He slowly came to admit that
Beethoven had partly become intelligible to him, but he was the
more inclined to think that Beethoven must be much overrated as a
musician, to be so easily followed. This could not be called
education, for he had never so much as listened to the music. He
had been thinking of other things. Mere mechanical repetition of
certain sounds had stuck to his unconscious mind. Beethoven might
have this power, but not Wagner, or at all events not the Wagner
later than "Tannhauser." Near forty years passed before he
reached the "Gotterdammerung."
One might talk of the revival of an atrophied sense -- the
mechanical reaction of a sleeping consciousness -- but no other
sense awoke. His sense of line and color remained as dull as
ever, and as far as ever below the level of an artist. His
metaphysical sense did not spring into life, so that his mind
could leap the bars of German expression into sympathy with the
idealities of Kant and Hegel. Although he insisted that his faith
in German thought and literature was exalted, he failed to
approach German thought, and he shed never a tear of emotion over
the pages of Goethe and Schiller. When his father rashly ventured
from time to time to write him a word of common sense, the young
man would listen to no sense at all, but insisted that Berlin was
the best of educations in the best of Germanies; yet, when, at
last, April came, and some genius suggested a tramp in Thuringen,
his heart sang like a bird; he realized what a nightmare he had
suffered, and he made up his mind that, wherever else he might,
in the infinities of space and time, seek for education, it
should not be again in Berlin.
Pages:
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138