Modern Musical Drift

Modern Musical Drift

By
W. J. Henderson
Author of "The Story of Music," "Preludes and
Studies," etc., etc.

Longmans, Green, and Co.

91 and 93 Fifth Avenue, New York
London and Bombay
1904

Copyright, 1904,
By Longmans, Green, and Co.

All rights reserved

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

TO MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE,
JAMES HUNEKER.

Dear James:

Beside the ebon Styx

The brood harmonious wanders slow.

A backward gaze on earth they fix,

And ask, "Where doth dear Music go?"

I fancy Palestrina stares,

And good Scarlatti gasps for breath,

While Handel, with his figured airs,

Bemoans poor Music's early death.

Old Haydn shakes his long peruke,

And Mozart wags his pendant cue,

As both record their soft rebuke:

"What is it that these moderns do?"

Alone in all that troubled throng

One moves with calm, unruffled brow;

For still Sebastian's voice is strong

To say, "'Twas I who taught them how."

So when the storms discordant brew,

You smile at me across the house;

For well you know there's nothing new,

Not even (pardon!) in your Strauss.

Except, perhaps, a fine disguise

Of leading motives, wood and strings,

Which make a score look wondrous wise,

And seem to mean to many things.

So weave your fancies; I'll weave mine;

And let them wander, dark or bright.

The Lords of Art have graven fine;

Perchance we both discern aright.

W. J. H.
August, 1904.

CONTENTS

Modern Musical Drift

PARSIFALIA

I.—A PURE FOOL IN THE NEW WORLD

The Holy Grail!—I trust
We are green in heaven's eyes.

Tennyson, The Holy Grail.

It was the night before Christmas. The city of Gotham was surfeited with the vast spectacle of wealth in its annual orgy of expenditure. Women had careered madly through the savings of a twelvemonth; and desperate husbands, driven almost to the abyss of insanity, had plunged blindly into the vortex of buying, and mortgaged the labor of the next half-year. It was the merry Yule-tide, when every self-respecting New Yorker feels that it is incumbent upon him to assume a bank account, if he have it not, and to buy for his neighbor Christmas gifts more expensive than the neighbor can buy for him.

On the eve of Christmas Day it seemed as if half the city had turned to its last madness, for Wagner's "Parsifal," torn from the holy seclusion of Baireuth by the ruthless hand of an American showman (from Vienna), was produced at the Metropolitan Opera-House for the first time in the New World. The fiat had gone forth that all prices of admission were to be doubled at the box office; and it was no secret that sidewalk venders of tickets were charging five times the figures nominated in the bond. It had been made known that the performance would begin at five of the clock in the afternoon, and that after the first act there would be an intermission of nearly two hours for rest and refreshment.

Restaurateurs in the neighborhood of the opera-house had sung their "Laus Deo" and marked up their schedule of charges. Society had been vainly interrogated by reporters as to how it intended to dress for a solemn festival, split between afternoon and evening. Trumpeters had been secured to blow selected motives to warn the faithful to their seats, and it had been published in very large type that against the singers engaged in the production had been launched the curse of Wahnfried. Nothing had been neglected that might add fresh fire to the flaming fever of extravagance.

At the appointed hour the ceremonial of the intoning of the motives was performed, and a little later the curtains swung wide to disclose the sylvan retreat near the Castle of Monsalvat. The deed was accomplished. The black Alberich of the Yankee ooze had wrested from its Baireuth bed the Rheingold of the Wagner family, and the gods of the Wahnfried hearthstone shivered in their Dämmerung.

A vast and strange assemblage sat in bewildered silence at the performance, and, having heard the martial pæans of much free advertising, went away thrilled with the belief that it had assisted at the introduction to America of the "masterpiece" of Wagner. O ye Norse gods and little fish-maidens! There was a Wagner once—but no matter.

What kind of impression did this drama make upon the unprejudiced and equipoised mind? What is the real truth about this huge ragoût of mysticism and orchestration which in the looming shadows of the Festspielhaus is called "sacred"? The story of "Parsifal" has been told over and over again. The themes are becomingly catalogued in the handbooks of Wolzogen, Heinz, and Kufferath. The very boarding-school girls smirk at one another as they hum "Der Reine Thor," and rosy-cheeked boys can whistle the Klingsor theme. There is no need to rehearse here either the story or the music. But let us come at once to some conclusions drawn from a cool, dispassionate study of a dozen performances of "Parsifal" beyond the factitious influences created by the Baireuth exaltation.

"Parsifal" is the child of Wagner's artistic decrepitude. It is a decrescendo in inspiration, a ritardando in invention. More than any other drama of Wagner does it rely upon the dazzling of the eye to dull the keenness of the musical ear. It is a most imposing pageant set to unimposing music. Wagner fired heaven once with the immolation of Brünnhilde. It was not to be done again. The light on the Holy Grail is white and cold.

The entire machinery of the familiar Wagnerian drama is here; but the scene painter, the stage manager, the mechanician, and the electrician bravely hold up the hands of the musician. Cast any aged rags of scenery on the stage; let the lights be as dim and flickering as the dying fancies of Adrian; let the actors be of the breed of the subsidized provincial German theatre, and yet the last act of "Tristan und Isolde" will peal its eloquence into the heart and blast the soul with the lightnings of genius. Give the first act of "Die Walküre," most hackneyed of all great acts, the tottering timbers of battered scenes, a moonlight of such Prussian blue as never was on sea or land, and still the might and power of its pulsating passion will conquer.

But strip "Parsifal" of its scenic and mechanic glories, and you will lay bare the skeleton of a system with only a few shreds of the flesh left upon it. The poem of "Parsifal" is almost utterly devoid of those great basic elements which make human life dramatic for men and women. Nowhere in it do we see, as in Wagner's other works, the primeval man and woman at gaze upon each other in the naked barbaric splendor of desire. Instead of the one passion which makes plays, we are asked to consider the suffering of a man who is as remote from our common sympathies as his figure is from our eyes when it lies recumbent in the seat behind the altar of the Grail.

Amfortas is held up as typical of the sufferings of humanity under the curse of carnal sin. Tannhäuser is more eloquent than a thousand of him. We see Tannhäuser in the grip of the temptress; of the sin of Amfortas we hear talk, talk, talk; while the sufferer himself is carried about upon a litter,—a charnel-house sight,—making his unending moan to the patient stars.

The hero of the story, young Parsifal, comes before us looking like young Siegfried and wearing a musical tag of similar style. In the last act he is bearded and armored, again like Siegfried, and his theme is exfoliated in an umbrageous harmony of trumpets and trombones. But what a tenuous echo he is, after all! Siegfried blazes with all the glory of manhood: he has hot blood in his veins; and he carves his way through fire and the wrath of a god to the mountain of his heart's desire.

Parsifal loves no woman. He cannot, for he is the embodiment of ascetic, or at least monastic, denial. The one emotion which he submits for our hearts is pity, a most excellent emotion and admitted to be akin to love. A highly respected sister-in-law of love it may be; but love is love, and spins the big round world down the grooves of time.

As an ethical basis of this drama, we are asked to accept a philosophy of pity, founded on the ethics of Arthur Schopenhauer and amplified by the adoption of certain of the teachings of Buddha. Instead of those beautiful doctrines of redemption through the love and self-sacrifice of woman, so eloquently preached in some of Wagner's other dramas, we are besought to look upon woman as a temptress, and renunciation of love as the highway to heaven.

As the exemplar of the claim of pity, we are presented with the picture of the wounded Amfortas, who is a lay figure of incomprehensible personality. He is shown in the first act, and the pity doctrine is further preached in the pother made over the killing of the swan (such a big, fat, able-bodied swan!). As the master of evil we behold Klingsor, who comes before us in the first scene of the second act with more paraphernalia of slate-green walls, blue smoke, and exclamatory incantations than Faust ever had in his salad days at the Paris Grand Opera.

Kundry, the only woman in the play, is an ill-made muddle of inhumanity, who never commands a single instant of sympathy. She strives by service to atone for her sins, which are committed under the spell of Klingsor. She has neither love nor passion. Gurnemanz, the aged knight, is a wearisome talker. He tells the story of his life or any one else's life to whomsoever will listen. The audience cannot escape.

With the exception of Klingsor and his "flower-girls"—a charming euphemism—these puppets are shown to us in the first scene, in which the necessary explanations are made in long-winded speeches, mostly by Gurnemanz, seated on a rock and reciting like weary Wotan in Act II. of "Die Walküre." When this doddering graphophone comes to lead Parsifal to the castle of the Grail, Wagner sorts over his old plans and specifications and selects Siegfried's Rhine Journey.

But this time it is a sedate and pious progress finishing with bells and chorals. Nevertheless, it is one of the fine spots in the work. When the bells are in tune, it is imposing. The scenery changes in an ingenious and effective panorama.

Then comes the crown of the act and the noblest scene in the work,—the unveiling of the Grail and the ceremony of the Last Supper. This is not the time for a discussion of the propriety of putting such matters on the stage. Suffice it to say, that here Wagner has accomplished one of the most triumphant demonstrations of the effectiveness of his organic union of the arts tributary to the drama. Music, text, action, scenic form and color, all work together in an irresistibly potent symphony of symbolism, which no reverent man can hear and see without emotion. It makes "Parsifal" almost persuasive.

The second act opens with the exhibition of Klingsor, as already noted. He is as unreal as the purple light which illumines Kundry when he summons her from the trapdoor in the stage. She rises like Mother Erda in "Siegfried," Act III., but, oh, so different! Away with such cheap and paltry claptrap as this scene! Poor Wagner, he had to write it to explain himself; and in "Parsifal" he needed a lot of explanation. Not all the Ellises nor Wolzogens in the world could blot out the Drury Lane stain of this one scene. Even the exclamatory "Ha, ha!" of the time-dishonored stage villain is not spared us.

The second scene of the act is the magic garden of flower-maidens, Venusberg, No. 2. No. 1 is much better, both dramatically and musically. This one is "Tannhäuser" and water, and very poor water at that. Yet it is the scene which will please the populace most, when the flower-girls are pretty and graceful, for their music is languorous and suggestive of Leo Delibes raised to the seventh power.

