Paris coquetted with
catastrophe as though it were an old mistress -- faced it almost
gaily as she had done so often, for they were acquainted since
Rome began to ravage Europe; while New York met it with a glow of
fascinated horror, like an inevitable earthquake, and heard
Ternina announce it with conviction that made nerves quiver and
thrill as they had long ceased to do under the accents of popular
oratory proclaiming popular virtue. Flattery had lost its charm,
but the Fluch-motif went home.
Adams had been carried with the tide till Brunhilde had become
a habit and Ternina an ally. He too had played with anarchy;
though not with socialism, which, to young men who nourished
artistic emotions under the dome of the Pantheon, seemed
hopelessly bourgeois, and lowest middle-class. Bay Lodge and Joe
Stickney had given birth to the wholly new and original party of
Conservative Christian Anarchists, to restore true poetry under
the inspiration of the "Gotterdammerung." Such a party saw no
inspiration in Baireuth, where landscape, history, and audience
were -- relatively -- stodgy, and where the only emotion was a
musical dilettantism that the master had abhorred.
Yet Baireuth still amused even a conservative Christian
anarchist who cared as little as "Grane, mein Ross," whether the
singers sang false, and who came only to learn what Wagner had
supposed himself to mean.
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