In itself this philosophy had been more of a passing phase (even as
Schopenhauer is lost in the chain of ethical sages) but for its strange
coincidence with the Wagnerian music. The accident of this alliance gave
it an overwhelming power in Germany, where it soon threatened to corrupt
all the arts, banishing idealism from the land of its special
haunts.[A] The ultimate weakness of the Wagnerian philosophy is that it
finds in fatalism an excuse for the surrender of heroic virtue,--not in
the spirit of a tragic truth, but in a glorification of the senses; just
as in Wagner's final work, the ascetic, sinless type becomes a figure
almost of ridicule, devoid of human reality. It is significant that with
the revival of a sound art, fraught with resolute aspiration, is
imminent a return to an idealistic system of philosophy.
[Footnote A: In literature this movement is most marked, as may be seen
by contrasting the tone of Goethe with that of Sudermann; by noting the
decadence from the stories of a Chamisseau and Immermann to those of a
Gottfried Keller; from the novels of Freytag to the latest of Frenssen
and Arthur Schnitzler; from the poems of Heine to those of Hoffmansthal,
author of the text of Strauss' later operas.
Or, contrast merely the two typical dramas of love, Goethe's "Faust" and
Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde."]
In the musical art even of Germany the triumph was never complete. The
famous feud of Brahms and Wagner partisans marked the alignment of the
classical and radical traditions.
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