But this may be the result of growing older; and if I do not recognise
the Wagner of other days, it is perhaps because I do not recognise my
former self. A work of art, and above all a work of musical art, changes
with ourselves. _Siegfried_, for example, is for me no longer full of
mystery. The qualities in it that strike me to-day are its cheerful
vigour, its clearness of form, its virile force and freedom, and the
extraordinary healthiness of the hero, and, indeed, of the whole work.
I sometimes think of poor Nietzsche and his passion for destroying the
things he loved, and how he sought in others the decadence that was
really in himself. He tried to embody this decadence in Wagner, and, led
away by his flights of fancy and his mania for paradox (which would be
laughable if one did not remember that his whims were not hatched in
hours of happiness), he denied Wagner his most obvious qualities--his
vigour, his determination, his unity, his logic, and his power of
progress. He amused himself by comparing Wagner's style with that of
Goncourt, by making him--with amusing irony--a great miniaturist
painter, a poet of half-tones, a musician of affectations and
melancholy, so delicate and effeminate in style that "after him all
other musicians seemed too robust.
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