generation to whom Wagner first disclosed himself, the generation that
attained maturity between 1850 and 1880. It was upon the men of those
days that he did his full work of destruction and revival. It was in
them he battered down walls. It was them he made to hear afresh, to
stretch and grow in the effort to comprehend him. At the moment we
encountered Wagner, his work was already something of a closed
experience, something we were able to accept readily and with a certain
ease because it had been accepted and assimilated by an entire world,
and become part of the human organism. Its power was already slightly
diminished. For instance, Wagner the musician was no longer able to make
either Wagner the poet or Wagner the philosopher exist for us as they
existed for the men of the earlier generation. Only Houston Stewart
Chamberlain still persisted in trying to stand upon the burning deck
whence all the rest had fled. For us, it was obvious that if Wagner's
work throned mightily it was because of his music, and oftentimes in
spite of his verse and his doctrine. For us, it was a commonplace that
dramatic movement and the filling up of scenes by the introduction of
characters who propose pointless riddles to one another and explain at
length what their names are not, are incompatible; that poetry does not
consist in disguising commonplace expressions in archaic and
alliterative and extravagant dress; that Wotan displays no grasp of the
essentials of Schopenhauer's philosophy when he insists on dubbing
Brunhilde his Will.

And yet, whatever the difference, most of Wagner's might was still in
him when first we came to know his music. The spell in which he had
bound the generation that preceded ours was still powerful. For us,
too, there occurred the moments when Siegfried's cavernous forest depths
first breathed on us, when for the first time "Die Meistersinger"
flaunted above the heads of all the world the gonfalon of art, when for
the first time we embarked upon the shoreless golden sea of "Tristan und
Isolde." For us, too, the name of Richard Wagner rang and sounded above
all other musical names. For us, too, he was a sort of sovereign lord of
music. His work appeared the climax toward which music had aspired
through centuries, and from which it must of necessity descend again.
Other, and perhaps purer work than his, existed, we knew. But it seemed
remote and less compelling, for all its perfection. New music would
arriv