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And again: [Illustration: Some bars of music] The lovers are presently awakened. At the very climax of a mad, tumultuous passage Brangaena gives a scream; Kurvenal rushes in, and then--enter Mark, Melot and the other hunters. Melot's trap has worked satisfactorily. The cold red dawn slowly breaks. The phantoms of the daylight have broken in upon the dream of night, which alone is true. It is here that many would have the act terminate. Such an ending would leave the idea of the act half expressed, and shatter the noble architectonical scheme of the whole drama. The idea of the act--that the light is the lovers' enemy, the dark their friend and refuge--has to be worked out to prepare for the last act; the idea of the drama--that the lovers must be seen gradually thrust away from life (which is light) to death (which is eternal night)--must be carried one step further. Mark, in an agony of grief, asks them why they, the two he loves best in the world, dishonour him in so frightful a fashion. He presses home to them their sin and his suffering, his affection and their indifference to it; and he ends up with the question, "Why?" Tristan cannot answer; he perceives only that Mark's love is a more terrible menace for them than any trap laid by Melot. Without their passion they cannot live, and it is not Melot and the general outside world that threaten to sunder them, but their protector and dearest friend. The passion is irresistible, and Tristan faces the inevitable. He asks Isolda if she will follow him where he is now going: she replies that she will; and he, after taunting Melot with his treachery, lets him thrust him through with his sword. The drama has moved a stage further on, and there remains now only the logical completion. Anyone who thinks all this is to read into the opera a meaning that is not there merely accuses me of being greater than Wagner; without this we have only a commonplace Divorce Court episode. The next act takes place in the courtyard of Tristan's castle in Brittany. It is in a state of decay. In the hot afternoon sun the sea shines like burnished metal, and Tristan, who has been brought there by Kurvenal, lies delirious. Presently one of the saddest songs ever written sounds from a shepherd's pipe without. It half awakens Tristan, and he talks of it--how it has haunted him since his childhood. Kurvenal tells him Isolda has been sent for. He becomes more and more delirious, and at las
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