And yet he would insist on the truth of his own assertion in the pamphlet. “If in the plastic art a Jew has to be represented,” he said, “the artist models after an ideal, or, if working from life, omits or softens those very details in the features which are the characteristic of the countrymen of Isaiah.”
As regards the histrionic art, he laid it down that it is impossible to picture a Jew impersonating a hero or lover without forcing a sense of the ridiculous upon us. And this feeling he felt of an actor, irrespective of sex. It would not be difficult to destroy this argument now: the names of Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt, Patti at once cross the mind. He asserted that their strength in art lay in imitation and not in creation.
In speech, too, the Jew was offensive to him. The accent was always that of a foreigner, and not of a native. The language was spoken as if it had been acquired, as something alien, and had not the ring of naturalness in it; for language, he argued, was the historic growth of a nation, and the Jew’s mother tongue, Hebrew, was a dead language. To the Jew, our entire civilization and art had remained a foreign language. He could only imitate it; the product, therefore, was artificial; and as in speech, so in song. “Notwithstanding two thousand years of contact with European peoples, as soon as a Jew spoke our ear was offended by a peculiar hissing and shrill manner of intonation.” Moreover, he contended, in their speech and writing there was a wilful transposition of words and construction of phrases, characteristics of an alien people, also discernible in their music. These racial characteristics which Wagner asserted were repugnant, were intensified in their offensiveness in his eyes by an absence of genuine passion, _i.e._ strong emotion coming deep from the heart. In the family circle he allowed the probability of the Jews being earnest and impassioned, yet in their works it was absent. On the stage he would have it that the passion of a child of Israel was always ridiculous. He was incapable of artistic expression in speech, and therefore less capable of its expression in song; for true song is speech raised to the highest intensity of emotion.