In the music of this act, if anywhere in the creations of Wagner, we are lifted above the necessity of seeking significances. Even the pianoforte can speak the language of this act. There is not one measure in it which does not tell its story in a manner which puts mere words to shame. Oh, the heart-hunger of the hero! The longing! Will she never come? The fever is consuming him, and his heated brain breeds fancies which one moment lift him above all memories of pain, and the next bring him to the verge of madness. Cooling breezes waft him again towards Ireland, whose princess healed the wound struck by Morold, then ripped it up again with the avenging sword with its telltale nick. From her hands he took the drink whose poison sears his heart. Accursed the cup and accursed the hand that brewed it! Will the shepherd never change his doleful strain? Ah, Isolde, how beautiful you are! The ship, the ship! It must be in sight! Kurwenal, have you no eyes? Isolde's ship! A merry tune bursts from the shepherd's pipe. It is caught up by the orchestra and whirled away on an ocean of excited sound. It is the ship! What flag flies at the peak? The flag of "All's well!" Now the ship disappears behind a cliff. There the breakers are treacherous. Who is at the helm? Friend or foe? Melot's accomplice? Are you, too, a traitor, Kurwenal?
Tristan's strength is unequal to the excitement of the moment. His mind becomes dazed. He hears Isolde's voice, and his wandering fancy transforms it into the torch whose extinction once summoned him to her side: "Do I hear the light?" He staggers to his feet and tears the bandages from his wound. "Ha, my blood, flow merrily now! She who opened the wound is here to heal it!" Life endures but for one embrace, one glance, one word—"Isolde!"—which is borne to her ears by the sadly sweet phrase, typical of the first glance of love—the word and tones which first he had uttered after the potion had made him forget all but his love.
While Isolde lies mortally stricken upon Tristan's corpse, Marke and his train arrive upon a second ship. Brangäne has told the secret of the love-draught, and the king has come to unite the lovers. But his purpose is not known, and faithful Kurwenal receives his death-blow while trying to hold the castle against Marke's men. He dies at Tristan's side. Isolde, unconscious of all these happenings, sings out her broken heart and expires.
"And ere her ear might hear, her heart had heard,
Nor sought she sign for witness of the word;
But came and stood above him, newly dead,
And felt his death upon her: and her head,
Bowed, as to reach the spring that slakes all drouth;
And their four lips became one silent mouth."
VI.
The story of Tristan and Isolde, as it was sung by the minstrel knights of the Middle Ages, is a picture of chivalry in its palmy days. We need to bear this in mind when we approach the ethical side of Wagner's version. In the music of the love duet and Isolde's death lies, perhaps, the most powerful plea ever made for the guilty lovers. No one will stray far from the judgment which the future will pronounce on Wagner's creations, I imagine, who sets down Isolde's swan's song as the choicest flower of Wagner's creative faculty, the culmination of his powers as a composer. I do not believe that the purifying and ennobling capacity of music was ever before or since demonstrated as it is here. While listening to this tonal beatification, it is difficult to hear the voice of reason pronouncing the judgment of outraged law. Yet it is right that that voice should be heard. It is due to the poet-composer that it should be heard. Wagner's attitude towards the old legend differs vastly from that of the poets who preceded him in treating it.
In the days of chivalry depicted by Gottfried von Strassburg and the other mediæval poets who have sung the passion of these lovers, the odor which assails our moral sense as the odor of death and decay was esteemed the sweetest incense that arose from a poet's censer. Read the Wachtlieder of the German Minnesinger. The German Wachtlied, the Provençal alba, is the song sung by the squire or friend watching without, warning the lovers to separate. Brangäne's song in the second act is such a Wachtlied. Read the decisions of the Courts of Love, which governed the actions of chivalrous knighthood when chivalry was at its zenith. Again and again was it proclaimed by these tribunals that conjugal duty shut out the possibility of love between husband and wife. In the economy of feudal castle life there was no provision for women. The place was the domicile of warriors. Daughters of the lord of the castle were married off in childhood. Who, then, could be the object of knightly love? The answer is not far to seek. The service of woman to which mediæval knighthood was devoted, the service which is celebrated in words which we can scarcely accept, except as wildest hyperbole, was the service paid to another man's wife. And the fact that the knight himself had a wife was not a hinderance but an incentive to the service which was the occupation of his life. Now think for a moment on Wagner's modification of the Tristram legend. From it he eliminates the second Iseult. His hero cannot contract a loveless marriage, and at one stroke one element in the attitude of the sexes which appears strange, unnatural, and shocking to us, is wiped from the story.
The versions of Gottfried von Strassburg, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Tennyson, and Wagner present three points of view from which the love of the tragic pair must be studied. With the first three the drinking is purely accidental, and the passion which leads to the destruction of the lovers is something for which they are in no wise responsible. With Tennyson there is no philter, and the passion is all guilty. With Wagner the love exists before the dreadful drinking, and the potion is less a maker of uncontrollable passion than a drink which causes the lovers to forget duty, honor, and the respect due to the laws of society. It is a favorite idea of Wagner's that the hero of tragedy should be a type of humanity freed from all the bonds of conventionality. It is unquestionable in my mind that in his scheme we are to accept the love-potion as merely the agency with which Wagner struck from his hero the shackles of convention.