But there is nothing human in this whole scene. Kundry, unlike Venus, does not love the man she tempts. Venus is at the heart a passionate, despairing woman. Kundry is the deputed and bewitched instrument of a Wahnfried Cagliostro. Her deed is that of a woman of the pavement; her extenuation the pitiful and transparent fact that she plies her trade in a trance and under an irresistible spell. We see her put in the trance; we see her come out of it. Before and after it she is a rough and revolting yokel with tangled black locks and a gunny bag for her garb. In the trance she is transformed by the power of the magician to a beautiful blonde in a diaphanous décolleté gown.

The symbolism of the whole scene is weak and tottering. The logic of the enlightenment of Parsifal by the long-drawn kiss with wind and string accompaniment (see "Siegfried," Act III.) is beyond finite conception. The symbolism of the waking of a sleeping Valkyr maiden by the first kiss of love is something that even the most hardened society woman might understand; but the employment of a courtesan's salute to enlighten a pure fool by pity is a device which swings futile between heaven and earth.

The last act is a flat desert of tedium, with oases of musical verdure. Gurnemanz has more opportunities to lecture on Amfortas, Good Friday, and similar topics, but even with the aid of Wagner's own musical illustrations he is uninteresting. The foot-washing episode is a pitiable and shocking plagiarism from the life of Christ. The central figure, with its beard, its long hair, and its light-tinted robe, is so like the Good Shepherd of the paintings that it suggests an automaton replica. And this is all so inessential. It is dragged in to give the thing a sacred atmosphere.

The really beautiful places in the first scene of the last act are the splendid proclamation of the Grail theme after the baptism of Parsifal—one of the few bursts of power which recall the Wagner of "Die Walküre"—and the ineffably lovely peacefulness of the Good Friday music. This indeed is an inspired page in the score; but it was written twenty-five years before the drama was produced.

The final scene is a weak and diluted repetition of the second scene of the first act. This time Parsifal unveils the Grail. The music is necessarily built of the same materials. It does not achieve its effect. Neither is the pictorial impression as deep. We have seen it all before. The gorgeous, pealing brass passage at the second entrance to the Grail hall is the most muscular thing in the whole act, but it stands by itself. It seems to have no logical place in the musical scheme.

The score of this drama is mostly a long, faint echo of Wagner's greatest works. Siegfried vainly strives to animate this Parsifalian puppet of renunciation with the blood of the Volsung woe. Cloudlike shreds of "Tristan und Isolde" struggle to float sunset tints across this pallid sky. All is copying, futile, without inspiration, without newness,—a hotch-potch of the old marketable materials made over with much constructive skill, but with commercial thrift and inartistic insincerity. There is hardly a note of honest æsthetic conviction in the whole thing. One is inclined to think that Wagner did not believe in it himself.

These, then, are the conclusions gathered from performances in a common opera-house of Wagner's religious, symbolical, ethical, philosophical, and highly gilded summary of his artistic creed. When this work is played in Baireuth, where churchly airs are assumed and the people robe their spirits in sackcloth and ashes, the impression is different. But now that "Parsifal" has come out into the light of morning and faced the cold glare of the work-day world, it must be measured by the artistic standards which are applied to Wagner's other dramas. Weighed in the balance with "Tristan und Isolde" or any of the "Ring" works, except perhaps "Rheingold," to which it is artistically not a stranger, it must be found wanting. Beside "Tannhäuser," which treats the same subject, it is a mass of glittering artificialities. Wagner was wise in wishing that this drama should be preserved for home consumption.

II.—ETHICS AND ÆSTHETICS

The cut nails of machine divinity may be driven in, but they won't clinch.

Oliver Wendell Holmes,
The Professor at the Breakfast Table, Ch. IV.

There was no question that Gotham—wicked, wayward Gotham—was much stirred up by this production. It was generally accepted as a kind of religious ceremony, as to which no right-minded gentleman should deliver himself of critical comment. Yet there were some picturesque exceptions to the general state. A few ministers of the Gospel sprang to the pulpit or the interviewer, and descanted in glowing terms on the outrageous irreligion of the thing, or rather on the sacrilege of the representation by "painted actors" of incidents in the life of Christ. Of course these gentlemen had not taken the trouble to study the work in the original, and some of them showed conclusively that they were utterly ignorant of it.

But this chanced to be one of those cases in which the pulpit is not immune. The ignorance of the reverend utterers of sweeping statements was blithely exposed by some of the men whose business it has been for many years to study the works of Wagner. Let us, then, in all justice and humility, with due observance of the Grail adorers on the one side and the objecting pulpit orators on the other, ask ourselves how much of real Christianity is disclosed in "Parsifal." How much more of German mystic philosophy, of mediævalism, of the teachings of Siddartha, and lastly of pure paganism? What is this work, after all, but a summary of the blind gropings of the imaginative Wagner after a philosophy beyond his reach?

Why all this pother about the sacrilege of putting the Holy Grail on the stage? Was there ever a Holy Grail? Is the green glass chalice which now reposes peacefully in Genoa a holy vessel? Did the blood of Christ ever sanctify it? Did Joseph of Arimathea catch the precious drops in it; and was it really the vessel used at the Last Supper of Jesus and his apostles?

The ceremony of the Last Supper is unquestionably represented in a crude manner in Wagner's drama, where it is mixed with a pictorial representation of the legendary tale that the Christians may make objection with good ground. The place which the communion occupies in the ceremonies of the Church is such that to see it made part of a public theatrical performance, no matter how solemn, or how artistic, or how honest in its purpose to treat holy things reverentially, must be repugnant to every Christian mind.

As to this, nothing more need be said. Of the effect of the representation on an audience there can be no doubt. It is impressive in the highest degree. The emotions caused by the unveiling scene are a tribute to the power of theatrical art. But let it be thoroughly understood that the stage picture and the music are the most influential elements. Taking that scene as a point of suggestion, let us ask ourselves how much of real Christianity there is in "Parsifal." Let us examine the ethics of the drama and probe its philosophy.

The doctrine of enlightenment by pity, preached so insistently in this drama, has no relation to Christianity. The religion of Jesus Christ knows of but one enlightenment, that by faith. It is "he that believeth," not he that pitieth. The enlightenment of faith enables the Christian to conceive God. But what do we find in "Parsifal"? A man has committed a mortal sin, in that he has fallen from that state of personal chastity in which the servants of the Holy Grail are required to live. The outward and visible sign of his fall is an immediate physical (with accompanying spiritual) punishment, inflicted by the impious hand of the Tempter himself.

Here Wagner follows the story as told by Chrétien des Troyes, and not the version of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Chrétien made the spear that with which Longinus pierced the side of the Saviour. Wolfram made it simply a poisoned lance. Wagner accepted the sacred spear, because he was always an eager searcher after ethical significance, even when there was less virtue in it than there is in this one. The wound of the sacred lance is more than physical; it is a mortal hurt of the soul. Wagner tells us that for such a wound there can be but one cure, a touch of the selfsame lance in the hands of one who has successfully withstood the temptation to which the sufferer fell a victim.

Very well. There is absolutely no authority for such a conclusion. It is a bit of mediæval religious mysticism, an adaptation of the fabulous miracles. Wagner, however, has a right to manufacture miracles for a fabulous story. He has as much right to do it in the tale of the Holy Grail as he had in the matter of Hagen's wonder-working beverages in "Götterdämmerung."

But when he tells us that the reason for Parsifal's action is enlightenment by pity, he goes still farther away from the dogmas and doctrines of Christianity and moves through the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer toward the religion of the Buddha. It is a grave error to relegate to a secondary place the influence of Schopenhauer on Wagner and to credit the poet-composer with a direct entry into the teachings of the Gautama. We must bear in mind continually that Wagner got from Schopenhauer two great doctrines, one artistic, and the other ethical.

Schopenhauer propounded as the basis of his æsthetic system the theorem that it is the business of art to represent to us the eternal essence of things by means of prototypes. The conditions of time and place, cause and tendency, must be cleared away, and the naked Eternal Idea underneath disclosed. The discernment and revelation of this Idea are the duty and privilege of art.

Wagner, then, sought to set forth his personages and their actions as symbolical. They were to be visual embodiments of Eternal Ideas. Amfortas is the sinner in the agony of his punishment. Parsifal is the savior, the pure one who can redeem; Klingsor is the evil one, and Kundry the unwilling slave of his power. If here we find ourselves involved in some contradictions, let us be patient. Wagner's logic is that of a poet and a musician. It will not stand the test of the metaphysician.

But to resume. The ethical doctrine which the composer obtained from Schopenhauer was more significant in its results. Schopenhauer's philosophic system need not be set forth here. Suffice it to say that ethically its only possible outcome was negative. The world is so bad that the chief end of man should be to get out of it.

To reach the state of mind in which that end is the chief object, one must rid himself of all desire and yearn to arrive at a complete negation of the will to live. Recall "Tristan und Isolde." The first step toward the negation of the will to live is perfect sympathy with suffering. Then comes asceticism, which leads directly away from life toward a condition of abstraction.

Here the thought touches the monasticism of the early Church and avows a kinship with the Buddhistic doctrine. Withdrawal from the world and safety by absorption into the universal unconsciousness were the Buddhist's hope of peace. But neither Gautama nor Schopenhauer had any definite, positive reason for this. Here the early monk, who was looking out for the salvation of his own precious soul and letting other people's souls take care of themselves, came nearer to the ideals of Wagner as set forth in "Parsifal."

No, Schopenhauer did not teach Wagner the doctrine of "enlightenment by pity," for with Schopenhauer pity was not enlightenment, but the beginning of a personal abstraction. A man was sorry for others because they were in the world, the very worst place a man could inhabit. His sensuous nature made him like the things he found here (such as flower-maidens, for example); and his duty was to mortify the flesh, get rid of all his mortal appetites, live in asceticism, and die as soon as possible. Wagner was fond of grafting his own ideas on the philosophical systems of bigger men than himself. So he invented this doctrine of enlightenment. How he worked out his psychologic plan we shall see presently.

