In “Parsifal” there was only the second act which he could admire without enormous reservations.  The writing in the chorus of the “Flower Maidens” was, of course, irresistible—­little cries, meaningless by themselves, but, when brought together, they created an enchanted garden, marvellous and seductive.  But it was the duet that followed that compelled his admiration.  Music hardly ever more than a recitative, hardly ever breaking into an air, and yet so beautiful!  There the notes merely served to lift the words, to impregnate them with more terrible and subtle meaning; and the subdued harmonies enfolded them in an atmosphere, a sensual mood; and in this music we sink into depths of soul and float upon sullen and mysterious tides of life—­those which roll beneath the phase of life which we call existence.  But the vulgarly vaunted Good Friday music did not deceive him; at the second or third time of hearing he had perceived its insincerity.  It was very beautiful music, but in such a situation sincerity was essential.  The airs of this mock redeemer were truly unbearable, and the abjection of Kundry before this stuffed Christ revolted him.  But the obtusely religious could not fail to be moved; the appeal of the chaste kiss, with little sexual cries all the while in the orchestra, could not but stir the vulgar heart to infinite delight, and the art was so dexterously beautiful that the intelligent were deceived.  The artiste and the vulgarian held each other’s hands for the first time; they gasped a mutual wonder at their own perception and their unsuspected nobility of soul.  “Parsifal,” he declared, with true Celtic love of exaggeration, “to be the oiliest flattery ever poured down the open throat of a liquorish humanity.”

As he spoke such sentences his face would light up with malicious humour, and he was so interested in the subject he discussed that his listener was forced to follow him.  It was only in such moments of artistic discussion that his real soul floated up to the surface, and he, as it were, achieved himself.  He knew, too, how to play with his listener, to wheedle and beguile him, for after a particularly aggressive phrase he would drop into a minor key, and his criticism would suddenly become serious and illuminative.  To him “Parsifal” was a fresco, a decoration painted by a man whose true genius it was to reveal the most intimate secrets of the soul, to tell the enigmatic soul of longing as Leonardo da Vinci had done.  But he had been led from the true path of his genius into the false one of a rivalry with Veronese.  Only where Wagner is confiding a soul’s secret is he interesting, and in “Tannhaeuser,” in this first flower of his dramatic and musical genius, he had perhaps told the story of his own soul more truly, more sincerely than elsewhere.  To do that was the highest art.  Sooner or later the sublimest imaginations pale before the simple telling of a personal truth, for the most personal truth is likewise the most universal.  “Tannhaeuser” is the story of humanity, for what is the human story if it isn’t the pursuit of an ideal?