That this Drama was a religious teacher connected with the Mysteries is very clearly brought out, and Wagner draws a fine picture of one of those great sacred days when thirty thousand people assembled to witness “that most pregnant of all tragedies, the _Prometheus_; in this titanic masterpiece to see the image of themselves, to read the riddle of their own actions, and to fuse their own being and their own communion with that of their god.”
How fell this glorious Tragedy? “As the spirit of _Community_ split itself along a thousand lives of egoistic cleavage, so was the great united work of Tragedy disintegrated into its individual factors.” For two thousand years since then Art has given way to Philosophy; but “True Art is highest freedom” and can only arise out of freedom.
Then follows a splendid description of the brutal materialism of the Romans which hangs to this very day like a pall about her ruins: “They loved to revel in concrete and open bloodthirstiness.” Mutual slavery of Emperor and people was the result, and “self-contempt, disgust with existence, horror of community” found their expression in Christianity. But this Christianity of Constantine Wagner is careful to distinguish from the teaching of “the humble son of the Galilean carpenter; who, looking on the misery of his fellow-men, proclaimed that he had not come to bring peace, but a sword into the world; whom we must love for the anger with which he thundered forth against the hypocritical Pharisees who fawned upon the power of Rome; ... and finally who preached the reign of universal human love.” In short, one might say that Jesus and his teaching stood in the same relation to the later Christianity as Dionysus and the early pure mysteries to the later degraded and materialized Bacchic mysteries.
Then in a very fine passage Wagner indicts Modern Art, based, as it is, on fame and gain and serving all the lower needs of a debased public taste. The Drama is separated into Play and Opera; the one losing its idealizer—Music,—the other, its dramatic aim and end: “What serves it us, that _Shakespeare_, like a second Creator, has opened for us the endless realm of human nature? What serves it, that _Beethoven_ has lent to Music the manly, independent strength of Poetry? Ask the threadbare caricatures of your theatres, ask the street-minstrel commonplaces of your operas: and ye have your answer!”