on
Court or on Richmond Hill, not to say Margate pier, so that we could
have a delightful summer evening holiday, Bayreuth fashion, passing the
hours between the acts in the park or on the river before sunset, is
it seriously contended that there would be any lack of visitors? If a
little of the money that is wasted on grand stands, Eiffel towers, and
dismal Halls by the Sea, all as much tied to brief annual seasons as
Bayreuth, were applied in this way, the profit would be far more certain
and the social utility prodigiously greater. Any English enthusiasm for
Bayreuth that does not take the form of clamor for a Festival Playhouse
in England may be set aside as mere pilgrimage mania.

Those who go to Bayreuth never repent it, although the performances
there are often far from delectable. The singing is sometimes tolerable,
and sometimes abominable. Some of the singers are mere animated beer
casks, too lazy and conceited to practise the self-control and physical
training that is expected as a matter of course from an acrobat, a
jockey or a pugilist. The women's dresses are prudish and absurd. It
is true that Kundry no longer wears an early Victorian ball dress with
"ruchings," and that Fresh has been provided with a quaintly modish copy
of the flowered gown of Spring in Botticelli's famous picture; but the
mailclad Brynhild still climbs the mountains with her legs carefully
hidden in a long white skirt, and looks so exactly like Mrs. Leo Hunter
as Minerva that it is quite impossible to feel a ray of illusion whilst
looking at her. The ideal of womanly beauty aimed at reminds Englishmen
of the barmaids of the seventies, when the craze for golden hair was
at its worst. Further, whilst Wagner's stage directions are sometimes
disregarded as unintelligently as at Covent Garden, an intolerably
old-fashioned tradition of half rhetorical, half historical-pictorial
attitude and gesture prevails. The most striking moments of the drama
are conceived as tableaux vivants with posed models, instead of as
passages of action, motion and life.

I need hardly add that the supernatural powers of control attributed
by credulous pilgrims to Madame Wagner do not exist. Prima donnas and
tenors are as unmanageable at Bayreuth as anywhere else. Casts are
capriciously changed; stage business is insufficiently rehearsed; the
public are compelled to listen to a Brynhild or Siegfried of fifty when
they have carefully arranged to see one of twenty-