Nazareth;' later on, his thoughts turned to the resignation of the Buddhist sages, and how, in choosing Nirvana, or in giving up this world of sense, they had conquered. His heroic youth, Siegfried, was strong by a kind of instinctive purity; but he could now perceive a more spiritual temper, which denied itself in the presence of temptation, and learned wisdom by innocence turning to pity. The 'Ring of the Nibelungs' idealized is 'Parsifal.' And it is Wagner's own Requiem, at which we see him, already half-way down the shadow of the grave,' assisting as the phantom Titurel, while the music sends forth echoes in subdued harmony of all he has ever sung, and the Grail lifted over him announces that he dies a Christian. He had seen his 'Parsifal' in vision as early as 1865, if not before. The friendship with which Louis II. honoured himself and Wagner threw a mystic mediaval light upon a mind ever impressionable to fresh aspects of beauty; and Mont Salvat rose out of the dim and cloudy distance into a foreground, where its high cathedral shrine grew yet more imposing than in his dreams of the knight in silver mail who came down from it to rescue the lost maiden, Elsa. With these rich fancies were strangely mingled scenes in the New Testament, which he had always thought of dramatizing, reverently, though not as an orthodox poet would have done. Now, instead of the Redeemer Himself, he chose a shadowy figure, somewhat according to the principle on which Calderon,-a great favourite with him,had fashioned his 'Autos Sacramentales,' or Corpus Christi miracle-plays. And thus, in Parsifal,' we meet with a kind of allegorical person, who rehearses, or acts over again, the sacred ceremonies which, in Southern lands, are associated with the cycle of the Passion, with the so-called sepulchre of Maundy Thursday, with the mass of the Presanctified,'-which has its funereal vestments, and solemn laments, and mournful expiations on Good Friday,—and with the bells and rejoicings of Easter. Parsifal' may be viewed as a Northern Passion-Play, which is open at once to all the privileges, but likewise to the manifest perils, attendant upon a transformation, the result of which is to give the stage a close resemblance to the church and even to the altar. We know that, in Greek tragedy, the actors and singers moved about the altar of Dionysus. But we do not much mind the Greeks; and since dramatic art has been banished from our houses of prayer, we find it scarcely becoming to introduce religious rites upon the stage. That all is done in a spirit of profound respect for the doctrines and ceremonies thus shadowed forth, is undoubtedly true. Nevertheless, we have arrived, with Wagner, by a long course of ascent from his revolutionary revolutionary period, upon a summit which is crowned, not with any mere shrine of art, or modern theatre, but with a temple which embodies the idea of the Christian Eucharist; and our play is a reminiscence, or even a reproduction, of events the most sacred that the New Testament contains and exhibits. As Nietzsche observes with absolute justice, it is a revolt from Luther, and an idealized Christendom, imaged after the Catholic manner.' We can now perceive why this 'miracle of miracles,' which is admittedly a beautiful work of art, and perhaps Wagner's masterpiece, as he intended it to be his dying legacy, has given rise to discussions so vehement. Those whom we may describe as men of goodwill towards Wagner, mediæval in their attachment to the mystic rites which he borrows or imitates, and apt, as many are, to import their religious feelings into his music, even as an English audience is wont to do on hearing the 'Messiah,' listen, gaze, and are edified. No words will express too strongly the delight that springs up within them while the 'mystery' moves along from scene to scene. They are devout in the temple of the Grail, and the strange and perplexing figure of Kundry does not give them pause; she is a repentant Magdalene; while Parsifal, bearing the part of one too sacred to be named, does but remind them of the Gospel and in no way detract from its inviolable and unique character, by the symbolism of certain acts. To all such as these, no more scandal is given than would have been suggested to naïve and orthodox Spaniards who were present at the 'Autos' of their poet-priest, Calderon. Another class, whom we may quickly pass over, will be found among artists,-mere artists as it is scornfully said, but, in any case, so absorbed by one passion, so single in their aim, like Gabriel Rossetti, that the whole universe, including religion and its rites, will appear in their eyes to be a kind of material, a canvas, or a 'property,' suitable for purposes of painting, writing, singing, and otherwise not to be considered. Their only serious concern is their art; they can grasp no other interest, and their church is the studio, the stage, the orchestra. Like our naïve friends, and by a similar strong prepossession, they will adore Parsifal' if they feel drawn to Wagner as a mighty musician, scene-painter, stage-poet, or inventor of ideal forms. But yet a third class remain, whose judgment cannot quite be left out of our reckoning. These are philosophers and critics, united in their way of looking at the question, but in their conclusions opposed. For while both agree in regarding Wagner as 'a power of civilization,' civilization,' they differ as to the quality of that civilization. Is it progress or decadence, anarchy or a world of ordered forces? It is clearly not the order that now reigns which 'Parsifal' would glorify, any more than the drama of the Nibelungs. But,' says Nietzsche, whom we quote for the last time, it is decadence; life governed by emotions, in love with disease, pessimist and voluptuous, which takes its pleasure by watching the agonies of a dying religion, as the Romans looked on at their dying gladiator. If men wanted Christian truth, or believed in it, they would seek it elsewhere than in the simulacrum of its realities, where feeling does duty for the ten commandments, and luxurious sentimentalism ravages the heart of its "horned Siegfrieds." This, expressed a little more decorously, would be the Puritan's objection to all art and representation. It attacks the 'image' as an 'idol' which it would fain abolish. And Nietzsche, desirous of a less effeminate existence than he saw around him, held that Wagner was teaching men to be contented with their sensations-that he was filling them with passive