of the will to live, the conquering of all desire—­that the highest happiness is the achievement of nirvana, nothingness.  This conception finds its highest expression in the quietism and indifferentism of the old Brahmanic religion (if such it can be called), in which holiness was to be obtained by speculative contemplation, which seems to me the quintessence of selfishness.  In the reformed Brahmanism called Buddhism, there appeared along with the old principle of self-erasure a compassionate sympathy for others.  Asceticism was not put aside, but regulated and ordered, wrought into a communal system.  It was purged of some of its selfishness by appreciation of the loveliness of compassionate love as exemplified in the life of Cakya-Muni and those labors which made him one of the many redeemers and saviours of which Hindu literature is full.  Something of this was evidently in the mind of Wagner as long ago as 1857, when, working on “Tristan und Isolde,” he for a while harbored the idea of bringing Parzival (as he would have called him then) into the presence of the dying Tristan to comfort him with a sermon on the happiness of renunciation.  Long before Wagner had sketched a tragedy entitled “Jesus of Nazareth,” the hero of which was to be a human philosopher who preached the saving grace of love and sought to redeem his time and people from the domination of conventional law, the offspring of selfishness.  His philosophy was socialism imbued by love.  Before Wagner finished “Tristan und Isolde” he had outlined a Hindu play in which hero and heroine were to accept the doctrines of the Buddha, take the vow of chastity, renounce the union toward which love impelled them, and enter into the holy community.  Blending these two schemes, Wagner created “Parsifal.”  For this drama he could draw the principle of compassionate pity and fellow-suffering from the stories of both Cakya-Muni and Jesus of Nazareth.  But for the sake of a spectacle, I think, he accepted the Christian doctrine of the Atonement with all its mystical elements; for they alone put the necessary symbolical significance into the principal apparatus of the play—­the Holy Grail and the Sacred Lance. {1}

Footnotes: 

{1} “Parsifal” was performed for the first time at the Wagner Festival Theatre in Bayreuth on July 28, 1882.  The prescription that it should belong exclusively to Bayreuth was respected till December 24, 1903, when Heinrich Conried, taking advantage of the circumstance that there was no copyright on the stage representation of the work in America, brought it out with sensational success at the Metropolitan Opera-house in New York.  The principal artists concerned in this and subsequent performances were Milka Ternina (Kundry), Alois Burgstaller (Paraifal), Anton Van Rooy (Amfortas), Robert Blass (Gurnemanz), Otto Gorlitz (Klingsor) and Louise Homer (a voice).

CHAPTER XV