ABSTRACT
The centre of dramatic gravity changes. Italy, England, Spain, France, had been successively its home. Emanuel Swedenborg was an expert mineralogist as well as a religious philosopher. He had personal experience of other planes and of spirit-converse, and has been called the father of modern spiritualism. Goethe (1749-1832) as poet, dramatist and philosopher was a man of comprehensive wisdom made of a spiritualized paganism and a science in contact with esoteric tradition. Richard Wagner aimed to re-create western drama in a manner worthy of its Greek ancestry. Thought and language had become severed from emotion; traditional opera and oratorio he regarded as exercises primarily in music; but a new totality was conceived where-by man might regain contact with his deepest personal and communal selfhood. Water and fire, nature and mind, dominate. Peer Gynt, like Goethe's similarly straggling Faust, must be read as a reflection of European humanism.
