The book was published here several years ago, but has lain unnoticed until today. Our sudden torridity of welcome makes one reflect upon a dog who tramples on the grass beneath his feet and feeds on offal; suddenly he begins to eat the grass and then we cry, “The dog is sick!” Humanity has a canine instinct for its needs. Its tastes must ripen. We can neither hasten nor retard them.
As it takes the fever of intoxication to appreciate the purity of water; as the quiet of repose must follow the stress of effort, so man now turns to the sweet nothingness of a dream, amid the warring clash of realities.
That Wagner’s idyl of simplicity is but a dream, a sigh of the imagination, only idealists can deny. Civilization and Simplicity! Bedlam and Elysium! Nirvana on the Tower of Babel! All these alliances are equally possible.
The very fact of his dream arousing such a storm of approval awakens suspicion. Insistence is always a confession of doubt. Man never talks so much of his happiness as when he is unhappy. This is demonstrated in marriage.
Wagner’s arrival in America was singularly opportune. Certainly it was fortunate that his little olive branch was given to the public just when it was clamoring for something. Its palms were itching for some of the sugar-plums the Privileged Few had wrested from it, and it was beginning to get noisy. Yes, that hydrocephalic infant, the Proletariat, was beginning to sob for the golden spoon in the mouth of Special Privilege, when, lo and behold! the powers behind the throne go to Paris and bring back the soothing syrup of Wagner and his philosophy. The infant lets the Pharisee dope him, and he drops the unintelligible complexities of Franchises, Trusts, Labor Problems and Wrongs to grab the little woolly lamb of Content.
Surely the importers of Wagner are altruists, to try thus to make the public so happy. And that Wagner has had importers as well as indorsers, the Initiated know. Nevertheless, Wagner is a remarkable man. He is remarkable in resembling two historical characters and also in possessing the aptitudes for several vocations.
He resembles Rousseau. Rousseau sang the same little Psalm of Simplicity in the most artificial and febrile period of France. The Philistines shrieked the same applause, and even tried to eat the prescribed grass. He resembles Mme. de Pompadour. When no longer she could charm the palled fancy of Louis XV as Circe, coquette, dancer or grande dame, she assumed the garb of a peasant girl.
That was one of the early triumphs of simplicity. Art is always a surprise. Its sole function is to astonish. Therein Wagner is an artist.
He is also a civil engineer, for he has mastered the cosmic momentum. The world is a seesaw. It exists by the eternal balance of contrasts. Wagner, seeing the excess, has given us the weight to restore our equipoise. He has led us back like refractory children to drink of milk after we have eaten marrons glacés and liked them. Of course they have given us indigestion, and that is where Wagner fills the role of physician; he diagnoses our disease, he places his finger upon the very “Malady of the Century,” and he prescribes—sugar pills. This shows his great wisdom, for sugar pills and the dissecting-knife should form the sole equipment of every physician.
Wagner is also a philanthropist. His aim is to make us happy, and his method is to make us believe that a gridiron is a lyre and that cobblestones may be Apples of the Hesperides. He tells us that as things now are, each child is “born into a joyless world; that the complexities of our lives have led us into the Slough of Despond; that Civilization has been futile, for it has left us miserable.” And for all our ills he gives us the panacea of content, simplicity and repose. He summons us to be “merely human, to have the courage to be men and leave the rest to Him who numbered the stars. Each life should wish to be what it is good for it to be, without troubling about anything else.”