moved them; it was because for the moment that Baireuth to Germans meant Germany.  From Berlin, from Dresden, from Frankfurt, from Luxemburg, from a hundred towns those who were most typically German, whether high or low, rich or poor, made their joyous pilgrimage.  Joy and solemnity, exultation and the yearning that could never be satisfied drew them here.  And even as music was in Michael’s heart, so Germany was there also.  They were the people who understood; they did not go to the opera as a be-diamonded interlude between a dinner and a dance; they came to this dreadful little town, the discomforts of which, the utter provinciality of which was transformed into the air of the heavenly Jerusalem, as Hermann Falbe had said, because their souls were fed here with wine and manna.  He would find the same thing at Munich, so Falbe had told him, the next week.

The loves and the tragedies of the great titanic forces that saw the making of the world; the dreams and the deeds of the masters of Nuremberg; above all, sacrifice and enlightenment and redemption of the soul; how, except by music, could these be made manifest?  It was the first and only and final alchemy that could by its magic transformation give an answer to the tremendous riddles of consciousness; that could lift you, though tearing and making mincemeat of you, to the serenity of the Pisgah-top, whence was seen the promised land.  It, in itself, was reality; and the door-keeper who admitted you into that enchanted realm was the spirit of Germany.  Not France, with its little, morbid shiverings, and its meat-market called love; not Italy, with its melodious declamations and tawdry tunes; not Russia even, with the wind of its impenetrable winters, its sense of joys snatched from its eternal frosts gave admittance there; but Germany, “deep, patient Germany,” that sprang from upland hamlets, and flowed down with ever-broadening stream into the illimitable ocean.

Here, then, were two of the initiations that had come, with the swiftness of the spate in Alpine valleys at the melting of the snow, upon Michael; his own liberty, namely, and this new sense of music.  He had groped, he felt now, like a blind man in that direction, guided only by his instinct, and on a sudden the scales had fallen from his eyes, and he knew that his instinct had guided him right.  But not less epoch-making had been the dawn of friendship.  Throughout the week his intimacy with Hermann Falbe had developed, shooting up like an aloe flower, and rising into sunlight above the mists of his own self-occupied shyness, which had so darkly beset him all life long.  He had given the best that he knew of himself to his cousin, but all the time there had never quite been absent from his mind his sense of inferiority, a sort of aching wonder why he could not be more like Francis, more careless, more capable of enjoyment, more of a normal type.  But with Falbe he was able for the first time to forget himself altogether; he had met