American life
seemed to be calling for this music in order that its vastness, its
madly affluent wealth and multiform power and transcontinental span, its
loud, grandiose promise might attain something like eternal being.
And just as in Wagner's music there sounds the age's cry of material
triumph, so, too, there sounds in it its terrible cry of homesickness.
The energy produced and hurled out over the globe was sucked back again
with no less a force. The time that saw the victory of industrialism saw
as well the revival or the attempted revival of medieval modes of
feeling. Cardinal Newman was as typical a figure of nineteenth-century
life as was Balzac. The men who had created the new world felt within
themselves a passionate desire to escape out of the present into the
past once more. They felt themselves victors and vanquished, powerful
and yet bereft and forlorn. And Wagner's music expresses with equal
veracity both tides. Just as his music is brave with a sense of outward
power, so, too, it is sick with a sense of inner unfulfilment. There is
no longing more consuming, no homesickness more terrible, no straining
after the laving, immersing floods of unconsciousness more burning than
that which utters itself through this music. There are passages, whole
hours of his, that are like the straining of a man to return into the
darkness of the mothering night out of which he came.
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