had need of that music it was not because it was
death to us, but life. Cramped by the artificiality of a town, far from
action, or nature, or any strong or real life, we expanded under the
influence of this noble music--music which flowed from a heart filled
with understanding of the world and the breath of Nature. 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.

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