But a still larger view of the whole temper of art in Europe of the later century is needed.  We wander here beyond the fine distinctions of musical forms.  A new wave of feeling had come over the world that violently affected all processes of thought.  And strangely, it was strongest in the land where the great heights of poetry and music had just been reached.  Where the high aim of a Beethoven and a Goethe had been proclaimed, arose a Wagner to preach the gospel of brute fate and nature, where love was the involuntary sequence of mechanical device and ended in inevitable death, all overthrowing the heroic idea that teems throughout the classic scores, crowned in a greatest symphony in praise of “Joy.”

Such was the intrinsic content of a “Tristan and Isolde” and the whole “Nibelungen-Ring,” and it was uttered with a sensuous wealth of sound and a passionate strain of melody that (without special greatness of its own) dazzled and charmed the world in the dramatic setting of mediaeval legend.  The new harmonic style of Wagner, there is good reason to suppose, was in reality first conceived by Liszt, whose larger works, written about the middle of the century, have but lately come to light.[A] In correspondence with this moral mutiny was the complete revolt from classic art-tradition:  melody (at least in theory), the vital quality of musical form and the true process of a coherent thread, were cast to the winds with earlier poetic ideals.

[Footnote A:  The “Dante” Symphony of Liszt was written between 1847 and 1855; the “Faust” Symphony between 1854 and 1857.  Wagner finished the text of Tristan und Isolde in 1857; the music was not completed until 1859.  In 1863 was published the libretto of the Nibelungen-Ring.  In 1864 Wagner was invited by King Ludwig of Bavaria to complete the work in Munich.]

If it were ever true that a single personality could change an opposite course of thought, it must be held that Richard Wagner, in his own striking and decadent career, comes nearest to such a type.  But he was clearly prompted and reinforced in his philosophy by other men and tendencies of his time.  The realism of a Schopenhauer, which Wagner frankly adopted without its full significance (where primal will finds a redemption in euthanasia), led by a natural course of thought to Nietzsche’s dreams of an overman, who tramples on his kind.

In itself this philosophy had been more of a passing phase (even as Schopenhauer is lost in the chain of ethical sages) but for its strange coincidence with the Wagnerian music.  The accident of this alliance gave it an overwhelming power in Germany, where it soon threatened to corrupt all the arts, banishing idealism from the land of its special haunts.[A] The ultimate weakness of the Wagnerian philosophy is that it finds in fatalism an excuse for the surrender of heroic virtue,—­not in the spirit of a tragic truth, but in a glorification of the senses; just as in Wagner’s final work, the ascetic, sinless type becomes a figure almost of ridicule, devoid of human reality.  It is significant that with the revival of a sound art, fraught with resolute aspiration, is imminent a return to an idealistic system of philosophy.