sture. The vortex of steel and
glass and gold, the black express-packets plowing the seven seas, the
smoking trains piercing the bowels of the mountains and connecting
cities vibrant with hordes of business men, the telegraph wires setting
the world aquiver with their incessant reports, the whole sinister
glittering faery of gain and industry and dominion, seemed to tread and
soar and sound and blare and swell with just such rhythm, such grandeur,
such intoxication. Mountains that had been sealed thousands of years had
split open again and let emerge a race of laboring, fuming giants. The
dense primeval forests, the dragon-haunted German forests, were sprung
up again, fresh and cool and unexplored, nurturing a mighty and
fantastic animality. Wherever one gazed, the horned Siegfried, the man
born of the earth, seemed near once more, ready to clear and rejuvenate
the globe with his healthy instinct, to shatter the old false barriers
and pierce upward to fulfilment and power. Mankind, waking from
immemorial sleep, thought for the first time to perceive the sun in
heaven, to greet the creating light. And where was this music more
immanent than in the New World, in America, that essentialization of the
entire age? By what environment was it more justly appreciated, Saxon
though the accents of its recitative might be? Germany had borne Wagner
because Germany had an uninterrupted flow of musical expression. But had
the North American continent been able to produce musical art, it could
have produced none more indigenous, more really autochthonous, than that
of Richard Wagner. Whitman was right when he termed these scores "the
music of the 'Leaves.'" For nowhere did the forest of the Niebelungen
flourish more lushly, more darkly, than upon the American coasts and
mountains and plains. From the towers and walls of New York there fell a
breath, a grandiloquent language, a stridency and a glory, that were
Wagner's indeed. His regal commanding blasts, his upsweeping marching
violins, his pompous and majestic orchestra, existed in the American
scene. The very masonry and river-spans, the bursting towns, the fury
and expansiveness of existence shed his idiom, shadowed forth his proud
processionals, his resonant gold, his tumultuous syncopations and
blazing brass and cymbals and volcanically inundating melody; appeared
to be struggling to achieve the thing that was his art. American life
seemed to be calling for this music in order that