This reduction of the panacea to absurdity was not forced upon
Shelley, because the love which acts as a universal solvent in
his Prometheus Unbound is a sentiment of affectionate benevolence
which has nothing to do with sexual passion. It might, and in
fact does exist in the absence of any sexual interest whatever.
The words mercy and kindness connote it less ambiguously than the
word love. But Wagner sought always for some point of contact
between his ideas and the physical senses, so that people might
not only think or imagine them in the eighteenth century fashion,
but see them on the stage, hear them from the orchestra, and feel
them through the infection of passionate emotion. Dr. Johnson
kicking the stone to confute Berkeley is not more bent on
common-sense concreteness than Wagner: on all occasions he
insists on the need for sensuous apprehension to give reality to
abstract comprehension, maintaining, in fact, that reality has no
other meaning. Now he could apply this process to poetic love
only by following it back to its alleged origin in sexual
passion, the emotional phenomena of which he has expressed in
music with a frankness and forcible naturalism which would
possibly have scandalized Shelley. The love duet in the first act
of The Valkyries is brought to a point at which the conventions
of our society demand the precipitate fall of the curtain; whilst
the prelude to Tristan and Isolde is such an astonishingly
intense and faithful translation into music of the emotions which
accompany the union of a pair of lovers, that it is questionable
whether the great popularity of this piece at our orchestral
concerts really means that our audiences are entirely catholic
in their respect for life in all its beneficently creative
functions, or whether they simply enjoy the music without