, so penetrating, is his speech, that one becomes aware of the
meaning without thinking of the words that convey it. Nietzsche is
right when he says Wagner summarises modernism; but he forgot that
Wagner summarises it because he largely helped to create it, to make
it what it is, by this power of transferring his thought and emotion
bodily, as it were, to other minds, and that he will remain modern for
long to come, inasmuch as he moulds the thought of the successive
generations as they arise.

"Tristan and Isolda" is one of the world's half-dozen stupendous
appeals in music to the emotional side of man's nature; it stands with
the "Matthew" Passion, the Choral Symphony, and Mozart's Requiem,
rather than with "Don Giovanni," or "Fidelio," or "Tannhaeuser;" like
the Requiem, the Choral Symphony, the "Matthew" Passion, there are
pages of unspeakable beauty in it; but, like them also, its main
object is not to please the ear or the eye, but to communicate an
overwhelming emotion. That emotion is the passion of love--the
elemental desire of the man for the woman, of the woman for the man;
and to the expression of this, not in one phase alone, like Gounod in
his "Faust," but in all its phases. It is a glorification of sex
attraction: nevertheless, it refutes Tannhaeuser or Venus as completely
as it refutes Wolfram or Elizabeth. Tannhaeuser, we know, would have it
that love was wholly of the flesh, Wolfram that it was solely of the
spirit. That there is no love which does not commence in the desiring
of the flesh, and none, not even the most spiritual, which does not
consist entirely in sex passion, that the two, spiritual and fleshly
love, are merely different phases of one and the same passion, Wagner
had learnt when he came to create "Tristan." And in "Tristan" we
commence with a fleshly love, as intense as that Tannhaeuser knew; but
by reason of its own energy, its own excess, it rises to a spiritual
love as free from grossness as any dreamed of by Elizabeth or Wolfram,
and far surpassing theirs in exaltation. This change he depicted in a
way as simple as it was marvellous, so that as we watch the drama and
listen to the music we experience it within ourselves and our inner
selves are revealed to us. Nothing comes between us and the passions
expressed. Tristan and Isolda are passion in its purest integrity,
naked souls vibrating with the keenest emotion; they have no
idiosyncrasies to be sympathised with, to be allowed fo