Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/217

 flowing from a different source. Do we mean then that the music of this German is not German? We do at any rate mean that in certain of its characteristics, and those precisely the most distinctive ones, it is in fact not German. Compare it with Schumann's music. It seems to me that if anything is Germanic it is Schumann's lyricism. Now nothing in the world is further removed from the inspiration of Schumann, than the inspiration of Wagner. For Schumann, Nature is poetic as the agent that excites vague states of feeling, vague hopes, vague delirium, vague melancholy and other moods, intense of course, of a sensibility that is occupied with itself alone and feeds only on itself. For Wagner Nature is poetic in herself, as a divine machine whose working and phenomena give the mind and the imagination their greatest delights. I certainly will not go so far as to make him a Frenchman on account of this feature; that would be to overlook huge differences of taste and style. With Frenchmen the musical rendering of things is subtle, sober, dainty, vibrant, lively, stripped and free from excess of matter, full of rhythm. With Wagner it is startling, opulent, sumptuous, streaming with colour; it makes far less call on rhythmic invention (which is not Wagner's strong point) than on forms, on harmony and instrumentation. But its spirit is not German. Wagner, who was so German, so pitiably German in his ideas and literary lubrucations is very little of a German at root in his musical genius, nor am I the first person to have noticed the fact. Some critics have even thought it their duty to point out in this connection that his father after the flesh, who must not be confused with his legal father, and whose name was Geyer (an actor and painter of talent)