in the second act of the Valkyrie, or to that in the third act between Wotan and Brünnhilde, where the ruler of the gods explains at interminable length to his wife, and then to his daughter, the origins and dark features of the situation. All that his speeches add to what we know already, to what has happened before our eyes, or to what we have been told, is a peculiar sort of obscure and barren commentary. Germans perhaps take pleasure in these passages of long drawn out sham profundity. Whatever power the heavy musical work expended on these passages may often possess, there is for Frenchmen nothing more oppressive.
Such then are the substance and basic arrangements that Wagner has set himself to express in music. It is obvious that the elements which we have found in them lent themselves very unequally to musical expression, and that some of them were quite incapable of moving or inspiring the imagination of a musician, whoever he might be. To have musical ideas it is first necessary to have genius; after that an exaltation of soul is required which mental pictures and sentiments alone can produce. Wagner's theogonic and cosmogonic conceptions, his theorising day dreams on the origins, history and future of humanity, society and civilisation:—all these "ideas" which embrace everything and grasp nothing, their vacillating system which varied according as he found himself under the influence of the revolution of 1848, or under the influence of a royal friendship,—according as he had been reading Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Gobineau or Gleizès (yes, Gleizès, a French vegetarian theorist who made Wagner a convinced vegetarian, as he has indicated symbolically in an episode of Parsifal)—all
