“The public art of the Greeks, which reached its zenith in their tragedy, was the expression of the deepest and the noblest principles of the people’s consciousness; with _us_ the deepest and noblest principle of man’s consciousness is the direct opposite of this, namely, the denunciation of our public art. To the Greeks the production of a tragedy was a religious festival, where the gods bestirred themselves upon the stage and bestowed on men their wisdom; _our_ evil conscience has so lowered the theatre in public estimation that it is the duty of the police to prevent the stage from meddling in the slightest with religion; a circumstance as characteristic of our religion as of our art. Within the ample boundaries of the Grecian amphitheatre the whole populace was wont to witness the performances: in our superior theatres loll only the affluent classes. The Greeks sought the instruments of their art in the products of the highest associate culture: we seek ours in the deepest social barbarism. The education of the Greek, from his earliest youth, made himself the subject of his own artistic treatment and artistic enjoyment in body as in spirit: our foolish education, fashioned for the most part to fit us merely for future industrial gain, gives us a ridiculous, and withal arrogant, satisfaction with our own unfitness for art, and forces us to seek the subjects of any kind of artistic amusement outside ourselves.”[13] Making due allowance for the heated utterance of one to whom the questions at issue had such grave personal importance as to prevent judicial calmness of speech, we cannot fail to perceive that Wagner had penetrated to the essence of the difference between the stage of Greece and that of Europe in his day. The compact union of the arts tributary to the stage had been at once the outcome and the embodiment of that intensely national art-feeling which he contrasted so bitterly with the modern European lack of art-feeling, as he saw it. With the downfall of the Athenian, state tragedy fell also, and “art became less and less the expression of the public conscience.” In Wagner’s mind this downfall resembled that of the tower of Babel, with its subsequent dispersion of the tribes. The dramatic union of arts was dismembered. Poetry, painting, music, rhetoric, all separated, and each went its own way in pursuit of its own ends. No one who has reviewed the history of the fine arts in the Middle Ages can fail to have observed how blindly they seemed to grope their way toward the gates of truth until the guiding light of the Renaissance, with its new revelation of the classic antiquity, was turned upon Italy by the scholars driven out of Constantinople by the fall of Rome’s Eastern Empire. Wagner has reviewed the dissevered condition of the arts and their employment as means, and not ends, in a few terse sentences in the essay already quoted; and then he says:—