pleasure, instead of rousing them to exertion, or calling out the faculties of self-control. He would agree with M. Lavignac's description of that mood which is essentially Wagnerian, a complex and indefinable emotion, profoundly disquieting, which, after all these scenes from mythology, plunges the melting spirit into a state of supernatural contemplation, and of an almost Christian idealism.' But he would argue that a reverie which leads to idealism is much the same as an opiate; and that contemplation, divorced from energy in act, is Nirvana. Perhaps the Nirvana which he condemned may turn out, as other philosophers would say, when deeply analyzed, to be mysticism and nothing worse, the preliminary or the accompaniment of a musical art carried to perfection, nor less reconcilable with the duties of life than other fruits of the meditative instinct. It is certain that we cannot, like the aged Plato, banish either the musician or the tragedian from our pattern city. And, without pretending to answer questions which only time can resolve, we may take our farewell of Richard Wagner with the candid admission that he attempted and achieved the great things which he proposed to himself. In his own splendid dramas, if not in life, he combined music with tragedy and with comedy of the most impressive character; he reformed the stage; and he increased, beyond his contemporaries and his predecessors, the power of musical expression as applied to definite actors and visible scenes. ART. ART. II.-1. History of the Irish Rebellion in 1798. By W. 3. La France et l'Irlande pendant la Révolution. Par E. Guillon. Paris, 1888. 4. The French Invasion of Ireland in '98. By Valerian Griboyédoff. New York, 1890. 3. Ulster Biographies; relating chiefly to the Rebellion of 1798. By W. T. Latimer. Belfast, 1897. 6. The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. By Thomas More. Edited by Martin MacDermott. London, 1897. T THE author of 'Waverley' has laid it down that sixty years represent the period at which the chronicle of the events that make up the record of political struggles mellows into history. Two generations, he considered, should suffice to give to the animosities of party rancour, and to the still deeper wounds of which even a brief period of civil warfare must inevitably leave the scars, that neutral tone which the veil of time sooner or later imparts to all things human. When the first chapters of 'Waverley' were written, sixty years had elapsed since the attempt of the Young Pretender had convulsed Scottish society in a struggle which was at once dynastic and national, and which divided sharply the Celtic from the Teutonic elements in the Scottish people. Yet in the course of no more than two generations, the fever of loyalty and feudalism which gave reality to the rising in behalf of Prince Charlie had so completely vanished as to have ceased to affect in any real sense the course of Scottish politics. Attachment to Jacobite traditions had become no more than a picturesque survival, with just enough vigour about it to add interest to a picture of the times when it dominated the national aspirations of Scotland, and threatened, not remotely, a revolution in Great Britain. The very opposite case of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 affords in this respect yet another of the many striking contrasts in which the history of the two islands that form the three kingdoms abounds. Not two generations, nor three, not sixty years nor a century, have availed to chase from the sombre memories of the Celtic population of Ireland the recollection of the events of '98. For them the lapse of time has scarcely served to soften a single animosity, or to obliterate the marks of racial and religious hate which the disorders of the Rebellion kindled kindled afresh in Ireland. In the popular imagination the long procession of a hundred years has only served to tinge with the romance of history the figures of the chief actors in a struggle which, hopeless as were its objects, bloody as was its progress, and mournful its conclusion, is still regarded with a certain enthusiasm of patriotic reverence as a central and inspiring episode in the drama of Irish history. And For this peculiar attachment to memories of defeat and failure, which to other races would be too depressing to dwell upon, it is not difficult to account. The pathetic delight with which the Irish people love to indulge in the dreary recollections of their abortive past is no new feature in their character. Unfortunately for themselves, they have ever been as unable to forget as unwilling to forgive, and the contemplation of their own sufferings and misfortunes has continually a morbid attraction for them. They will allow neither the balm of time nor the oblivion of the grave to work their merciful alleviations. Contests which the victors have long ceased to remember, the vanquished cannot forbear to brood over. but for the unequalled facility with which they can console themselves with the shadowy might-have-beens of their history, the Irish would surely be the most unhappy instead of the most buoyant of peoples. This characteristic optimism of the race has never been more powerfully exemplified than in the arrangements which have for several months been in progress in Ireland for celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Rebellion of 1798. Had the movement which it is proposed to celebrate been a triumph instead of a disaster, a glory rather than a reproach, a splendid Waterloo rather than a humiliating Sedan, it could not be more magniloquently commemorated. Within the past few months all the energy which the discouraging aspect of Nationalist prospects has denied its normal outlet has been expended upon elaborate arrangements for the celebration of the centenary of the Rebellion; and as the British Government appears to treat with indifference this glorification of the most serious attempt ever made to destroy the connexion between the two islands, there is nothing apparently to mar the success of this national festival. It is long since the subdued notes that followed the Union have checked the grandiloquence of Irish eulogies of the heroes of the Rebellion. The fear to speak of '98, of which Dr. Ingram spoke in his stirring lyric, no longer troubles the patriot. The cult of the Rebellion which began among the Young Irelanders is just as strong to-day as it was fifty years ago. It does not indeed find literary expression in a form |