Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/206



In the composition of the Wagnerian poems several distinct elements may be noted, and the special study which I have just devoted to them enables me, I think, to define these elements in a summary fashion.

I. Ideas. To be accurate, they are larvæ, phantoms of ideas: ideas social, political, cosmogonic, mystic, prophetic; a chaotic system picked up by Wagner in the intellectual grooves of the German nineteenth century and proving above all a complete inability to think, combined with an ardent ambition to do so.

II. A mythological realm of faëry, treated in the form of drama. The persons of the drama are in part the interpreters of the poet's ideologies, and as such they have no real existence. They might be called, after Victor Hugo, "shadow lips," and we might leave to none but the Wagnerian initiates (an intellectual race whom I have known very well, and in whom vivacity is not the quality that strikes me) the task of hearing what these shadowy lips say. But on the other hand, these persons of the drama have a soul. I do not assert that they have a character. Oh no, a character is something very complicated for fairy-tale heroes. But they have a soul, such as people have in fairy stories, a little soul that a little child can walk round, though it often animates an enormous body, the body of a giant, a dragon or a god.

III. Wagnerian drama contains another class of protagonists, which can only be so described by pure metaphor. They are, in reality, abstractions. But