, caught in the pugnacity of his
youth and the first impetuosity of his prodigious artistic power by
the first fierce attack of the New Reformation, gave no quarter to
the antagonist of his hero. His Wotan, whom he calls Jupiter, is the
almighty fiend into whom the Englishman's God had degenerated during two
centuries of ignorant Bible worship and shameless commercialism. He is
Alberic, Fafnir Loki and the ambitious side of Wotan all rolled into
one melodramatic demon who is finally torn from his throne and hurled
shrieking into the abyss by a spirit representing that conception
of Eternal Law which has been replaced since by the conception of
Evolution. Wagner, an older, more experienced man than the Shelley of
1819, understood Wotan and pardoned him, separating him tenderly from
all the compromising alliances to which Shelley fiercely held him;
making the truth and heroism which overthrow him the children of his
inmost heart; and representing him as finally acquiescing in and working
for his own supersession and annihilation. Shelley, in his later works,
is seen progressing towards the same tolerance, justice, and humility
of spirit, as he advanced towards the middle age he never reached. But
there is no progress from Shelley to Wagner as regards the panacea,
except that in Wagner there is a certain shadow of night and death come
on it: nay, even a clear opinion that the supreme good of love is that
it so completely satisfies the desire for life, that after it the Will
to Live ceases to trouble us, and we are at last content to achieve the
highest happiness of death.

This reduction of the panacea to absurdity was not forced upon Shelley,
because the love which acts as a universal solvent in his Prometheus
Unbound is a sentiment of affectionate benevolence which has nothing to
do with sexual passion. It might, and in fact does exist in the absence
of any sexual interest whatever. The words mercy and kindness connote it
less ambiguously than the word love. But Wagner sought always for some
point of contact between his ideas and the physical senses, so that
people might not only think or imagine them in the eighteenth century
fashion, but see them on the stage, hear them from the orchestra, and
feel them through the infection of passionate emotion. Dr. Johnson
kicking the stone to confute Berkeley is not more bent on common-sense
concreteness than Wagner: on all occasions he insists on the need
for sensuous apprehension