e of the
later century is needed. We wander here beyond the fine distinctions of
musical forms. A new wave of feeling had come over the world that
violently affected all processes of thought. And strangely, it was
strongest in the land where the great heights of poetry and music had
just been reached. Where the high aim of a Beethoven and a Goethe had
been proclaimed, arose a Wagner to preach the gospel of brute fate and
nature, where love was the involuntary sequence of mechanical device and
ended in inevitable death, all overthrowing the heroic idea that teems
throughout the classic scores, crowned in a greatest symphony in praise
of "Joy."

Such was the intrinsic content of a "Tristan and Isolde" and the whole
"Nibelungen-Ring," and it was uttered with a sensuous wealth of sound
and a passionate strain of melody that (without special greatness of its
own) dazzled and charmed the world in the dramatic setting of mediaeval
legend. The new harmonic style of Wagner, there is good reason to
suppose, was in reality first conceived by Liszt, whose larger works,
written about the middle of the century, have but lately come to
light.[A] In correspondence with this moral mutiny was the complete
revolt from classic art-tradition: melody (at least in theory), the
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
coinci