that barred his senses on one great side of life, suddenly fell,
of its own accord, without so much as his knowing when it
happened. Amid the fumes of coarse tobacco and poor beer,
surrounded by the commonest of German Haus-frauen, a new sense
burst out like a flower in his life, so superior to the old
senses, so bewildering, so astonished at its own existence, that
he could not credit it, and watched it as something apart,
accidental, and not to be trusted. He slowly came to admit that
Beethoven had partly become intelligible to him, but he was the
more inclined to think that Beethoven must be much overrated as a
musician, to be so easily followed. This could not be called
education, for he had never so much as listened to the music. He
had been thinking of other things. Mere mechanical repetition of
certain sounds had stuck to his unconscious mind. Beethoven might
have this power, but not Wagner, or at all events not the Wagner
later than "Tannhauser." Near forty years passed before he
reached the "Gotterdammerung."

One might talk of the revival of an atrophied sense -- the
mechanical reaction of a sleeping consciousness -- but no other
sense awoke. His sense of line and color remained as dull as
ever, and as far as ever below the level of an artist. His
metaphysical sense did not spring into life, so that his mind
could leap the bars of German expression into sympathy with the
idealities of Kant and Hegel. Although he insisted that his faith
in German thought and literature was exalted, he failed to
approach German thought, and he shed never a tear of emotion over
the pages of Goethe and Schiller. When his father rashly ventured
from time to time to write him a word of common sense, the young
man would listen to no sense at all, but insisted that Berlin was