No doubt Wagner had his eye on Buddhism when he wrote "Parsifal." It is history that he once contemplated a Buddhistic drama, called "The Victors," in which he was to preach the doctrine of fleshly renunciation and salvation through the mortification of desire. But he abandoned the scheme. The story was Eastern, and he did some delving in Oriental literature.

How the "Four Sublime Verities" of Gautama, the founder of the Buddhistic religion, must have appealed to him! These were, first, that pain exists; second, that the cause of pain is desire or attachment; third, that pain can be ended by Nirvana; and fourth, how to attain Nirvana.

The way to Nirvana is hard, much harder than the path to the Christian Heaven, for the man must walk it without aid. There is no vicarious sacrifice in the religion of Siddartha. You must walk the wine-press alone, and drink of the dregs of life. All the best of the Ten Commandments are found in the precepts of this religion. Added to them are minor commands looking to complete abstraction.

For example, a Bhikshu (an order of monk) is forbidden to look at or converse with a woman lest emotion should disturb the serene indifference of his soul. He must not even save his mother if she is drowning, except with a long stick reached toward her.

"To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock," seems to have been the chief business of the founder. Thus is he always represented cross-legged and contemplative, with eyes downcast, "cleaving with the thunderbolt of science the mountain of ignorance," and perceiving the illusory nature of all things. So he comes at last to that state in which he breaks the bonds binding him to existence and enters into the complete Nirvana.

In this religion pity is pre-eminent, for it is sympathy with suffering. But it does not confine itself to human beings. Animals are also to share our sympathies, and here we meet with the foundation of Wagner's idea in "Parsifal" of the sacredness of the life of dumb creatures in the realms of the Holy Grail. But now let us see how Wagner works out his jumble of religious and philosophic doctrines.

Parsifal is a pure fool. Weigh that, first of all. He knows nothing; yet when he enters the flower-garden he compliments the women on their beauty, and fails to understand what they want of him. O wise young judge! this pure fool, who does not know what is the matter with Amfortas, and therefore has no desire to aid him, must be enlightened by pity. So Wagner sets Kundry to work to tell him the story of his mother's sufferings, and she ends the narration by printing a long kiss upon his lips. Wagner was fond of long kisses set to music, and he used one in "Siegfried" as an awakener.

Now what happens? This salacious kiss of an unchaste woman, imprinted on the lips of a youth who was, according to Wagner's delineation of him, as innocent as a child of eight or ten, instantly opens up to him the entire experience of Amfortas, and fills him with pity and horror! That is, indeed, a miracle. And to make the thing psychologically more absurd, Wagner shows us this "pure fool" battling madly with the simultaneous working of these two emotions. What has become of the enlightenment by pity? Plainly the enlightenment comes first and the pity afterward! Furthermore, Parsifal prays to the Redeemer for forgiveness for his failure to understand the scene in the hall of the Grail. But, as H. E. Krehbiel pertinently asked in an article in the "New York Tribune," what could the boy have done when he had not yet got the sacred spear from Klingsor?

What a hold, then, the Buddhistic ideas, toward which Wagner was led by Schopenhauer, had taken upon him! The religion of the crucial scene of the drama is not Christian at all. The outward and visible signs of the scene are purely pagan, but the underlying philosophy is Buddhistic. It is the final issue of the dreams which this master visionary had in his mind when he planned "The Victors." The only remnant of Christian story in this act is the reminiscence of the drama which Wagner once planned relating to the Saviour.

In his "Jesus of Nazareth" he intended to show Mary of Magdala in love with the Divine One. Wagner was no fool. Nor was he a madman, as Nordau has tried to show. But he was first, last, and all the time a theatrical thinker. His imagination dwelt in the show-house, and all was grist that came to his mill. If he had thought the meditations of the Creator good material for a music drama, he would have laid his artistic hands upon the eternal throne itself.

Thus, he shrank not from grafting spectacular show, Schopenhauerian ethics, and Buddhistic dogmas on the legend of the Holy Grail. As a matter of absolute fact, the Christian elements in this drama are almost wholly spectacular and in the nature of accessories. If ministers of the Gospel desire to be shocked by "Parsifal,"—and they have reason to be, if they look for it in the right place,—let them consider the place which the Holy Grail and the ceremony of the communion occupy in this play.

They are merely stage devices to heighten the picture of the suffering of Amfortas, and to impress upon our minds the vital need of the enlightenment of the pure fool. The processional of the Grail is spectacle pure and simple. The eating of the Last Supper is spectacle pure and simple. It has absolutely nothing to do with the story of the drama.

The unveiling of the Grail is necessary because it shows how Amfortas is made to suffer agony. But it is no assistance to such Christian ethics as there are in this muddle. If Amfortas has an incurable wound, which is merely the outward symbol of conscience, he ought not to need the sight of the Grail to make him feel worse. The thought of his unworthiness to be a member of the chaste brotherhood should be enough.

The foot-washing incident is theatricalism of the crassest kind. Can any one show that it has a direct connection with the development of the story? The argument in its favor is that it shows Kundry as a penitent, and establishes her in relations of atonement with Parsifal. Quite unnecessary, for the significance of the second act is that Parsifal, having resisted her tempting, is spiritually her master and also her redeemer. The act of absolution is made possible by his triumph over the flesh. He could have baptized her and bidden her trust in the Lord without offering us a portrait of the Saviour as represented in the seventh chapter of St. Luke:—

"And behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment,

"And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment."

Wagner brings on the tears after the foot-washing, so that he can show us how Kundry was released from the curse of laughter. Or was the curse imposed solely that this theatrical picture might be introduced?

The sacred spear has some connection with the story, but the weapon is not an important feature of Christianity. There is even room for doubt as to whether there ever was a sacred spear at all. The wound certainly existed; but who can vouch for the preservation of the spear as an object of reverence? So let us for the present dismiss the profound religious basis of Richard Wagner's "Parsifal." Buddha and Arthur Schopenhauer taught the dramatist more essentials than the Holy Bible did. The foundations of the drama rest on the philosophy of negation. The Christianity is merely ornamental, spectacular, and delusive.

III.—THE NATIONAL RELIGIOUS DRAMA

I shall lay down a type of theological orthodoxy to which all the divine legends in our city must conform.

Plato, Republic (Grote's abstract)

"Parsifal" is the supreme test of the outcome of Wagner's theory that the modern theatre ought to bear the same relation to the life of the people as the theatre of the Greeks did. All students of the master's writings know that he preached this especially in those years when his system had attained definite and detailed form in his mind. In the Greek theatre he saw an art influence far-reaching and mighty,—an influence which dominated because it dramatized the artistic and religious ideals of a people. That he failed to discern the identity of religion and art in the symbolical embodiments named gods by the imaginative Greeks is another story.

Furthermore, he objected strenuously and rightly to any criticism of his philosophic and artistic system based on the study of his early works, which were written before his system was fully developed. In the "Communication to My Friends" he says:—

"Certain critics who pretend to judge my art doings as a connected whole have set about their task with this same uncritical heedlessness and lack of feeling. Views on the nature of art that I have proclaimed from a standpoint which it took me years of evolution step by step to gain, they seize on for the standard of their verdict, and point them back upon those very compositions from which I started on the natural path of evolution that led me to this standpoint.

"When for instance—not from the standpoint of abstract æsthetics, but from that of practical artistic experience—I denote the Christian principle as hostile to or incapable of art, these critics point me out the contradiction in which I stand toward my earlier dramatic works, which undoubtedly are filled with a certain tincture of this principle so inextricably blended with our modern evolution."

Excellent. The italics are not Wagner's. Let us, then, avoid falling into the error of chaining Wagner to the beautiful Christianity idealized by dramatic art, which he, unwise youth that he was, poured into his "Tannhäuser," and confine ourselves to the full-fledged "Parsifal," in which we are not, as he tells us, to regard the Christianity as a vital art principle, but as one opposed to true art. What does the man mean?

One thing is clear. Wagner did endeavor to theatricalize religions and to parody in his feeble modern manner the theatre of the Greeks. But if he failed (and who can doubt that he did after studying the bloodless philosophy of the last product of his genius?), it was because he was trying to do with calculating forethought what the Greek did spontaneously, and because his religion supplied him plentifully and unconsciously with the Schopenhauerian materials of art; namely, Eternal Ideas represented by means of prototypes.

How came Wagner to fail in his puerile attempt to make a drama out of a supposed incident in the life of Christ? Misled by the similarity of his conception of the Saviour of mankind as a pure human being resisting the seductions of a temptress in the person of Mary Magdalen to his Tannhäuser battling with carnal passion typified by Venus, or his Parsifal, remaining innocent through sheer guilelessness, he set out to thrust into the glare of the footlights the personality of Jesus. And then he found that the personality was not merely human, nor the poetic embodiment of an idea, even an Eternal Idea, but an everlasting miracle and mystery, a divinity beyond the reach of his trap-doors, purple lights, and tenor tubas.

The story of Christ is tremendously dramatic, but it has eluded every attempt at theatrical treatment. The thing done at Oberammergau is not drama, but an old-fashioned mystery play. It is a moving panorama. Pinero, Belasco, or even Ibsen would shrink from an attempt to dramatize for the ordinary theatre the story of the Saviour. But Wagner, blinded by his own ambition to make a show of all things, to seize upon every suggestion of religion as material for music, thought for a time that he could turn the Son of Man into a mime.

What a different art work was that of the Greek dramatist! How much more direct and thornless was the path by which he reached the theatrical representation of his gods and goddesses and the dramatic relation of the fables in which they were the actors! With his stylus in hand he sat at gaze upon a world of personated ideas, of symbols in action. All was poetic and imaginative. All was the creation of the human mind speculating upon the operation of unseen forces and subtle passions. There was no almighty revelation to baffle him. The infinite did not come and stand before him in an incomprehensible mortalization of itself. What he had of the world beyond the skies was the dreaming of his own kind.

What were Zeus and Hermes, Aphrodite and Hera, Artemis and Apollo, Pallas and Poseidon, but personifications of ideas, those eternal types which even the nugatory speculation of Schopenhauer postulated as the materials of true art? When the Greek tragic dramatist was not utilizing the gods, he employed the people of the mythologic tales. When Phrynicus, in 511 B. C., wrote a tragedy on the capture of Miletus, melting an audience to tears with the pathos of a well-known contemporary event, he was fined a thousand drachmæ for his ill-chosen subject.

