friends--a power able to guard it during that long period preceding
its future glory, as the masterpiece of this future. Perhaps it was
not possible to steel this belief permanently against doubt, more
particularly when it sought to rise to hopes of immediate results:
suffice it that he derived a tremendous spur from his environment,
which constantly reminded him of a lofty duty ever to be fulfilled.
His work would not have been complete had he handed it to the world
only in the form of silent manuscript. He must make known to the world
what it could not guess in regard to his productions, what was his
alone to reveal--the new style for the execution and presentation of
his works, so that he might set that example which nobody else could
set, and thus establish a tradition of style, not on paper, not by
means of signs, but through impressions made upon the very souls of
men. This duty had become all the more pressing with him, seeing that
precisely in regard to the style of their execution his other works
had meanwhile succumbed to the most insufferable and absurd of fates:
they were famous and admired, yet no one manifested the slightest sign
of indignation when they were mishandled. For, strange to say, whereas
he renounced ever more and more the hope of success among his
contemporaries, owing to his all too thorough knowledge of them, and
disclaimed all desire for power, both "success" and "power" came to
him, or at least everybody told him so. It was in vain that he made
repeated attempts to expose, with the utmost clearness, how worthless
and humiliating such successes were to him: people were so unused to
seeing an artist able to differentiate at all between the effects of
his works that even his most solemn protests were never entirely
trusted. Once he had perceived the relationship existing between our
system of theatres and their success, and the men of his time, his
soul ceased to be attracted by the stage at all. He had no further
concern with aesthetic ecstasies and the exultation of excited crowds,
and he must even have felt angry to see his art being gulped down
indiscriminately by the yawning abyss of boredom and the insatiable
love of distraction. How flat and pointless every effect proved under
these circumstances-- more especially as it was much more a case of
having to minister to one quite insatiable than of cloying the hunger
of a starving man-- Wagner began to perceive from the following
repeated experience: everybody, even the performers and promoters,
regarded his art as nothing more nor less than any other kind of
stage-music, and quite in keeping with the repulsive style of
traditional opera; thanks to the efforts of cultivated conductors, his
works were even cut and hacked about, until, after they had been
bereft of all their spirit, they were held to be nearer the
professional singer's plane. But when people tried to follow Wagner's
instructions to the letter, they proceeded so clumsily and timidly