and it needs the strength and sincerity which accompany the advance of
years to bring a revolt against the selfish blindness of our youth. As
we watch and learn from the terrible tragedy of nature, as we realize
more and more the baseness and depravity of human life, our faith
becomes stronger that beauty, truth, righteousness, are eternal and
cannot be born only that they may perish; that man is not "a wild and
ravening beast held in check only by the bonds of civilization," but
is a divine and immortal being. Our vision gradually opens and we
learn more clearly that all which we once took for pleasure and for
pain are unreal, visionary reflections from a higher and purer
existence where all creation is united in the eternal embrace of love.
For those who, through courage and sincerity, through faith and hope
and love, have attained the higher insight, have seen the very face of
Brahm behind the delusive veil of Maya, there is no discord or
contradiction in all this; despair gives way to a resigned quietism,
to that "peace of God which passeth all understanding." Such is the
ineffable insight of the artist, and no poetry is satisfying which
does not spring from this source. Wagner in the letter I quoted
before, speaks of the cheerful playfulness of Spanish poets after they
had adopted the ascetic life. The philosophic pessimist is not a
fretful and malignant caviller who sneers at the follies of others
because he thinks himself so much wiser than they. Any one may note
among the ascetics of his acquaintance, those who take no pleasure in
what delights others and live a life of self-denial and
abstemiousness, how cheerful is their conversation, how bright and
steadfast their glance, how their tolerance of the follies of others
is only equalled by the saintliness of their own lives.

Such is Wagner's pessimism; it is the pessimism of the Vedanta
philosophy; that is to say, it is most clearly formulated in that