Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/205

 phonies of classical form on a basis of invention that has nothing classical about it, of wanting to make something great out of the puny and trivial. It is to be found in the strange oversight of those musicians who notice everything in the symphonies of Mozart or Beethoven except one point—the nature of the fundamental ideas which are the very reason of the existence of their symphonic creations.

These views are of the most classical character, and it would be a good thing if the essay in which I find them expressed were translated into French. But it will be noticed that Wagner never learnt to apply them outside music; he cannot get back to the general truths from which they proceed, and which concern all the arts. Wagner's culture was healthy only in the realm of music; in everything else it was full of darkness and disorder, as will have been sufficiently proved by the analysis of his poems; the reading of his works, wherever musical art is not very specially the subject, would prove it still better. And yet someone has managed to discover in his works "a thinker!"

How were the two portions of his mind, so different and so unequal, able to collaborate in one and the same work?

How could music inspired with the classical doctrine associate itself with poetry in which assuredly it will occur to no one to find this characteristic? That is a question which can only be resolved by a somewhat detailed analysis of the relations between the music and the poetry of the Wagnerian operas.