Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/214

 an interest; indeed, as a listener at any rate, I could never clearly make it out. But beginning from a certain point on which all music lovers will be able to put their finger, what a flow of melody, what abundance, what rhythm, what outpouring! No matter that Tristan and Yseult are young, it is no longer love as we saw it in Lohengrin, it is no longer young love. It is autumnal love, an aftermath of passion,—love that has passed forty, such as Wagner was experiencing in his own life when he wrote these pages: love that feels the shortness of the time before it as keenly as it enjoys its exaltation, because it has come late, and because it is a guilty love: it holds itself closer than it holds the beloved one, in a sort of attitude of defence against all that threatens it, above all against death, already lurking in the background. It is this flight from death's power that is required to give its character of complete abandonment to the final scene of passion at once carnal and ethereal, in which the two lovers give themselves up utterly to the dream of floating on the upper air to realise the passionate union of the senses. How different all that is from the sentiment of the Latin races! If we aspire to the celestial region, it is not in the hope of becoming disembodied souls.

The reader will not expect here an index of the beauties of Wagner's music; I will give merely a rapid glance at their chief divisions. It was not in the expression of love alone that Wagner was the eloquent interpreter of human pathos. It is true that the domineering jealousy of Fricka, the conjugal lassitude of Wotan, brought no characteristic inspiration to the musician. These gross gods have gross feelings, and the rather heavy style of the leit-motiv suits in this sense the movements of their souls. But Wotan's