d; and in this music we sink into depths of
soul and float upon sullen and mysterious tides of life--those which
roll beneath the phase of life which we call existence. But the vulgarly
vaunted Good Friday music did not deceive him; at the second or third
time of hearing he had perceived its insincerity. It was very beautiful
music, but in such a situation sincerity was essential. The airs of this
mock redeemer were truly unbearable, and the abjection of Kundry before
this stuffed Christ revolted him. But the obtusely religious could not
fail to be moved; the appeal of the chaste kiss, with little sexual
cries all the while in the orchestra, could not but stir the vulgar
heart to infinite delight, and the art was so dexterously beautiful that
the intelligent were deceived. The artiste and the vulgarian held each
other's hands for the first time; they gasped a mutual wonder at their
own perception and their unsuspected nobility of soul. "Parsifal," he
declared, with true Celtic love of exaggeration, "to be the oiliest
flattery ever poured down the open throat of a liquorish humanity."

As he spoke such sentences his face would light up with malicious
humour, and he was so interested in the subject he discussed that his
listener was forced to follow him. It was only in such moments of
artistic discussion that his real soul floated up to the surface, and
he, as it were, achieved himself. He knew, too, how to play with his
listener, to wheedle and beguile him, for after a particularly
aggressive phrase he would drop into a minor key, and his criticism
would suddenly become serious and illuminative. To him "Parsifal" was a
fresco, a decoration painted by a man whose true genius it was to reveal
the most intimate secrets of the soul, to tell the enigmatic soul of
longing as Leonardo da Vinci had done. But he had been led from the true
path of his genius into the false one of a rivalry with Veronese. Only
where Wagner is confiding a soul's secret is he interesting, and in
"Tannhaeuser," in this first flower of his dramatic and musical genius,
he had perhaps told the story of his own soul more truly, more sincerely
than elsewhere. To do that was the highest art. Sooner or later the
sublimest imaginations pale before the simple telling of a personal
truth, for the most personal truth is likewise the most universal.
"Tannhaeuser" is the story of humanity, for what is the human story if it
isn't the pursuit of an ideal?

And this