e mariner of ancient times, vainly
struggling to round Cape Horn (or some other cape) against a head
wind, swore in his wrath that he would succeed if he tried until the
Day of Judgment; a lightning flash in the sky proclaimed that he was
taken at his word; thenceforward his ship sailed the seas without
stopping; it never could reach any port, and release would only come
at the last day. The crew died and their ghosts worked the vessel; the
vessel rotted and the ghostly crew continued to work a phantom ship;
only Vanderdecken, the skipper, seems to have lived on in the flesh.
Other ships passed through the phantom as though it was a cloud; and
the living crews shuddered, and cursed the dead. Before this thing of
terror and mystery could form a part of any drama, adventures had to
be invented and grafted on to it. As with the legend of the Wandering
Jew, this was done in a hundred, perhaps a thousand, instances; and
never had a good piece of work been the result. Whether Heine did or
did not himself devise the form in which the legend is used in his
reminiscences of Herr von Schnabalewopski it is not worth troubling to
find out. It is enough that in Heine, Wagner found the story more or
less as he employed it. It is an odd compound--odd at this time of day
at least--of the hard old superstition with soft German sentimentality
of the Romantic period. A good Angel, thinking the Dutchman's fate
too hard, interceded for him; and though his sentence could not be
wholly remitted, a bargain was struck. Once in seven years
Vanderdecken could land and spend a certain time ashore. If during
this interval of peace he could find a maiden who would love him
faithfully to death, he would be released: his wanderings would be
o'er, and death would swallow him up. How the maiden's fidelity could
be tested does not appear.

Wagner would have it that with the _Dutchman_ he ceased to be a mere
stringer of opera verses and became the full poet. The work does not
support that view; nor is the construction of the plot one whit better
than a hundred others put together by hacks before he was born. Each
act is crammed with conventional tricks out of the hack's common
stock; in each scene, from the very first, characters come on or go
off, not because it is inherent in the action that they should do so,
but because without such helps the librettist, or "poet," could not
have got along. The curtain rises on a rocky Norwegian fiord where a
sailing