of the Wagnerian ideology.

I have called Wagner's works dramas, but the term applies to their external appearance rather than to their nature and true quality. There is no drama where there is not living and active humanity, and I