misunderstandings which can easily be accounted for by Wagner's
unparalleled originality, by the novelty of his art, necessarily
involving a wide departure from the classic standards by which alone
the critic can form his judgment. To comprehend his work we must give
up many of those cherished canons which hitherto have passed
unquestioned.

Wagner's _Tristan_ has often--even by Lichtenberger--been
described as a philosophic work; and as abstract thought or
philosophy, it is said, is foreign to art, a work which admits it must
be condemned. Let us first understand what is meant by philosophy. It
is surely a train of thought in the mind of the spectator, not in the
object which he contemplates. Anything in the world may be the subject
of philosophic thought, or may suggest it; there is plenty of
philosophy to be drawn from a daisy, but we do not therefore call a
daisy a philosophic flower. So, too, we may philosophize about
Wagner's _Tristan_, but the philosophy is our own; it is not in
the work. What is meant no doubt is that the work itself is not a
concrete reality, but an exposition of an abstract conception.
Philosophy has only herself to blame if abstractions are in the naif,
ordinary mind opposed to realities, for it is unhappily true that
nearly the whole of our current philosophy does consist of
abstractions which are mere "Hirngespinnste," rooted in words and not
in nature; philosophy itself has in art become a term of reproach from
being associated with unreality. We must, however, distinguish between
notions which are real but difficult to grasp and those which cannot
be grasped, because there is nothing in them, and this distinction
cannot be made without thought and labour from which the ordinary mind
shrinks, being too indolent or indifferent. Poetry is not opposed to
philosophy, and is not the less poetry when it concerns itself with