When Wagner delved in the pagan mythology of the Northmen, he fell upon metal like that of the Greeks. Nearly every personage in the burg of Wallhal has a companion on Olympus. In the Eddas Wagner found eternal types created by the human imagination by the same processes as those of the Greeks. Hence the splendid humanity of his Wotan, his Brünnhilde, his Fricka.

What had the Greek? The entire Grecian religion grew out of the worship of the powers of nature. It recognized one power as the head of all, Zeus, the god of heaven and light. "And God said, Let there be light, and there was light." The Greek's notion of the beginning of all things was the same as the Hebrew's. With Zeus abode in the clear expanse of ether Hera, representing the eternal feminine element in the divinity. The other gods were partly representatives of the attributes of Zeus himself,—as Athene, knowledge, sprung from his head; Apollo, beauty and purity; Hermes, who brings up the treasures of fruitfulness from the depths of the earth; and Cora, the child, now lost and now recovered by Hera, typifying the winter and the summer. Poseidon and Hephæstus represented the elements, water and fire. But why go farther with this catalogue? It is known to every school-boy.

Together with these symbols the Greek dramatist had Hercules and Prometheus, Paris and Orestes, Jason and Medea, and other earth-born mythologic personages, the Siegfrieds and Gunthers and Sieglindes of their mythologic world, demigods and heroes all, acting in fables of wondrous poetic power, built on imaginative developments of ideals. The Greek world knew these tales. The dramatist of the Æschylean age was situated as Weber was when he put "Der Freischütz" before Germany. He utilized the fairy tales of the people, and offering them in a novel form made them eloquent with a new glory.

Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were the masters of the Greek tragedy; and their plays all deal with either mythologic or legendary stories and personages. The ideas preached in the ethics of their dramas were those of Greek morality. The gods and goddesses introduced or referred to were the embodiments of Greek ideals. Though the populace was not so able a doctrinaire as to know that there was in truth but one deity, Zeus, of whom all the others were but aids and expressions, it had the enormous advantage of intimate acquaintance with the poetic attributes of the galaxy of gods. It was a public ripe for its religious drama.

Now, when Richard Wagner set out to build up a modern theatre which should have the same relation to the life of the people as the theatre of the Greeks had to theirs, he started on the right path. He took the legendary materials to be found in German literature. He wrote with unerring judgment when he created his operatic version of "The Flying Dutchman." The pity of it is that he did not compose this work when he was at the period of the maturity of his genius. We should have had something almost as splendid as "Tristan und Isolde," for while the story is not so suggestive as the old legend treated by Gottfried von Strassbourg, it is not far behind it. At any rate, it is purely Teutonic in its character, though in its origin it is Greek. For, of course, Vanderdecken is but a modern replica of Ulysses. The Germans knew the story, for Heine had made it theirs. Wagner wrote wisely and well in this drama.

In "Tannhäuser" again he found his materials in the vast treasure-house of German literature and legend. Possibly this story was known to fewer Germans than "The Flying Dutchman," but its character was sympathetic to them and there was no mistaking the force of its moral lesson. Yet the religious doctrines of this drama are not essentially those of the Christian Church; they are those of religion and morality in general. The idea of salvation through love of a pure woman is the Goethean doctrine of the eternal womanly leading us upward. It was not original with Wagner, but it was beloved by him.

In "Lohengrin" we come nearer to the mystical thoughts of such a work as "Parsifal," yet here humanity operates in the natural desire of Elsa to reach into the secrets of her husband's heart and life, and still more powerfully in the vengeful character of the sexless and inexorable Ortrud.

In both of these splendid dramas of Wagner's genius we are confronted at every step with the normal working of human passions, and love throbs through both of them. In "Parsifal" we have no single pulse of love. In "Parsifal" salvation is brought by ignorance and miracle. In "Tannhäuser" it comes triumphantly through suffering, repentance, and prayer. In "Parsifal" the sufferings of Amfortas are relieved by the purity of another man. In "Tannhäuser" the misery of the hero is assuaged by his own repentance and the holy love of Elizabeth. The religion of "Tannhäuser" is human; that of "Parsifal" is ceremonial, panoramic, abstract.

"Parsifal" is a dramatization of ceremonials. In the first and third acts we behold the pageant of religious rites; in the second the diorama of bacchanalian orgies. Externals are thrust upon us constantly; the depths are hidden under a veil of scenic pretence and musical delusion. The bulk of the music of the work is external and descriptive. Little, indeed, is there of the tonal embodiment of subjective ideas. Compare the three acts of "Parsifal" with the three great emotional episodes of "Tristan und Isolde." What a stupendous development the latter work shows of the tragedy of fatal passion!

In its first act the operation of a magical agency breaks down the hitherto safe bonds of restraint and plunges two typical human beings into the very vortex of flaming love. In the second act they rush together and forget honor. The stroke of retribution falls; fate deals her deadly blow. In the third act remorse, agony, death, and the salvation of suffering souls by negation.

There is a drama which preaches no religious doctrine, which has no dogma save the Buddhistic one of release from suffering by death, yet which stands in closer relation to the life of the people than all of Wagner's religious dramas, because it deals with world-thoughts.

When Wagner worked with the purely mythical and legendary tales of the German people, he built dramas of national character and power. When he undertook to turn into theatrical pageants the teachings of Christianity, he failed utterly. The Greek succeeded because his religion was one of symbols, of deifications of the powers of nature, with its literature developed from tales of the fabulous doings of gods and goddesses, tales embodying in imaginative form fundamental facts of nature.

When Wagner sought his inspiration in the mythology of the North, which was developed in precisely the same manner as the Greek mythology, he found material of poetic and suggestive kind. But when, by dramatizing Christian doctrine and history, he tried to bring his national theatre into such relation to the life of the people as the Greek dramatists brought theirs, he failed, for the simple reason that at this point his entire theory as to the suitability of mythical and legendary material to the use of the dramatist broke down.

There is nothing mythological in the teachings of the Christian religion, nor in the acts of its Founder or apostles. These things stand apart from mythology and are differentiated from it absolutely. They are not and could not have been the product of human imagination, symbolizing human experience and speculation. The profoundest philosophers of antiquity never hit upon the basic doctrines of Christianity.

Beautiful as the teachings of Socrates are, they are essentially human. The Sermon on the Mount sets up a system of ethics never dreamed of by Aristotle or Plato. Only Buddha ever approached Christ, and the outcome of the Hindu's entire system was not eternal salvation and glory, but endless silence and the negation of death. From this Wagner could not escape, even in his "Parsifal," for Kundry, in the final scene, dies of what? Of a Buddhistic ethical idea!

Wagner's greatest works are unquestionably those in which the fundamental myths or legends were symbolical of human passions, of the worldwide experience of mankind. "Tannhäuser," "Die Walküre," "Siegfried," "Götterdämmerung," and "Tristan und Isolde" are Wagner's masterpieces of serious drama, not the saccharine "Lohengrin," nor the tinselled ritual, "Parsifal." Are not those, with the matchless comedy of manners, "Die Meistersinger," enough for one mind to have created? Why should we believe it incumbent upon us to uphold all that Wagner did?

We can say of him as Prentice said of Napoleon, "Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his own originality." Taking him by and large, as the sailors say, he was the most striking figure in musical history. Why discredit him by trying to show that "Parsifal," the feeble child of his artistic senility, was filled with the vigor of his young Volsung or the radiant power of his immortal song of love insatiate?

DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN

I.—A FUTILE GOD AND A POTENT DEVIL

The will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs.

Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk. I.

With every year the festival of the four dramas is celebrated in the metropolis of the New World. Parsifalian orgies are new, and the wine of the holy cup offers a novel intoxication to restless spirits ever seeking fresh excitements. But your good, honest, old Wagnerite goes yearly to gape in awestruck silence at the majesty of the "wildered" Wotan, and to bask in the sunshine of Siegfried's radiant youth. Whistle your Last Supper motive, you Monsalvationer, if you will, as you crunch your lobster salad after the celebration, but we old-time Wagnerites, who have hunted with the pack since first the "flight" theme pulsated across the world, we shall trot home murmuring the slumber motive and lay us down to pleasant dreams with a final sigh of Fafner's "Lass't mich schlafen."

Perhaps this is a good time to review our impressions of that wonderful creation of a strange genius, "Der Ring des Nibelungen." Whatever else may be said of Wagner, it must always be admitted that he was a genius. Something of the vanity of the child, the naïveté that always dwells in the organization of the truly original artist, is to be discerned in his every action, in his every utterance; and it would be strange if it did not force itself upon our notice in his works. There it discloses itself most frequently in a ludicrous error of taking seriously things that can never be other than amusing to the casual observer, and of missing the point of some of his own best ideas.

Wagner has been much praised as a poet. Time was when the present writer (who must be his own confessor), feeling the power and beauty of the fundamental stuff in the music dramas, rather than the adapter's cumbersome and rudely articulated Germanizing of it, dreamed that Wagner had poetic craftsmanship of no mean order. But he never fell into the error of regarding him as a brother of the northern skalds, a bard chanting in full-blooded imagination. Wagner was a dramatist, of an uncommonly high order, if you will, looking always to the symbolism of musical investure for his stage pictures, but just a dramatist and nothing more.

His truest drama, as it is his most finely wrought, is "Tristan und Isolde," which rests upon the simplest of emotional propositions, demonstrated in the most convincing of musical illustration. But "Der Ring des Nibelungen" is his most ponderous conception, his most elaborate structure, and withal second only to "Tristan und Isolde" in the majestic heights of musical delineation to which it triumphantly ascends.

Not a little of its musical glory grows out of its dramatic difficulties. In its beginning it deals with gods, dwarfs, nixies of the Rhine, and cumbersome giants, all fabulous, nebulous, in some instances almost intangible figures, whose only force lies in their simulation of humanity, and whose mastering weakness consists in their unreality. Gradually these gods and goddesses fade away and leave the picture occupied with purely human figures alone. The last majestic burst of supernal majesty is the final scene of "Die Walküre." In "Siegfried" a worn and weary wanderer, cherishing a feeble hope, powerless to turn the flow of events, passes across the canvas and dwindles out of sight before the dawn of human love.

