In front of him hangs a piece of daubed cloth, which serves as a cloud upon which his splendid chariot may rest....  The theatre is furnished with little square trap-doors which, opening as occasion requires, show that the demons can be let loose from the cellars.  When the demons have to fly in the air, dummies of brown cloth are substituted, or sometimes real chimney-sweeps, who swing in the air, suspended by cords, until they are gloriously lost in the rag sky....

“But you can have no idea of the dreadful cries and roarings with which the theatre resounds....  What is so extraordinary is that these howlings are almost the only things that the audience applaud.  By the way they clap their hands one would take them to be a lot of deaf creatures, who were so delighted to catch a few piercing sounds now and then that they wanted the actors to do them all over again.  I am quite sure that people applaud the bawling of an actress at the opera as they would a mountebank’s feats of skill at a fair—­one suffers while they are going on, but one is so delighted to see them finish without an accident that one willingly demonstrates one’s pleasure....  With these beautiful sounds, as true as they are sweet, those of the orchestra blend very worthily.  Imagine an unending clatter of instruments without any melody; a lingering and endless groaning among the bass parts; and the whole the most mournful and boring thing that I ever heard in my life.  I could not put up with it for half an hour without getting a violent headache.

“All this forms a sort of psalmody, possessing neither tune nor time.  But if by any chance a lively air is played, there is a general stamping; the audience is set in motion, and follows, with a great deal of trouble and noise, some performer in the orchestra.  Delighted to feel for a few moments the rhythm that is so lacking, they torment the ear, the voice, the arms, the legs, and all the body, to chase after a tune that is ever ready to escape them....”

I have quoted this rather long passage to show how the impression made by one of Rameau’s operas on his contemporaries resembled that made by Wagner on his enemies.  It was not without reason that Rameau was said to be Wagner’s forerunner, as Rousseau was Tolstoy’s forerunner.

In reality, it was not against Siegfried itself that Tolstoy’s criticism was directed; and Tolstoy was closer than he thought to the spirit of this drama.  Is not Siegfried the heroic incarnation of a free and healthy man, sprung directly from Nature?  In a sketch of Siegfried, written in 1848, Wagner says: 

“To follow the impulses of my heart is my supreme law; what I can accomplish by obeying my instincts is what I ought to do.  Is that voice of instinct cursed or blessed?  I do not know; but I yield to it, and never force myself to run counter to my inclination.”

Wagner fought against civilisation by quite other methods than those employed by Tolstoy; and if the efforts of the two were equally great, the practical result is—­one must really say it—­as poor on one side as on the other.