In _Die
Meistersinger_, in _Tristan_, and in _Siegfried_, we went to find the
joy, the love, and the vigour that we so lacked.
At the time when I was feeling Wagner's seductiveness so strongly there
were always some carping people among my elders ready to quench my
admiration and say with a superior smile: "That is nothing. One can't
judge Wagner at a concert. You must hear him in the opera-house at
Bayreuth." Since then I have been several times to Bayreuth; I have seen
Wagner's works performed in Berlin, in Dresden, in Munich, and in other
German towns, but I have never again felt the old intoxication. People
are wrong to pretend that closer acquaintance with a fine work adds to
one's enjoyment of it. It may throw light upon it, but it nips one's
imagination and dispels the mystery. The puzzling fragments one hears at
concerts will take on splendid proportions on account of all the mind
adds to them. That epic poem of the _Niebelungen_ was once like a forest
in our dreams, where strange and awful beings flashed before our vision
and then vanished. Later on, when we had explored all its paths, we
discovered that order and reason reigned in the midst of this apparent
jungle; and when we came to know the least wrinkle on the faces of its
inhabitants, the confusion and emotion of other days no longer filled
us.
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