The rest is pure humanity, except when in the end of "Götterdämmerung" the imperial godhood of Brünnhilde enthrones itself upon the wreck of worlds, and sings the death-warrant of the waning Wotan and his wavering brood.

The futile and disappearing gods! These are the weird and enchanting unrealities of Wagner's "Nibelungen" scheme. How they potter and fumble with the machinery of the inevitable! How they falter and fail in the presence of inscrutable Truth, which overcomes them like a summer cloud! They parade before us in "Das Rheingold," clad in a clarion of trumpets and trombones, made glorious with the radiance of Wagner's blazing sunlight of sonorous chords; but they are none the less futile. Save one,—Loge, the tempter, Loge, the spirit of indomitable evil, who sows the seed of destruction in the beginning and writes the plot of "Götterdämmerung" with a twist of his finger toward the gleaming gold.

Of all Wagner's philosophic compositions, his psychological conjurations out of the shadowy depths of his own fancy and the equally cloudy shallows of Schopenhauer and Feuerbach, Loge is the most intimately conceived and the most finely wrought. Disappearing, indeed, he is, but by no means futile. The Mephistopheles of the rock-ribbed north, the Lucifer of the hills, he unites all the subtlety of the metropolitan conception of the sophisticated Goethe with the breadth and spontaneity of the harp-strokes of the storm-bred bard.

Wagner does not paint Loge so brilliantly in text as he does in music. This Satanic tempter of the wise ones is an operatic character raised to the seventh power. His words are unconvincing without his music, which charges them and him with a boundless significance. Never once in all his flickering career does he utter a single sentence of such elemental majesty as that of Boito's Mefistofele: "Son lo spirito che nega." That looming figure of the archlibrettist of Tuscany spreads the shadow of contemporaneous sophistication across the operatic firmament. Standing with his defiant gaze upon the throne of the many-voiced invisible, he is a lyric reincarnation of the epic Lucifer of Milton.

Loge is no such mighty spirit. He comes upon the scene whining excuses for an ill-done errand. He slips, he slides, he wriggles away. He is the aurora of casuistry, the embodiment of the elusive. The flickering fire is his outward manifestation. He is mean. He is a sneak. But he is the intellectual superior of the entire coterie of futile gods, and he laughs at their infantile incapacity. Poor old Wotan! He mumbles in his beard that he cannot do mental tricks as Loge can. A simple-minded old god is he, who would gladly cheat the lumbering giants out of their guerdon, but does not know how. So he turns to Loge, who comes waving and caracoling upon the scene—to what theme? That of the fire! A theme which is as elusive as his nature, a theme which has neither beginning nor end, which wanders along in the form of an indefinite decimal of harmony and never for an instant establishes a definite tonality.

Every movement of Loge, every betrayal of a new thought formed in his shifty mind, is accompanied by an utterance of this motive in the orchestra. Not once in "Das Rheingold" does the theme rest itself upon the firm foundations of a major triad. Chromatic in form, it is chromatic, chameleon-like in color. It is the real Loge. It is a musical triumph, because in terms of purely descriptive imitation it expresses a psychologic study. The music is the shifting, flickering, changeful, destroying fire; the fire is the soul of Loge and the first fruit of perdition.

The theme returns in the last scene of "Die Walküre," when Wotan, the helpless father, has put his best-beloved to sleep. He is to surround her with a belt of guardian fire. Fire is the soul of Loge, a lovely protector for unconscious virtue! Again we hear the fire music, but only for fire. Loge, most subtle of the gods of the field, has to all appearances been the most futile. He has disappeared already. But now his fire, at any rate, returns and beams beneficently from a base of diatonic major harmonies with tinkling of blissful bells. Did Wagner realize the fathomless depths of his own sarcasm here? Or is it all a beautiful chance?

In the last scene of "Siegfried" there is an echo of the Loge theme, but it means almost nothing. The same echo is heard in "Götterdämmerung," Act I. In Act III. of the same drama, when Brünnhilde seizes the torch to fire the funeral pyre whose flames shall set all Walhalla in a blaze, the Loge chromatics, together with a gleam of the ring theme, flashes up, but it is as futile as the almost-forgotten Loge. Here was Wagner's opportunity to tell the truth about his own secret conception of this vast phantasmagoria of fact and fable. At the very end of "Das Rheingold" the crafty one says:

"A feverish fancy

Doth woo me to wander

Forth in flickering fire:

To burn and waste them

Who bound me erewhile.

Rather than be

Thus blindly engulfed,

Even were they of gods the most godlike."

No Walhalla for the free spirit of flame, but liberty and the ultimate destruction of these pitiful children of the light. Wagner might have let the glittering chromatics of the fire theme rise just once into a peal of majestic power in the end of "Götterdämmerung," when Wotan and all his hosts sat helpless amid the blazing of Walhalla. It is Loge's triumph, is it not? Oh, yes, of course, it is the stupendous immolation of Brünnhilde, with the unutterable thought behind it and the regeneration of the earth before it. But Loge would have seen in it nothing but the victory of the eternal principle of destruction, which Wagner epitomized even better than he knew in his musical characterization of the fire-fiend.

What was really in Wagner's mind when he wrote that extraordinarily beautiful passage of song for Loge in the first scene of "Das Rheingold"?

"Where life ebbeth and floweth

In flood and earth and air,

All asked I,

Ever inquiring,

Where sinew doth reign,

And seedlings are rooted,

What well a man

Could mightier deem

Than woman's wonderful worth."

Again, it is not the text, but the marvellous burst of throbbing melody that tells the thought in Wagner's mind. But does it tell all? Study well the phrases in the score. Are they sincere, or does Wagner shadow forth just a suspicion of the dishonesty which lurks in the utterance? Loge knows that he has yet his trump card, the gold of the Rhine, to play; and either he believes that will be a winning card, or he is not the devil, after all.

What, then, becomes of this manifestation of Wagnerian philosophy, this joyous tempter of wooden gods? At the end of "Das Rheingold" his personal career ends. Henceforth only his soul hovers about us. Like the genie who, according to the veracious chronicler of the "Arabian Nights," had sinned against Solomon, he was shut up in a box, the old earth itself. He fades out of sight to reappear only in a materialistic exhibit of steam and red fire. A sad end, indeed, for such a thoughtful representation of sophistry. "Two special powers," says M. Taine, "lead mankind,—impulse and idea." Loge was the embodiment of idea. Farewell to thee, Idea. Henceforth let impulse lead us onward to love and death. Yet shall not Idea, subtle, crafty, remorseless, triumph at last?

The foil to Loge is Wotan, foil and victim. What a sorrowful spectacle is this unfortunate master of the gods, who takes up Loge because that craftsman has brains, and yet cannot withstand the temptations of his own devil! Jupiter did not need a devil to lead him astray. A neatly turned ankle or a pair of melting eyes sufficed to lure Zeus from Olympus. The world and the flesh were equal to his undoing. But here is a primitive god, manufactured out of the imagination of a wholly unsophisticated people, far removed from the polish and culture of the Greeks, and he cannot sin in hot blood. First of all, he must be tempted by a fiend, who lures him with the promise of unlimited power. Zeus had his power ready-made.

Wotan was right. What was a god to do who was short of power? Preposterous! He could not afford to allow some one else to get the gold and make the ring. Alberich already had it. What was to be done? Get it away from him, and so save the Walhalla dynasty from being dethroned. Wise Wotan! It never occurred to him that Loge was planning just that coup.

Here is a chief god whose power rests upon contracts, yet who does not know how to make an advantageous bargain with two stupid giants! Pity the sorrows of the one-eyed god! He is not omnipotent. He is surrounded by enemies, and afar off looms the fathomless abyss of the dusk of the gods, the pall of Ragnarok, the last battle. A fortress must he have, and heroes culled by the aerial Valkyrs from the slain of all the world to fight for Walhalla in the final hour.

Self-preservation is the selfish motive of Wotan's sin. He haggles with Fafner and Fasolt for a haven of refuge, and offers a price he knows he dare not pay. Without Freia, the goddess of youth, he must wither. What does all this mean? Simply that Wotan was the subject of a moral law outside of and above him. Was it strange that the primitive mind could not conceive a god who was himself the law?

Not at all; for, after all, these children of the ages made deities of human attributes,—power, knowledge, passion, beauty, swiftness. They knew all these attributes were subject to the moral law, for the blackest years of Egypt had not obscured the truth that the wages of sin is death. In "Das Rheingold" Wotan falls a prey to the moral law as interpreted to him by the giants. In "Die Walküre" he again makes a foolish effort to dodge it, and the outraged majesty of Fricka demands revenge. What a futile god!

The figure of Wotan is heroic only in "Die Walküre." Here we find the old god at bay. In "Rheingold" he is a feeble plotter; in "Walküre" he faces the inevitable and fights in the last ditch. In "Siegfried" he has become a garrulous dotard, maundering about the earth, impotent and puerile, quibbling in childish conundrums with a shifty dwarf, pledging a head he would not sacrifice, waiting for the defiant act of the youthful hero, and enacting the silly mummery of opposing him with the spear which he knows the boy despises.

"In vain! I cannot hinder thee!" he tragically exclaims, as he stalks off the stage and into the gallery of properties which Wagner reserves for destruction in the last scene of all. And this is the All-Father, the Thunderer of the Norse mythology, the supine creature of moral laws which his pitiable nature cannot grasp and which he feebly strives throughout the whole story to escape.

What music has Wagner evolved to body forth the traits and accessories of this godless deity? The Walhall theme, which identifies with the god the stone walls of his stronghold; the spear motive, which speaks in splendid accents of the firmness of sacred obligations, broken by Wotan in the very first scene of the tragedy; Wotan's anger; Wotan's distress; Wotan the wanderer; Wotan's bequest of the inheritance of the world. All these themes depict this entangled god in the meshes of circumstance. There is not a single motive setting forth any inherent grandeur of character, any great or noble thought or passion blazing from his soul.

