es you, you soon sicken of the whole
business. And in the highest kind of story, play, or music-drama,
subject and treatment merge inseparably one in the other, substance
and form are one; for the idea is all in all, and the complete idea
cannot be perceived apart from the dress which makes it visible.
Besides, in the Wagnerian music-drama, it is intended that beauty of
idea and of arrangement of ideas shall be as of great importance as
beauty of ornament. Wagner certainly intended "Parsifal" to be such a
music-drama; and indeed the idea is only too clearly visible. The main
idea of the "Ring" is so much obscured by the subsidiary ideas twined
about it that very few people know that the real hero is Wotan, and
the central drama Wotan's tragedy, that Siegmund and Sieglinde,
Siegfried and Bruennhilde, and their loves--all the romance and
loveliness that enchant us--are merely accessory. But in "Parsifal"
there is nothing superfluous, no rich and lovely embroidery on the
dress of the idea to divert us from the idea itself--the idea is as
nearly nude as our limited senses and our modern respectability
permit. And the idea being what it is, it follows that the play, after
the drama once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting
and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The
first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never
were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in
more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was
merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining all manner of
wounds and evils where no evils or wounds existed, had he made
Parsifal a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to learn this,
and brought him back to break up the monastery, to set Amfortas and
the knights to some useful labour, and to tell them that the sacred
spear, like Wotan's spear, had power only to hurt those who feared it,
then we might have had an adequate working-out of so noble a
beginning. Instead of this, Kundry kisses Parsifal, Parsifal squeals,
and we see him in a moment to be only an Amfortas who has had the luck
not to stumble; and he, the poor fool who is filled with so vast a
pity because he sees (what are called) good and evil in entirely wrong
proportion--as, in fact, a hypochondriac sees them--he, Parsifal,
this thin-blooded inheritor of rickets and an exhausted physical
frame, is called the Redeemer, and becomes head of th