132Gabriel Marcel Music & Philosophyfact that, on the one hand, we have the invincible assurance that this word idelity�has a meaning as precise in music as in the world of spiritual relations, but that, on the other hand, we surely do not have direct access to an object-reality (ralit-objet) with relation to which this fidelity could be defined. Perhaps I will make myself a little better understood if I say this it is this fidelity that is itself the only way of access. But this surely does not signify, as some philosophers of the past would have wanted us to believe, that this fidelity in some way engenders its object. And here another category comes into play whose importance music alone revealed to me at the outset, and this is the category of humility. It is scarcely necessary to say that the Moussorgsky of Boris and the artsongs was for me at the origin of this discovery and that this revelation took place in opposition to the exaltation unleashed by Wagner hubris (which does not mean, however, that I have ever rejected either Tristan or Die Meistersnger or the Ring Cyclexcommunications of this sort seem to me even today absurd and scandalous.) If then I am not mistaken in this difficult and risky reconstruction, I would have reason to think that these categories (whose metaphysical meaning I have attempted to specify, particularly beginning with 1930) had been in a way presented to me most concretely in the great lyric works I have mentioned. The special function of Ariane et Barbe-Bleu in this development was probably a little different. I have previously attempted to specify it in a note that I sent to Paul Dukas, of which, I think, he was essentially quite willing to approve. In Ariane, beyond the admirable Andante of the Sonata and the most beautiful of the Variations, I thought I saw a certain tragic wisdom revealing itself to me, a wisdom entirely in harmony with what was then the deepest exigency of my being. And to tell the truth, I am inclined to think that this need is more than moderately important. I recognize this exigency in myself today just as deep as it ever was, even if it has some difficulty in harmonizing with other no less fundamental needs that are themselves authentically Christian. I no longer know precisely who at the time brought out the basically Nietzschean character of that tragic wisdom that was expressed in the last scene of Arianehis scene that inwardly