Walhall was Wotan's chapel of refuge. The spear's holy runes were outside of his personality and greater than it. His anger was awakened by the disobedience of a loving daughter who sought to be what she had always been, the heart's wish of the god. The distress was the fruit of a realization that the stern grip of the moral law was strangling the whole coterie of Walhall because of its master's sins.

Wotan the wanderer,—what a desolate succession of changing tonalities, telling of a god without a local habitation or a name, a god whose occupation was literally gone! The bequest theme tells of this doddering deity's resignation of power in favor of youth and love, two honest agencies much better fitted to carry on the administration of a world than trickery and subterfuge.

Carlyle in his "French Revolution" harps upon the end that was contained in the beginning. "Cast forth thy act, thy word," again in his "Sartor Resartus" he says, "into the ever working universe; it is a seed grain that cannot die; unnoticed to-day (says one) it will be found flourishing as a banyan grove (perhaps also as a hemlock forest) after a thousand years." The Scripture has tersely summarized the whole matter in the prophetic declaration that the wages of sin is death.

Wotan's original sin in cheating the giants spreads itself into the hemlock forest of a mighty tragedy, but for the god himself the Biblical maxim stands in letters of fire. And here mark the awful majesty of the Norse myth. Wotan and all his brood fall victims in the end to the physical manifestation of the evil spirit, Loge.

They are burned in Walhalla. The flickering fire singes out the last vestiges of this rotten dynasty. The spirit of temptation wreaks its own vengeance upon the tempted. "Son lo spirito che nega." The Mephistophelian principle of negation wipes the futile gods off the firmament. Was there any touch of Schopenhauer or Buddha in this? Not a whiff. It was pure, stern, primeval morality. It was unsophisticated man's recognition of the inexorable justice of the moral law.

How infinitely grander this conception is than the flimsy and artificial doctrines of the seduction and spear cure in "Parsifal"! In the consecrational festival play all is manufactured, all is artificial. The entire external machinery of the thing is a cheap theatrical pose. In "Der Ring des Nibelungen" the ethics are the common sense of a people, nay, of whole races, sprung from the mystic Aryan source and filtered through the anxious thought of a hundred tribes that speculated under the inspiring stars across the valleys and plains of all Europe.

How much of all this did Wagner perceive when he was constructing his extraordinary drama in four plays? His scheme, according to his own words, contemplated the representation of the gods as writhing in helplessness under the burden imposed by their own transgression of the law. This burden could be removed only by the action of a free agent, a man, whose deeds were all his own. After Titanic preparation Wagner places this man before us in the person of Siegfried.

His death is the vicarious sacrifice for the gods. In order to get him killed Wagner writes a whole drama, a mighty one indeed, in which this noble hero is made to commit a crime while under the influence of enchantment. He is slain for that crime by Hagen, who knows that he is innocent, and who contrived the whole plot simply to have an excuse for killing him, in order to get back the Nibelungs' ring.

What evidence is there that Wagner perceived the full significance of the final triumph of Loge over the erring Wotan? Not one jot. That the idea occurred to him in its purely external and physical form is proved by a passage in the final speech of Brünnhilde:

"Fly home, ye ravens!

Rede it in Walhalla

What here on the Rhine ye have heard!

To Brünnhilde's rock

Go round about.

Yet Loge burns there:

Walhall bid him revisit!

Draweth near in gloom

The dusk of the gods.

Thus, casting my torch,

I kindle Walhalla's towers."

And that is all. Yet the thought lurks always beneath the surface of the tragedy. Wotan, the father and master of the futile and disappearing gods, fell a victim to evil itself, to evil which in the consuming power of flickering fire was its own executioner.

II.—THE WOMAN AND THE SERPENT

I will put enmity between thee and the serpent.

Genesis iii. 15

Wagner's gallery of portraits of women has been much praised. Senta, mooning by her idle spinning-wheel and waiting the time when she might cast her pure spirit on the stained bosom of the ocean rover and so save him another seven years' damnation; Elsa, wavering between faith and doubt and finally rushing to destruction out of sheer curiosity; the holy Elizabeth, praying for the life of him who had committed against her the deadliest of all sins, gross infidelity, the sanctified Elizabeth, sweetest, purest, most adorable of all Wagner's heroines; the blazing torch of human passion, Isolde, the primeval, unconventional woman; and Brünnhilde, the wish maid, the sleeping beauty, the waking avenger and liberator,—all these have been praised by learned commentators in divers tongues.

Wagner was a student of women. He married two, and there are also many unpublished letters. He wrote "Tristan und Isolde" on the shores of Lucerne, where Isolde's real name was Mathilde. In the end he was dominated by a woman, but it may be doubted whether he ever really comprehended the "ewig weibliche," of which he made such clever theatrical use. There is not a very convincing feminine element in "Das Rheingold." The first disclosure is of three Rhein daughters sporting in the gauzy depths of their native element and singing in a language all their own around a nugget of gold of which strange lies are told. It is said that any person who makes a ring of that gold will have power and dominion over the world. The truth is that whosoever possesses that ring is bound to get into trouble, because a filthy little black dwarf will place a freak's curse upon it.

These three fish-tailed maidens, frisking in the sallow glare of the shaded spot-light, youthful of aspect, ebullient of manner, irreproachable in morals, so far as one can judge from their treatment of the winsome Alberich, outlive the futile and disappearing gods. They come to the surface in the final scene of "Götterdämmerung," and wrest back their ring from the hands of Hagen, whom they incontinently drown in their dotted Swiss habitation. There must be a deep moral lesson somewhere in this. What is it? Possibly it signifies that good girls are always triumphant in the end. At any rate, it accentuates the pitiable feebleness of the mighty ones of Walhall.

Another feminine figure in the foreword of the trilogy is the excellent Erda. This portentous poser in green light and veiling makes two appearances in the course of the tragedy. The first is in "Rheingold" and the second in "Siegfried." She occupies a position somewhat similar to that of a Greek chorus. She helps the audience to a comprehension of what the rather incomprehensible gods are doing. She always comes to the surface when Wotan is "stumped."

The first time she comes when he is about to commit an act of folly. She tells him to get rid of the ring which he had employed so much strategy to procure. He promptly obeys her, although he has never seen her before, and was pretty thoroughly astonished by her unexpected appearance. The second time she discloses herself when Wotan is sorely in need of more sound advice. We now learn that Wotan, who in "Rheingold" had declared that he intended to know more of the lady, has not wasted his time in idle prating. The nine Valkyrs are the living proofs of this. Erda is plainly not at all pleased to meet her old friend again. She gives him another dark and dismal warning, and leaves him to chew the cud of his own cheerful reflection.

Freia, the charming young woman for whom the giants wrangle, is a mere figure in "Rheingold." She might as well be a piece of stage property. She counts for nothing else. She has no more dramatic significance than the lumps of gold which the dwarfs lug upon their straining shoulders. She belongs to the same category as the delectable Donner and Froh, who stand about in odd corners and try desperately to look as if they were Vulcan and Apollo, whereas they are neither.

One feminine character stands alone in "Rheingold." The virtuous Fricka, type of that species of amiable wife who regards all mortal desire as utterly depraved and who would joy to wrap herself in a spotless mantle of noli me tangere and let her husband worship her on bended knees outside the portals of her holy temple,—she is the woman with a mission in this splendid tragedy of futile gods and fumbling mortals.

But Fricka is right, after all. If Wotan had listened to her advice, he would have come out of all his difficulties much better. The fount of misfortune, as far as Fricka is concerned, was her failure to brush the dust off her own garments in the day of the first temptation. Loge knew where to touch the quick of her woman's weakness. "Will the gold make pretty ornaments for women?" she asked; and Loge, who, being the spirit of evil, well knew the root, declared that there was nothing which it could do better than that. And so Fricka stood actionless while Wotan went down to Niebelheim to rape the gold from Alberich.

Short-sighted Fricka! Mean-spirited Fricka! True woman Fricka! When she has tacitly consented to the theft of the gold, what does she? Seeing her poor old one-eyed husband struggling to escape the consequences of his guilt by creating a race of free agents to make the atonement for him, she pounces upon him with a stern demand that Siegmund shall die for violating her standards of virtue. But who ever expected to find a consistent logic in the mind of fair woman, even a resident of high Olympus?

Having turned upon the hand that sought to benefit her, what does she? She joins the procession of the futile and disappearing gods. Fricka mounts her ram-hauled chariot and slides away into the past, only to reappear in the chaste and general conflagration of the last great scene. She has served her purpose. She has made the drama of "Siegfried" imperatively necessary.

Siegmund being slain in answer to her inexorable demand, Brünnhilde must be punished for trying to carry out Wotan's original plot. Of course that is well enough. If Brünnhilde had had her way, there never would have been any drama of "Siegfried" and consequently no "Götterdämmerung." But without Siegfried things cannot go on. Sieglinde must hie her to the dark forest in the east, there to sob out her sweet but shadowed young life, and leave to the whining Mime the nursery task of rearing the youthful Volsung.

So much for the eternal feminine in the celestial circle of the trilogy. Poor little Gutrune! She's worth the whole lot of them. She at least was a gentle, soulful, loving woman, who was not troubling her spirit with a desire for gold, but who was possessed of an honest ambition to be the wife of the most important gentleman of the district. Social position was not what she sought, for she had that already. She was a Gibichung, which was the same in the Rhine valley as being a Biddle in Philadelphia. No; what she yearned for was distinction. She would have been a lady of the White House, if possible, had she lived in our time. Anyhow, she was a woman with whom one can sympathize, for she really liked Siegfried.

Last but not least of the "Rheingold" coterie are the giants. Fafner is an admirable character. He knows just what he wishes and he goes straight to the point. First of all, he wishes to possess himself of Freia because she would serve two purposes; namely, to keep house and cook for him and at the same time to preserve his youth. But the lumbering Fasolt, that overgrown blond basso, must go and fall in love with the simpering little soprano leggiere. How came Wagner not to remember the law of operatic tradition?

