THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
not produce that feeling of perfectly overpowering exaltation. No, it was all these things together, scenery, action, and music, that transported us into an atmosphere of—shall I so call it?—religious, devotional fervor, lifting us high above all the prosy, commonplace actualities of life, into the sphere of the purely sublime, the holy, and unloosing all the craving for faith and adoration that may have been dormant in the soul. We were truly and profoundly pious as we sat there gazing and listening—pious beyond the control of our feelings. Our hearts were full of a strange joyfulness, heaving upward with those grand harmonies, as they swelled and rose toward the mystery of heaven.
Beyond comparison, no production of art has ever touched me so wondrously, so supernaturally, as the first act of “Parsifal.” The effect was the same when I saw it again and it lacked the element of surprise. Nor have I ever met anyone who has seen and heard it and has altogether resisted its charm. And this was the last and crowning achievement of a most astonishing career. In the highest degree astonishing, it may well be said, was the success of a man who in elaborate treatises put forth the systematic theories of a truly revolutionary character, upon which his works of imagination had been, or were to be, constructed, giving the why and wherefore of everything, the ends he had in view, and the means to be used for their accomplishment, and who, thus assailing generally accepted principles and notions with a supreme, almost insolent confidence in his own power, had prejudiced almost the whole artistic world against himself. Yet Wagner finally won a triumph which no musical composer before him ever had dared to dream of; for he substantially said to princes and potentates, to the leaders in literature and art, and to mankind generally: “I am no longer to peddle my productions among you. I have selected,
[ 63 ]
