mained for Wagner, subject to slight variations, a definite tendency, has however no originality. It gives no evidence of any personal effort of reflection. It is a beaten track, but he follows it with as much feverish ardour as if he had hewn it out by his own initiative. He embraces his ideas with passion, but he is not in any sense their creator. He received them from the ambient air. In German philosophic and literary circles of the nineteenth century there were no ideas more widely received; the source from which he draws them occupied in German thought of that century the position of an ordinary commonplace. That commonplace consists in what might be called the cult of the primitive, in the identification of the primitive with the ideal. The supposition, or the dream, is that all the creations of thought and of the human soul, all the instutitions of human life, poetry, religion, morality, law, once had a primitive state, a primitive form, superior to all the forms they have subsequently assumed, which is the excelling type by which all the rest must be judged, and to which a return must be made.
Considered in itself this ideology is the cloudiest and vainest in the world; there is nothing corresponding to it in the reality of things. The primitive state is an entity devoid of sense. But what has no sense as an expression of the real may have some as the expression of certain tendencies. And it is easy to recognise in the ideology of the primitive the expression of the ethical and national tendencies, aspirations and pretensions of modern Germany. Up to the end of the eighteenth century Germany had felt herself and recognised herself to be a backwater of the traditional European culture of which
