vital quality of musical form and the true process of a coherent thread,
were cast to the winds with earlier poetic ideals.

[Footnote A: The "Dante" Symphony of Liszt was written between 1847 and
1855; the "Faust" Symphony between 1854 and 1857. Wagner finished the
text of _Tristan und Isolde_ in 1857; the music was not completed until
1859. In 1863 was published the libretto of the _Nibelungen-Ring_. In
1864 Wagner was invited by King Ludwig of Bavaria to complete the work
in Munich.]

If it were ever true that a single personality could change an opposite
course of thought, it must be held that Richard Wagner, in his own
striking and decadent career, comes nearest to such a type. But he was
clearly prompted and reinforced in his philosophy by other men and
tendencies of his time. The realism of a Schopenhauer, which Wagner
frankly adopted without its full significance (where primal will finds a
redemption in euthanasia), led by a natural course of thought to
Nietzsche's dreams of an overman, who tramples on his kind.

In itself this philosophy had been more of a passing phase (even as
Schopenhauer is lost in the chain of ethical sages) but for its strange
coincidence with the Wagnerian music. The accident of this alliance gave
it an overwhelming power in Germany, where it soon threatened to corrupt
all the arts, banishing idealism from the land of its special
haunts.[A] The ultimate weakness of the Wagnerian philosophy is that it
finds in fatalism an excuse for the surrender of heroic virtue,--not in
the spirit of a tragic truth, but in a glorification of the senses; just
as in Wagner's final work, the ascetic, sinless type becomes a figure
almost of ridicule, devoid of human reality. It is significant that with
the revival of a sound art, fraught with resolute aspiration, is