jumps into the sea, and we feel sure
nothing would have happened if she had not jumped. _That_ lesson, at
any rate--a childish, inept, inane, insane one at best--is not set
forth in the _Dutchman_. The only other possible one is that
self-sacrifice is a worthy and beautiful thing in itself. In itself, I
say, for Senta's self-sacrifice is purely a fad: she knows nothing of
Vanderdecken save a rumour shaped into a primitive ballad. Such
self-sacrifice is not worthy, not beautiful; but, on the contrary, a
very ugly and detestable form of lunacy. In truth, not only is there
no lesson in the _Dutchman_, but the whole idea is so absurd that only
the power of the music enables us to swallow it at all. The condition
on which the Dutchman can be saved is purely arbitrary; what
difference ought it to make to him that some one, for the sake of an
idea, sacrifices herself? The "good angel" who proposed it must have
been temporarily out of her senses, and the Creator when he agreed
must have been nodding. And the whole business is smeared over with
German mawkish sentimentality--this business, I mean, of Senta
_loving_ the Dutchman. Had he seen and loved her, and resolutely
sailed off without her, and found his salvation in that, there would
be some semblance of reason; but the fumbling attempt to make
something of the man at the last moment is futile, and we are left
with nothing but sentimental sickliness, nauseating and revolting. In
a word, then, we must take the _Dutchman_ libretto as it is,
unreasonable, false: only a series of occasions for writing some fine
music. That it is nothing more than such a series I have endeavoured
to establish at all this length; because if it is worth understanding
Wagner at all, and if we wish to understand him, we must realise the
point he started from in his half-conscious groping after the opera
form which he only found in its full perfection in his _Tristan_
period.

III

In the music the head and shoulders of the real Wagner emerge boldly
from the ruck of commonplace which constitutes the bulk of the
operatic music of the time. How any one could have failed to see the
strength and beauty of much of the _Dutchman_ is one of those things
almost impossible to understand to-day. Of the tawdry vulgarity, the
blatant clamour, of _Rienzi_ there is not a hint. The opera is by no
means all on the highest level, but a good third of it is, and there
are pages which Richard never afterwards surpas