The knights’ bones are dust,
And their good swords rust,
Their souls are with the saints, I trust.
But he who wishes to find any record of their doings with Sir Tristram must search through the length and breadth of Malory’s twenty-one books ere he find it. Nor is there any trace in the modern poems of the sweet old story, how after that “deep draughts of death” had taken the Lady Elizabeth, Tristram’s mother, and his father, King Maliodas, had “let call him Tristram, the sorrowful-born child,” and had actually, for love of her, “endured seven years without a wife,” he married a wicked lady, who tried to poison Tristram; and how she was condemned to death for the attempt, and he rescued her from his father’s wrath, and made them accorded, and how she “loved him ever after, and gave Tristram many great gifts.”
All these things, which relieved the sombre hues of the picture have faded into dimness. The martial glory of Tristram has passed away; nothing but tragedy remains—the sin, the sorrow, the inexplicable fate which linked two separated lives together. Long ago it was a bit of witchcraft pure and simple; now the magic drink has become the symbol of mystery and doom, and what not. Like Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, the guilty souls are hurried round and round without a moment’s respite by the whirlwind of their passion, in that wonderful opera which the most devoted followers of Wagner esteem his masterpiece of blended poetry and music. The fierce, dark, rapturous rejoicing of love on the very edge of death lights it up with a lurid glare, which makes everything else look pale and fanciful by comparison; it has no parallel in art, even among Wagner’s other works, nor can any one desire that it should have. The great difficulties which stand in the way of its representation may prevent it from ever becoming popular in the sense in which “Lohengrin” and “Tannhäuser” are popular; but those who have had the good fortune to hear it will not easily forget its unique and terrible power. It is strange that Wagner should have made King Mark an ideal uncle, tender and forgiving to the last degree, and so full of self-denial that had he but known of the fatal drink in time, he would have resigned his bride to his nephew with the best grace in the world. Dramatically the action loses by this change; the sympathies of the audience are baffled and divided; do what we will, the conduct of the hero seems mean and treacherous, and his death more arbitrary than it need have been, since Melot, the traitor who gives him his mortal wound, had far less reason to hate him than had the injured bridegroom. Indeed, it is difficult to see what Wagner himself thought that he gained by this amendment, unless that tragedy itself becomes more tragic by the needless suffering inflicted on a high and noble soul, ready to sacrifice its dearest hopes rather than undergo the agony of seeing another’s virtue tempted beyond endurance. There is also one dire offence against good taste, worthy of Wagner’s earliest models (and of Shakespeare in “King Lear”,) in the scene where Tristram tears the bandage from his wounds. But if the hero fares rather badly, until we forgive him for the sake of his death-cry, “Liebe!” the heroine has never in the course of her long life found such an interpreter. She has lost, indeed, her old, light-hearted innocence; but she has lost it to become one of the grandest and most original creations in the whole range of the drama. She surpasses even the bounds of passion; the very fury of love is upon her, from the moment when, foreseeing that she can no longer live without him, she resolves to make Tristram drink with her of the death-drink, and the charm begins to work, to the moment when she falls dead besides his body. The magic only reveals what shame forbade her to confess. The key to her whole character lies in her answer to Bragwaine’s entreaty that she will not give the signal for Tristram’s approach by extinguishing the torch in the window of her tower in King Mark’s palace—
Und wär ’es meines Lebens Licht,
Lachend es zu löschen
Zag ’ich nicht.
Wagner showed his wisdom when he left her alone in her glory, and made no attempt to introduce that other Iseult of Brittany, who certainly interferes with any conception of Tristram as the most faithful of lovers. “And for because that Sir Tristram had such cheer and riches, and all other pleasures that he had, almost he had forsaken La Beale Isoud. And so upon a time Sir Tristram agreed to wed Isoud les Blanches Mains. And at the last they were wedded, and solemnly held their marriage,” But this is far too natural and unheroic for the nineteenth century; and poor Iseult the Second fares ill at the hands of our poets—excepting Matthew Arnold who, with unwonted chivalry, has taken up the cause of this distressed damsel (this “snowdrop by the sea,” whose own brother forsook her for her namesake), and made of her one of those meek, motherly, sweet little women, who are ready to forgive any one they love anything; and who, too weak either to make or mar the lives with which they come in contact, yet hold their own by the power of that clinging, lasting devotedness, which is all their innocent natures let them know of passion. Very sweet is his picture of her, standing in her gorgeous robes by the chimney-piece with the firelight flickering on her white face and her white hands, and her jewelled clasp, ready to vanish gracefully the moment her rival enters; and it is with a gentle feeling of regret that we lose sight of her at last, wandering on the seashore with her children, while she tells them the old story of Merlin and Vivien to beguile the weary hours of her widowhood. Here and here only the pure, white-handed maiden-wife bears away the palm from the old Iseult of Tristram’s dreams, with
Her proud, dark eyes,