nd exaltation: "Salvation and grace have been granted to
the sinner! He has entered into the peace of the blessed!"

The warfare between soul and sense is presented by Wagner with
singular fairness. The pilgrims' song is very beautiful, and beautiful
is all the music of good in the opera of Tannhaeuser. The Venus-music
is certainly equally beautiful; perhaps, to the superficial ear, is
a little more beautiful still: the goddess's own Call, penetrating,
wonderful; the well-nigh irresistible song of the Sirens. The Bacchic
dance, which stands we suppose for the animal element in love,
the Satyr part in man, is hardly beautiful; yet the love-music
as a whole, we can concede without difficulty, carries it over
the sacred music in beauty of a sort, even as the goddess would
have carried off the palm of beauty over the saint. The power of
the music of good, as Wagner lets us see, lies just in the fact
that it is good; the final victory of the saint in the fact that
she is a saint, and that from a mysterious eternal bias of human
nature man finally must prefer good. He has a soul, he cannot help
himself; that, as we have seen, is the secret reason why Venus cannot
forever completely content him, why the pale hand of the saint,
beckoning him at the end of a penitential pilgrimage diversified
with every sort of suffering, draws him still on and upward.

THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

I

A Dutch sea-captain, so long before the date of the play that his
story at the time of it is an old legend, finding himself baffled
during a storm in his effort to double certain cape, swore a great
oath that he would persist to the end of time. The Devil heard
him and took him at his word. He was doomed eternally to sail the
seas. But an angel of the Lord interposed, and obtained for him
a condition of release: Every seven years he might land and woo
a woman; if he could find one to love him faithfully until death,
the curse upon him would be defeated, he would be saved.

The Ouverture paints a great storm at sea, and contrasts the two
ships that are drawing toward the same bay of refuge in the coast,
the phantom ship with its crew of ghosts and their sinister sea-cry,
the common substantial other craft with its comfortable flesh-and-blood
sailors.

As the curtain rises upon the turbulent sea and black weather,
the Norwegian vessel has got safely within the haven. While the
sailors furl sails, cast cables, the captain,