It is only another instance of his lack of the sense of humor. Fafner very properly disposes of Fasolt and goes off with the gold. And here follows one of the genuinely poetic touches of the tragedy. This scaly miser who has the hoard, the tarnhelm, and the ring, and who simply snuggles them up in a cave without reaping a single benefit from their possession, is put out of the drama by Siegfried, the embodiment of careless youth, hot blood, and human passion. Possibly Wagner thought of this, and possibly he did not; but at any rate we may do so, and thus intensify our poetic mood.

What effect has the disappearance of the futile gods upon the dramatic development of the story? Wotan is the hero of "Rheingold" and "Walküre." These two sections of the drama are concerned with the adventures of a god in search of a method of government. The hero of "Siegfried" and "Götterdämmerung" is Siegfried, a mortal in search of a raison d'être. The former plays bad politics and learns too late that in statecraft as in business honesty is the best policy. The latter follows the inspirations of youth and nature, and comes to grief because he is the Parsifal of the north, a "guileless fool."

Musically "Rheingold" is a vorspiel. It introduces a few fundamental themes, rings the harmonic changes on them, and makes way for the real first movement, "Die Walküre." Of this work the music is the salvation, for its second act is dramatically so feeble, so ill-made, and so prosy that it would drive people out of the theatre were it not for its melodic richness. Fricka's lecture of Wotan, one of the vital scenes of the whole trilogy, is dramatically a bore; but musically it is strong and interesting, and it approaches its end with one of the most imposing phrases conceived by the wizard of Bayreuth, the phrase with which Fricka intones the words:—

"Deiner ew'gen Gattin

Heilige Ehre

Schirme heut' ihr Schild."

"The holy honor of thy eternal spouse as a shield this day protects her." That is Wagner's one proclamation of the majesty of Fricka and the chastity of the law which she represented. It is the finest musical thought in the whole second act of "Die Walküre," for, after all, the much-vaunted "Todesverkündigung" is a situation rather than a theme. The brass melody of it is not genuinely imposing, especially when the impersonator of Brünnhilde does not know how to appear mysterious and foreboding. The fight in the clouds is one of Wagner's impracticable conceptions. When it is perfectly executed, it is unconvincing; when it is not, it is quite incomprehensible, and sometimes it is even comic.

Musically "Die Walküre" consists of the first and last acts, and the first really begins with the duet between Siegmund and Sieglinde. All that goes before is preparation, interesting by reason of its musical narrative, but much too prolix, as all Wagner's explanations are. Siegmund's narrative is three times as long as is necessary to afford a reason for the hatred of Hunding. It would have been more subtle and more dramatic, anyhow, to let Hunding's thirst for vengeance rest entirely upon his discovery of the interest of his wife and the visitor for each other.

But let that pass. The duet of Siegmund and Sieglinde is generally accepted as one of Wagner's great achievements in sustained melody. The love-song is babbled now by musical babes. It is very pretty, and it has a manly ring, which we may all admire. But the third act of "Die Walküre" dwells from beginning to end in the sunlit regions of genius.

The feebleness of Wotan here loses itself in a sea of infinite pathos. The power of the magic hand of Wagner in the creation of dramatic atmosphere is seen in the tumultuous storming of the Valkyrs through the inky air. "How now, ye secret black and midnight hags; what is't ye do?" The salutation of Macbeth to the witches pales before the lightnings of the winged steeds. Into the midst of this festival of the furies plunges the ill-assorted pair, Brünnhilde and Sieglinde.

Thundering upon their traces comes Wotan, the irate god, whose well-meant efforts to escape the complications wrought by his own misdeeds have been thwarted by the erring wish maiden. Hearken to the old scold berating his frightened daughters: "Out with ye, hussies. Your sister has been disobedient. Speak to her, and I'll whip ye, too."

Slinking away into the waning storm, they leave the father and the foolishly loving daughter together. The mighty seething of the musical sea subsides, leaving a deep underrunning swell of feeling. The billowing rush of the Valkyr theme gives way to the plaintive flow of the motive of Brünnhilde's pleading, one of the most poignantly expressive melodies ever conceived by Wagner. How it wells upward in the tender voices of the wood wind!

The stricken Valkyr grovels at the feet of the perplexed Wotan. What will he do with her? The two engage in a long and unnecessary wordy wrangle over the deed of the goddess. Wagner must talk, talk, talk. He is a German dramatist. His music alone saves him from perdition. Prate as he may of the organic union of the arts, the magic of melody and harmony is his wand of transformation.

With that he lifts the tiresome rehearsal of the incidents of "Rheingold" by Wotan to eloquence. With that he changes the hair-splitting of Tristan and Isolde to the most passionate of love duets. With that he makes almost a miracle of Siegfried's condensed narrative in the last act of "Götterdämmerung." The theory is a perfect one; Wagner's practice is wholly faulty. His music saves him. He is sometimes no better than an old-fashioned opera librettist, and writes long pages of bald text simply in order to clothe them with musical glory.

Brünnhilde complains: "Why are you angry at me, father?" He answers, "You know well enough what you've done." "You told me to do it," says she. "But afterward I told you not to do it," says he. "But you really didn't mean that. You wished me to protect Siegmund," declares Brünnhilde. "You made the other order because you were afraid of Fricka." And then Brünnhilde takes forty lines to tell Wotan what she did, which both he and we already know. Wotan takes just forty lines more to tell Brünnhilde that while he has been struggling with his problems she has had nothing to do but enjoy herself (how many mortal fathers talk thus to their daughters)! and that now he has no further use for her light soul.

Thus they bandy words till finally we come to Hecuba. Wotan tells her that she is to be put to sleep and that the man who awakens her shall have her. She begs for the protection of the magic fire, and this far-seeing god stares amazed and enraptured at the birth of a new idea. Glorious! He will commit this precious jewel of his soul to the guardianship of his arch enemy, Loge, the fire spirit, the treacherous, the shifty, the ultimate destroyer, not only of Brünnhilde, but of Walhalla and its futile brood.

Oh, Wagner, how much more prescient were the skalds than thou! But who thinks of all this while the performance is in progress? No one. The triumphant music swells to the very bursting point of emotional rhapsody. The entrance of the farewell of Wotan is one of the sublimest conceptions of the master craftsman in tone.

But there is a moment, a great, overmastering, torrential moment, in this scene, which is equalled only once or twice elsewhere in the trilogy. It is the moment when Brünnhilde and Wotan stand and gaze one upon the other, like the transformed Tristan and Isolde, and the plaintive, pitiful motive of the Valkyr's pleading rises into a tremendous, pealing burst of passionate yearning, which sets the whole orchestra reeling and rocking with the poignancy of its melody and wrings the tears from the eyes of the listener.

That is the climax of "Die Walküre." It is the victory of the child's love over the futile and disappearing All-Father. It is the last utterance of the majesty of Walhalla. Thenceforward godhood disappears not only from Brünnhilde, but from all Walhalla. The human hero is now to come, to see, and to command.

And as the curtain slowly shuts the pathetic figures from our sight, Loge—flickering, fluttering Loge—satisfied for once that he is master of the situation, sings out the comedy in the major mode. The spiritual tonality of Loge for once is fixed and inexorable. The sleep of Brünnhilde is the prologue to her immolation, and the fire at her bedside is the precursor of the fire of her funeral pyre which shall engulf the futile gods. "Rest, perturbed spirit." Rest in the victorious publication of thy conquest in fundamental harmonies. A primeval element art thou not, but a physical investiture of the shifting soul. Thou art the master of this hour—yea, even of the unconscious Brünnhilde and the equally unconscious Wagner. He builded better than he knew. The seed of the serpent hath bruised the heel of the woman.

III.—BACK-WORLDS, GODS AND OVER-WOMAN

And those same torches, flaring by her bed,
Lighted her downward path among the dead.

Meleager.

(Translated by Jane Minot Sedgwick.)

The drama of "Siegfried" opens with a reintroduction of one of Wagner's most subtle studies. Mime in "Rheingold" plays almost no part at all. There the local interest of Niebelheim is centred in that peevish parody of Napoleonic ambition, Alberich, whose curse is launched upon the entire succeeding series of incidents. In "Siegfried" Alberich is shown to us a helpless watcher on the outskirts of events, the complement of the wondering Wotan.

Both of the principal workers on the beginning of the web have been forced to let the threads slip from their feeble hands. Siegfried, the young, hot-blooded embodiment of humanity, and Mime, the last receptacle of underground craft and cunning, struggle for the supremacy. Alberich is absurd.

The battle of the dwarfs in the first scene of the second act is one of Wagner's pieces of grotesquery. Did he see the ridiculous aspect of it? One can hardly believe so. He seems to take it very seriously, but it refuses to be serious. Mime, however, is a genuine creation. Search opera from its inception to the disclosure of this extraordinary work and you will not find another such product of the imagination. Mime is the perfect type of a low cunning mind plotting to use a noble and generous nature for its own ends and then to consign that nature to destruction.

A ward politician or a Wall Street operator Mime might have been in a more advanced state of society. It was his misfortune and not his fault that he was born a cave-dweller. Wagner falls into ludicrous difficulties in his endeavors to disclose the inner workings of this nature. In the first act he has recourse to the old-fashioned operatic duet, in which two persons standing at opposite sides of the stage bellow antagonistic sentiments at the top of their lungs, yet do not hear each other.

The factitious veritism of the music drama crumbles into absurdity in the presence of this illogical scene. Wagner as frankly asks us to accept the unreal conventions of the stage as ever did Donizetti or Meyerbeer. And this, too, in the midst of his most elaborate and pretentious creation. But here again music, heavenly maid, saves the situation. The splendor of the climax of the forging episode dazzles judgment. One cannot analyze the dramatic verities when his heart is thumping under his ribs with the trip-hammer rhythm of this tremendous composition.

In the second act, when Mime is endeavoring to induce Siegfried to take the potion, we are asked to understand that the bird has warned Siegfried, and that the hero is enabled to discern behind Mime's utterances the real meanings which he strives to conceal. Wagner's conception was dramatically impracticable, and so he makes Mime utter his secret thoughts aloud, so that we, as well as Siegfried, may know them.

