the flute badly, and so he began to blow his horn.  The scene is intolerable, and there is not the least trace of music in it.  I was annoyed to see three thousand people round about me, listening submissively to this absurdity and dutifully admiring it.

“With some courage I managed to wait for the next scene—­Siegfried’s fight with the dragon.  There were roarings and flames of fire and brandishings of the sword.  But I could not stand it any longer; and I fled out of the theatre with a feeling of disgust that I have not yet forgotten.”

I admit I cannot read this delightful criticism without laughing; and it does not affect me painfully like Nietzsche’s pernicious and morbid irony.  It used to be a grief to me that two men whom I loved with an equal affection, and whom I reverenced as the finest spirits in Europe, remained strangers and hostile to each other.  I could not bear the thought that a genius, hopelessly misunderstood by the crowd, should be bent on making his solitude more bitter and narrow by refusing, with a sort of jealous waywardness, to be reconciled to his equals, or to offer them the hand of friendship.  But now I think that perhaps it was better so.  The first virtue of genius is sincerity.  If Nietzsche had to go out of his way not to understand Wagner, it is natural, on the other hand, that Wagner should be a closed book to Tolstoy; it would be almost surprising if it were otherwise.  Each one has his own part to play, and has no need to change it.  Wagner’s wonderful dreams and magic intuition of the inner life are not less valuable to us than Tolstoy’s pitiless truth, in which he exposes modern society and tears away the veil of hypocrisy with which she covers herself.  So I admire Siegfried, and at the same time enjoy Tolstoy’s satire; for I like the latter’s sturdy humour, which is one of the most striking features of his realism, and which, as he himself noticed, makes him closely resemble Rousseau.  Both men show us an ultra-refined civilisation, and both are uncompromising apostles of a return to nature.

Tolstoy’s rough banter recalls Rousseau’s sarcasm about an opera of Rameau’s.  In the Nouvelle Heloise, he rails in a similar fashion against the sadly fantastic performances at the theatre.  It was, even then, a question of monsters, “of dragons animated by a blockhead of a Savoyard, who had not enough spirit for the beast.”

“They assured me that they had a tremendous lot of machinery to make all this movement, and they offered several times to show it to me; but I felt no curiosity about little effects achieved by great efforts....  The sky is represented by some blue rags suspended from sticks and cords, like a laundry display....  The chariots of the gods and goddesses are made of four joists in a frame, suspended by a thick rope, as a swing might be.  Then a plank is stuck across the joists, and on this is seated a god.