brown cloth are
substituted, or sometimes real chimney-sweeps, who swing in the
air, suspended by cords, until they are gloriously lost in the rag
sky....

"But you can have no idea of the dreadful cries and roarings with
which the theatre resounds.... What is so extraordinary is that
these howlings are almost the only things that the audience
applaud. By the way they clap their hands one would take them to be
a lot of deaf creatures, who were so delighted to catch a few
piercing sounds now and then that they wanted the actors to do them
all over again. I am quite sure that people applaud the bawling of
an actress at the opera as they would a mountebank's feats of skill
at a fair--one suffers while they are going on, but one is so
delighted to see them finish without an accident that one willingly
demonstrates one's pleasure.... With these beautiful sounds, as
true as they are sweet, those of the orchestra blend very worthily.
Imagine an unending clatter of instruments without any melody; a
lingering and endless groaning among the bass parts; and the whole
the most mournful and boring thing that I ever heard in my life. I
could not put up with it for half an hour without getting a violent
headache.

"All this forms a sort of psalmody, possessing neither tune nor
time. But if by any chance a lively air is played, there is a
general stamping; the audience is set in motion, and follows, with
a great deal of trouble and noise, some performer in the
orchestra. Delighted to feel for a few moments the rhythm that is
so lacking, they torment the ear, the voice, the arms, the legs,
and all the body, to chase after a tune that is ever ready to
escape them...."

I have quoted this rather long passage to show how the impression made
by one of Rameau's operas on his contemporaries resembled that made by
Wagner on his enemies. It was not without reason that Rameau was said to
be Wagner's forerunner, as Rousseau was Tolstoy's forerunner.

In reality, it was not against _Siegfried_ itself that Tolstoy's
criticism was directed; and Tolstoy was closer than he thought to the
spirit of this drama. Is not Siegfried the heroic incarnation of a free
and healthy man, sprung directly from Nature? In a sketch of
_Siegfried_, written in 1848, Wagner says:

"To follow the impulses of my heart is my