Page:The War and the Future.djvu/11

 Renaissance, and that this work in its mixture of primitiveness and futurity addresses itself to a non-existent world of a class-less folk. The resistance, the indignation, which it aroused were directed much less against the revolutionary aspects of its form, or because it broke with the laws of operatic art, from which it obviously diverged. The opposition arose from a totally different source. The German Goethe disciple, who knew his "Faust" by heart gave utterance to an angry and contemptuous protest, a well-founded protest. It came from the still existing cultivated world of German classicism with which this work was a total break. The cultivated German burgher laughed at the Wagalawaia and all the alliteration business as barbarous nonsense, which can readily be understood. The extraordinary, one can say the planetary, success with which eventually this art met in the modern world, the world of the international bourgeoisie, thanks to certain sensual, nervous, and intellectual stimuli, was a paradox. For we must not forget that it was meant for a totally different public than the capitalistic burgher world, namely, for the romantic "Volk" which is also the ideal of national socialism.

The Wagner revolution was an archaic one in which reactionary and futuristic elements were mingled in the most peculiar way. He is always interested in the Ur-epic, the original and utmost simplicity, the pre-conventional and pre-social. Only this seems to him a theme suitable for art: his work is the German contribution to the monumental art of the nineteenth century which took the form in other nations, primarily, of great social-poetical novels—Dickens, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Dostoievski, Balzac, Zola. These monumental works that reveal a similar tendency toward moral grandeur were, par excellence, the European nineteenth century, the literary world of social critique. The German manifestation of this greatness knows nothing of society and does not want to know it. For the social is not musical and altogether not suitable for artistic productions. The only suitable themes for art are the mythical and purely human ones, the unhistorical, timeless Ur-poetry of nature and of the heart; and out of these depths the German spirit creates perhaps the greatest and most beautiful thing 11