Musical Portraits | Page 5

between 1850 and 1880. It was upon the men of those
days that he did his full work of destruction and revival. It was in them
he battered down walls. It was them he made to hear afresh, to stretch
and grow in the effort to comprehend him. At the moment we
encountered Wagner, his work was already something of a closed
experience, something we were able to accept readily and with a certain
ease because it had been accepted and assimilated by an entire world,
and become part of the human organism. Its power was already slightly
diminished. For instance, Wagner the musician was no longer able to
make either Wagner the poet or Wagner the philosopher exist for us as
they existed for the men of the earlier generation. Only Houston
Stewart Chamberlain still persisted in trying to stand upon the burning
deck whence all the rest had fled. For us, it was obvious that if
Wagner's work throned mightily it was because of his music, and
oftentimes in spite of his verse and his doctrine. For us, it was a
commonplace that dramatic movement and the filling up of scenes by
the introduction of characters who propose pointless riddles to one
another and explain at length what their names are not, are
incompatible; that poetry does not consist in disguising commonplace
expressions in archaic and alliterative and extravagant dress; that
Wotan displays no grasp of the essentials of Schopenhauer's philosophy
when he insists on dubbing Brunhilde his Will.
And yet, whatever the difference, most of Wagner's might was still in
him when first we came to know his music. The spell in which he had
bound the generation that preceded ours was still powerful. For us, too,
there occurred the moments when Siegfried's cavernous forest depths

first breathed on us, when for the first time "Die Meistersinger"
flaunted above the heads of all the world the gonfalon of art, when for
the first time we embarked upon the shoreless golden sea of "Tristan
und Isolde." For us, too, the name of Richard Wagner rang and sounded
above all other musical names. For us, too, he was a sort of sovereign
lord of music. His work appeared the climax toward which music had
aspired through centuries, and from which it must of necessity descend
again. Other, and perhaps purer work than his, existed, we knew. But it
seemed remote and less compelling, for all its perfection. New music
would arrive, we surmised. Yet we found ourselves convinced that it
would prove minor and unsatisfactory. For Wagner's music had for us
an incandescence which no other possessed. It was the magnetic spot of
music. Its colors blazed and glowed with a depth and ardor that seemed
to set it apart from other music as in an enchanted circle. It unlocked us
as did no other. We demanded just such orchestral movement, just such
superb gestures, just such warm, immersing floods, and were fulfilled
by them. That there would come a day when the magnetism which it
exerted on us would pass from it, and be seen to have passed, seemed
the remotest of possibilities.
For we accepted him with the world of our minority. For each
individual there is a period, varying largely in extent, during which his
existence is chiefly a process of imitation. In the sphere of expression,
that submission to authority extends well over the entire period of
gestation, well into the time of physical maturity. There are few men,
few great artists, even, who do not, before attaining their proper idiom
and gesture, adopt those of their teachers and predecessors.
Shakespeare writes first in the style of Kyd and Marlowe, Beethoven in
that of Haydn and Mozart; Leonardo at first imitates Verrocchio. And
what the utilization of the manner of their predecessors is to the artist,
that the single devotion to Wagner was to us. For he was not only in the
atmosphere, not only immanent in the lives led about us. His figure was
vivid before us. Scarcely another artistic personality was as largely
upon us. There were pictures, on the walls of music-rooms, of
gray-bearded, helmeted warriors holding mailed blonde women in their
arms, of queens with golden ornaments on their arms leaning over
parapets and agitating their scarves, of women throwing themselves

into the sea upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish men
and young girls conversing teasingly through a window by a lilac-bush,
that were Wagner. There were books with stories of magical swans and
hordes of gold and baleful curses, of phantasmal storm ships and
hollow hills and swords lodged in tree-trunks awaiting their wielders,
of races of gods and giants and grimy dwarfs, of guardian fires and
potions of forgetfulness and prophetic dreams and voices, that were
Wagner. There were