its vastness, its
madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its
loud, grandiose promise might attain something like eternal being.

And just as in Wagner's music there sounds the age's cry of material
triumph, so, too, there sounds in it its terrible cry of homesickness.
The energy produced and hurled out over the globe was sucked back again
with no less a force. The time that saw the victory of industrialism saw
as well the revival or the attempted revival of medieval modes of
feeling. Cardinal Newman was as typical a figure of nineteenth-century
life as was Balzac. The men who had created the new world felt within
themselves a passionate desire to escape out of the present into the
past once more. They felt themselves victors and vanquished, powerful
and yet bereft and forlorn. And Wagner's music expresses with equal
veracity both tides. Just as his music is brave with a sense of outward
power, so, too, it is sick with a sense of inner unfulfilment. There is
no longing more consuming, no homesickness more terrible, no straining
after the laving, immersing floods of unconsciousness more burning than
that which utters itself through this music. There are passages, whole
hours of his, that are like the straining of a man to return into the
darkness of the mothering night out of which he came. There is music of
Wagner that makes us feel as though he had been seeking to create great
warm clouds, great scented cloths, wide curtains, as though he had come
to his art to find something in which he could envelop himself
completely, and blot out sun and moon and stars, and sink into oblivion.
For such a healer Tristan, lying dying on the desolate, rockbound coast,
cries through the immortal longing of the music. For such a divine
messenger the wound of Amfortas gapes; for such a redeemer Kundry,
driven through the world by scorching winds, yearns. His lovers come
toward each other, seeking in each other the night, the descent into the
fathomless dark. For them sex is the return, the complete forgetfulness.
Through each of them there sounds the insistent cry:

"Frau Minne will
Es werde Nacht!"

There is no tenderness, no awareness of each other, in these men and
women. There is only the fierce, impersonal longing for utter
consumption, the extinction of the flaming torch, complete merging in
the Absolute, the weaving All. In each of them, desire for the void
mounts into a gigantic, mon