[Footnote 181:  In Guntram one could even believe that he had made up his mind to use a phrase in Tristan, as if he could not find anything better to express passionate desire.]

* * * * *

It is through this heroic side that he may be considered as an inheritor of some of Beethoven’s and Wagner’s thought.  It is this heroic side which makes him a poet—­one of the greatest perhaps in modern Germany, who sees herself reflected in him and in his hero.  Let us consider this hero.

He is an idealist with unbounded faith in the power of the mind and the liberating virtue of art.  This idealism is at first religious, as in Tod und Verklaerung, and tender and compassionate as a woman, and full of youthful illusions, as in Guntram.  Then it becomes vexed and indignant with the baseness of the world and the difficulties it encounters.  Its scorn increases, and becomes sarcastic (Till Eulenspiegel); it is exasperated with years of conflict, and, in increasing bitterness, develops into a contemptuous heroism.  How Strauss’s laugh whips and stings us in Zarathustra!  How his will bruises and cuts us in Heldenleben!  Now that he has proved his power by victory, his pride knows no limit; he is elated and is unable to see that his lofty visions have become realities.  But the people whose spirit he reflects see it.  There are germs of morbidity in Germany to-day, a frenzy of pride, a belief in self, and a scorn for others that recalls France in the seventeenth century. “Dem Deutschen gehoert die Welt” ("Germany possesses the world”) calmly say the prints displayed in the shop windows in Berlin.  But when one arrives at this point the mind becomes delirious.  All genius is raving mad if it comes to that; but Beethoven’s madness concentrated itself in himself, and imagined things for his own enjoyment.  The genius of many contemporary German artists is an aggressive thing, and is characterised by its destructive antagonism.  The idealist who “possesses the world” is liable to dizziness.  He was made to rule over an interior world.  The splendour of the exterior images that he is called upon to govern dazzles him; and, like Caesar, he goes astray.  Germany had hardly attained the position of empire of the world when she found Nietzsche’s voice and that of the deluded artists of the Deutsches Theater and the Secession.  Now there is the grandiose music of Richard Strauss.

What is all this fury leading to?  What does this heroism aspire to?  This force of will, bitter and strained, grows faint when it has reached its goal, or even before that.  It does not know what to do with its victory.  It disdains it, does not believe in it, or grows tired of it.[182]

[Footnote 182:  “The German spirit, which but a little while back had the will to dominate Europe, the force to govern Europe, has finally made up its mind to abandon it.”—­Nietzsche.]