sunshine. Lofty aspirations, which continually meet with failure,
ultimately turn to evil. The inadequacy of means for obtaining success
may, in certain circumstances, be the result of an inexorable fate,
and not necessarily of a lack of strength; but he who under such
circumstances cannot abandon his aspirations, despite the inadequacy
of his means, will only become embittered, and consequently irritable
and intolerant. He may possibly seek the cause of his failure in other
people; he may even, in a fit of passion, hold the whole world guilty;
or he may turn defiantly down secret byways and secluded lanes, or
resort to violence. In this way, noble natures, on their road to the
most high, may turn savage. Even among those who seek but their own
personal moral purity, among monks and anchorites, men are to be found
who, undermined and devoured by failure, have become barbarous and
hopelessly morbid. There was a spirit full of love and calm belief,
full of goodness and infinite tenderness, hostile to all violence and
self-deterioration, and abhorring the sight of a soul in bondage. And
it was this spirit which manifested itself to Wagner. It hovered over
him as a consoling angel, it covered him with its wings, and showed
him the true path. At this stage we bring the other side of Wagner's
nature into view: but how shall we describe this other side?
The characters an artist creates are not himself, but the succession
of these characters, to which it is clear he is greatly attached, must
at all events reveal something of his nature. Now try and recall
Rienzi, the Flying Dutchman and Senta, Tannhauser and Elizabeth,
Lohengrin and Elsa, Tristan and Marke, Hans Sachs, Woden and
Brunhilda,--all these characters are correlated by a secret current of
ennobling and broadening morality which flows through them and becomes
ever purer and clearer as it progresses. And at this point we enter
with respectful reserve into the presence of the most hidden
development in Wagner's own soul. In what other artist do we meet with
the like of this, in the same proportion? Schiller's characters, from
the Robbers to Wallenstein and Tell, do indeed pursue an ennobling
course, and likewise reveal something of their author's development;
but in Wagner the standard is higher and the distance covered is much
greater. In the Nibelungen Ring, for instance, where Brunhilda is
awakened by Siegfried, I perceive the most moral music I have ever
heard. Here Wagner attains to such a high level of sacred feeling that
our mind unconsciously wanders to the glistening ice-and snow-peaks of
the Alps, to find a likeness there;-- so pure, isolated, inaccessible,
chaste, and bathed in love-beams does Nature here display herself,
that clouds and tempests--yea, and even the sublime itself--seem to
lie beneath her. Now, looking down from this height upon Tannhauser
and the Flying Dutchman, we begin to perceive how the man in Wagner
was evolved: how restlessly and darkly he began; how tempestuously he
strove to gratify his desires, to acquire power and to taste those
rapturous delights from which he often fled in disgust; how he wished
to throw off a yoke, to forget, to be negative, and to renounce
everything. The whole torrent plunged, now into this valley, now into
that, and flooded the most secluded chinks and crannies. In the night
of these semi-subterranean convulsions a star appeared and glowed high
above him with melancholy vehemence; as soon as he recognised it, he
named it Fidelity--unselfish fidelity. Why did this star seem to him
the brightest and purest of all? What secret meaning had the word
"fidelity" to his whole being? For he has graven its image and
problems upon all his thoughts and compositions. His works contain
almost a complete series of the rarest and most beautiful examples of
fidelity: that of brother to sister, of friend to friend, of servant
to master; of Elizabeth to Tannhauser, of Senta to the Dutchman, of