The music is always expressive, the choruses very beautiful, the
orchestration skillful, but the whole is fatiguing and excessive, too
full, too laborious. When all is said, it lacks gayety, ease,
naturalness and vivacity--it has no smile, no wings. Poetically one is
fascinated, but one's musical enjoyment is hesitating, often doubtful,
and one recalls nothing but the general impression--Wagner's music
represents the abdication of the self, and the emancipation of all the
forces once under its rule. It is a falling back into Spinozism--the
triumph of fatality. This music has its root and its fulcrum in two
tendencies of the epoch, materialism and socialism--each of them
ignoring the true value of the human personality, and drowning it in the
totality of nature or of society.
June 17, 1857. (Vandoeuvres).--I have just followed Maine de Biran from
his twenty-eighth to his forty-eighth year by means of his journal, and
a crowd of thoughts have besieged me. Let me disengage those which
concern myself. In this eternal self-chronicler and observer I seem to
see myself reflected with all my faults, indecision, discouragement,
over-dependence on sympathy, difficulty of finishing, with my habit of
watching myself feel and live, with my growing incapacity for practical
action, with my aptitude for psychological study.
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