chapter I

pointed out how from his youth Wagner was fond of dabbling in pseudo-philosophy, and this had strengthened rather than weakened its hold on him as he grew older. For some time Feuerbach was his mentor. It is idle to ask what he saw in Feuerbach. It has long been a commonplace that rightly to understand an author you must meet him half-way. Wagner did more than that: he went the whole way, and often a long way beyond. What he read was not Feuerbach, but the thousand ideas that the merest chance sentences of Feuerbach aroused in his seething brain. Feuerbach, however, was sent about his business as soon as Schopenhauer entered. Wagner immediately wrote enthusiastically to Liszt, telling how peace and light had come into his soul; and one might wonder what particular doctrine of the grumpy old pseudo-philosopher had this remarkable effect. (This is to assume it to have had the effect. As a bare matter of fact it hadn't. Wagner's soul knew no peace until he died.) It was the great gospel of Renunciation. After reading this, in his own way, Wagner realized, if you please, that both _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ preached the same doctrine; and one can only retort that, if they preach any doctrine at all--which they don't, thank heaven!--it is not that. But Schopenhauerism might easily have ruined _Tristan_--did not ruin it only because Wagner himself, when writing it, was consumed with a fervour of passion that is the negation of Schopenhauerism. It is responsible, however, for many of the _longueurs_ of the _Ring_, as, for instance, in Act II of the _Valkyrie_, when Wotan stops the action to give Brünnhilde an elementary lesson in Schopenhauer-cum-Wagner metaphysics. The funny thing is that Wagner never renounced anything: to the end he was greedy, avid of life. He might have benefited by a careful study of Schopenhauer's pungent phrases; but instead of thus developing his own natural gift in that direction, his sentences afterwards grew longer and more complicated than ever. His Beethoven is a splendid essay; how much finer it might have been had he not wasted so many pages on what he took to be Schopenhauer's science!

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