The full impact of these reforms, the full might of Wagner, we of our
generation doubtlessly never felt. They could have been felt only by the
generation to whom Wagner first disclosed himself, the generation that
attained maturity between 1850 and 1880. It was upon the men of those
days that he did his full work of destruction and revival. It was in
them he battered down walls. It was them he made to hear afresh, to
stretch and grow in the effort to comprehend him. At the moment we
encountered Wagner, his work was already something of a closed
experience, something we were able to accept readily and with a certain
ease because it had been accepted and assimilated by an entire world,
and become part of the human organism. Its power was already slightly
diminished. For instance, Wagner the musician was no longer able to make
either Wagner the poet or Wagner the philosopher exist for us as they
existed for the men of the earlier generation. Only Houston Stewart
Chamberlain still persisted in trying to stand upon the burning deck
whence all the rest had fled. For us, it was obvious that if Wagner's
work throned mightily it was because of his music, and oftentimes in
spite of his verse and his doctrine. For us, it was a commonplace that
dramatic movement and the filling up of scenes by the introduction of
characters who propose pointless riddles to one another and explain at
length what their names are not, are incompatible; that poetry does not
consist in disguising commonplace expressions in archaic and
alliterative and extravagant dress; that Wotan displays no grasp of the
essentials of Schopenhauer's philosophy when he insists on dubbing
Brunhilde his Will.
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