It is a cumbersome and feeble device. Here again, however, the music comes to the dramatist's aid. The exquisitely artistic contrast between the craft and malice of Mime and the ingenuousness of the youthful hero is expressed perfectly by the opposing natures of their musical measures, and a final touch of most eloquent suggestion is supplied by the half-whispered instrumental repetition of the bird phrase. This is dramatic music of the most potent.

The keynote of Mime is sounded in the orchestra in the beginning of Act I. with the motive of reflection,—that hollow, sinister duet of two bassoons, so devilish, so serpentine in the mockery of its descending thirds. Whoever before heard the lascivious harmony of the third made to chant a psalm of mischief? Deep reflection, far-sighted wickedness, lies in those few sinister, sepulchral notes, and as the curtain rises and shows us the shaggy little elf bent hopeless over his forging and searching his evil mind for some solution of the problem of the lost hoard, we fall with him into a frame of mind fit for treasons.

And Loge? Is the embodiment of craft absent? Not he. Loge deserts not his kind. In the flickering flame of the forge he lurks in waiting. He will weld the sword "Nothung," which was shivered on Wotan's spear, and this time it will shatter that spear and break the power of the futile and disappearing gods. Loge will answer the call of Siegfried and rise in his might. Joyously will he blaze to melt the splinters, for this forging is but another act in the drama of his triumph. How can the dotard Wotan sit by the hearthstone playing at riddles with Mime and not feel the breath of Loge on his neck?

What a new and unheard of thing is the vocal style of Mime! The creation of this weird recitation is one of Wagner's most notable achievements. The sharp, cackling treble staccato, which sinks ever and anon into an indescribable gurgle of subterranean low tones and again rises to a shrill and infantile falsetto,—this is something that no old-time musician, who appealed to the outward ear alone, could ever have conceived. Its importance in the expression of grotesque and grim humor cannot be overestimated. It is neither speech nor song. It is not recitative. It is not declamation. It is simply the snarling, the barking, the whining of malice, cowardice, and sneaking treachery. It is the very thing itself that Wagner sought. It was a triumph of genius.

Has it ever occurred to you, gentle reader, that up to the last act of "Siegfried" this same music of Mime supplies the only psychologic element in the play so far as the musical part is concerned? Mime is the one scheming, introspective character in the work. Every musical thought in the score which is connected with him reveals an inner life. The rest is nearly all scenic or external music.

Siegfried's entrance is bodied forth in a gust of forest freshness sweeping into the noisome air of the cavern. The famous wanderlied of the youth is not introspective. It breathes not the yearning of the hero for a free life, but the spirit of the unbounded world itself. It is a song of the receding horizon.

The bandying of conundrums between Wotan and Mime leaves all the psychology to the dwarf. The rest is commemorative. It is a repetition of old themes to recall Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Giants and their unrequited labor, Walhall and its vanishing limelight glories. Take again the opening scene of Act II. How much introspection is there in Wotan's interesting interview with the unseen Fafner? Atmospheric, indeed, this music is, but not psychologic. It has a very suspicious resemblance to the famous scene before the tomb of Ninus in "Semiramide." But it is conducted more decorously, and instead of "Oh, horror!" we hear the more comforting "Lass't mich schlafen."

In the scene which follows we are presented with the picture of the young hero reclining under a linden tree and reflecting on his unique position in the primeval world. He hears the murmur of the wind among the branches of the trees and watches the shadows play at hide and seek. The music is purely descriptive and scenic. A bird carols among the foliage. It is a strain of unaffected melody, and surely none would affront a cheerful birdling by charging it with psychologic intent.

The young man, seeking for some channel of cheerful communication with his own antecedents, tries to fashion a pipe on which to imitate the bird's lay. In vain. So, forth with the familiar waldhorn and therewith wind a challenging blast. How did Siegfried learn his own musical theme? There is a psychologic tangle here, but it was in the thinking of Wagner, not in that of the hero. Siegfried had no business to know that there was an orchestra and that he had a theme. But let that pass.

Behold Fafner, clad in the shapeless form of a thing that never was, lumbering out of the cavern and wagging his sapient head and bannered tail with the aid of all too visible wires. Oh, Siegfried and Fafner, Fafner and Siegfried, which of ye is the more comic? Was it not cruel to place a "treasure of the world," a "smiling hero," in such a position, to make him do combat amid hissing steam and the shock of thunderous battle music with a most disillusioning dragon of papier-maché? Again hear the external music, the sword and the vigor of the young man.

After the fight the bird sings once more, this time in a soprano voice and with text. Mime enters and psychology reappears. After Mime's death, more external music, till the bird tells of the enchanted Princess asleep on the mountain top, and then there is a burst of hot blood, a rush of musical energy which has in it something more than mere external description. Nevertheless, in all music there is nothing else which so clearly demonstrates the ease with which the purely pictorial in the tone art may be confounded with the introspective as this second act of "Siegfried," for here the mood of nature and the mood of the chief actor, whose soul is to be laid bare, are one.

With the opening of Act III. we have the scene between Wotan and Erda. Here, again, the character of the music is chiefly descriptive. The storm is contrasted with the vague tonalities and muted voicing of Erda's music. After the spear of Wotan is shattered by the rewelded "Nothung," Loge fills the mountains with his radiance and his shimmering music. The last of the futile and disappearing gods has passed from the scene of action. The human drama which is to lead to the dusk of the high ones has begun. Loge's labor is almost completed.

With the change from the pealing music to which Siegfried ascends the mountain to the long-drawn strains of the strings which lead him to the couch of his desire, we enter upon a scene of soul revelation. What a marvellous inspiration of genius is the awakening of Brünnhilde! She went to sleep a weeping, supplicating goddess, deprived of her divinity. She wakes to the majestic chords which announce her assumption of a grander divinity, the might and majesty of perfect womanhood. The duo between her and Siegfried is all psychologic, not subtle, for the blazing of passion is not subtle, but none the less the delineation of an inward state.

Of all the dramas of the tetralogy "Siegfried" is that in which pure beauty is most plentiful. Here is a problem for musical philosophers. Is Strauss not a maker, but a product? Is the embodiment of subtle psychologic problems in tone hostile to unaffected beauty? Must the lyric drama follow the march of symphonic music into the screaming regions of the Strauss soul analysis? "Siegfried" is quite devoid of the elements of tragedy. The death of Fafner is not tragic; on the contrary, it is comic. There is even a touch of bathos in the dying speech of the transmogrified Bottom of the Wagnerian drama. The conundrum scene is childish. The bird belongs to the world of the infantile fairy tale. But the spirit of buoyant youth is in the work. Its music is nearly all external, and unaffectedly beautiful.

"Siegfried," revelling in purely descriptive music, devoid of mental sickness contracted from much study of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, breathes the spirit of a free world's youth.

Little is left to be said, or much, for "Götterdämmerung" must be treated as a separate drama or dismissed shortly in the light of what has already been written. In this drama we come to the drawing together of the threads, the stretto of the dream fugue. Behold Brünnhilde, who has given all her wisdom to Siegfried and hence has none left for herself, sending him out in quest of further reputation as a mighty hero. There is something pathetic in this and also pitiably modern. Must husbands have had outings in the elemental days even as now? Was the epic man inconstant of soul? Ah Brünnhilde! A wise woman would go with him. It is not good for man to be alone.

Siegfried arrives at the domicile of the desirable Gibichung family and accepts an unknown drink from a pretty girl he never saw before. His rusticity beams from his guileless countenance, and to Hagen, the experienced one, he is as the ripe pear on the low-hanging bough. Pitiable weakling Siegfried! Call ye this a hero of all the world? Pitiable Gunther, you do well to swear blood brotherhood with him. You are a well-mated pair. Pitiable Gutrune! Siegfried was not for you, though your drink did make him forget that he remembered and dream that he forgot.

In the hands of Hagen, the only really clever person in the drama, these three are as clay in the hands of the potter. Hagen could not command success, because Loge was more powerful than he, and the ultimate ruin of the gods would have been deferred had Hagen gained possession of the accursed ring; but he deserved success, and that, as Sempronius was long ago informed, was something worthy of respect.

Two elements of this final drama remain confronting us. They are the most tremendous of all Wagner's heroines, the completed woman, Brünnhilde, and the most potent of all psychologic music outside of "Tristan und Isolde." When Siegfried, in the end of the drama bearing his name, hurls the flood of human love at the reduced Valkyr, he awakens in her that which lifts her above principalities and kingdoms.

"Indeed I love thee. Come,

Yield thyself up—my hopes and thine are one:

Accomplish thou my manhood and thyself;

Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me."

Almost might Tennyson have substituted his words for those of Wagner, and truly they are more graceful. In "Götterdämmerung" we find Brünnhilde with her womanhood completed. Filled full to the lips and eyes with love, she is risen to a majesty which as the laughing Valkyr she never knew. Compared with her Olympian splendor, the fumbling weakness of her sire becomes indeed pitiable. With what heroine is she to be compared? Set her for a moment over against Isolde, who also died upon her true love's body.

The philosophy of negation which saturates "Tristan und Isolde" is a deadly foe to your piping enthusiasm. The draining of the cup of death, averted by the temporizing policy of the silly Brangäne, would never have assumed the tragic proportions of Brünnhilde's terrible oath upon the spear. The wounded love of Isolde dwindles to petulance when brought to the side of the outraged majesty of the chaste and glorious Valkyr wife.

Look upon the two in the last scenes of their respective tragedies. Isolde lays her down to die of a broken heart beside her dead lover, hymning in rapt ecstatic phrase, seeing in the vision of her own dissolution the new light streaming from his eyes and his heart beating in his chilled breast. It is sweet, so sweet. It is more honeyed than the dirge of Shelley for Adonais, or the exquisitely musical "Archete, Sikelikai, to pentheon archete, Moisai," of Moschus over the ashes of Bion. It is love's threnody in the realms of eternal moonlight, where the cypress shadows of a pessimistic philosophy shelter the lemur of blank negation.

Brünnhilde, too, beholds the sunny light streaming from her hero's dead eyes, but how her apostrophe to him rings with brave and hopeful praise! There is no sweating sickness of the soul here, but the proclamation of a grand personality. And then through prayer this supreme woman passes to prophecy: