inquiries: found that Wagner must bolt at once: it is supposed he
somehow "squared" the local police official to defer executing the
warrant; he got a passport in a false name, and six days after his
arrival Richard set out again on his travels. What need be recorded
about the journey to Zurich and the getting of Minna there, will best
be described when I come to tell of his settling down in his new abode
and the years he spent there.

CHAPTER VIII

'TANNHAeUSER'

I

Wagner alternated between what we may call the worldly--the sensual or
animal, or love of outward show--and the magical, mystical or
religious. After _Die Feen_, a story of magic, he went to _Das
Liebesverbot_, a story of lust; then he went on to a drama of warring
ambitions, with the outer brilliant show of armed men, gorgeous
processions, conflagrations and what not in the way of spectacle.
After that we have the _Dutchman_, strange and remote and mysterious,
with some pages of passionless ecstasy as its culminating point. The
reaction came, and he wrote _Tannhaeuser_, the opera we are now to
examine. It is largely based on sheer animal passion, though another
reaction takes place before the end is reached. That reaction proceeds
further in _Lohengrin_, which is sheer mysticism. _Tristan_ is pure
human passion--Tristan's soul is the antithesis of Lohengrin's. The
_Ring_ is, from beginning to end, a gorgeous spectacle, a
glorification of the grandeur and loveliness of the earth, the
splendour and beauty and strength of human life. Not even Wotan's
renunciation takes away a jot from its note of praise of
humanity--one might even say praise of the joy of living. _Parsifal_
is a denial of the value and richness and worthiness of human life:
the world is pushed away; and the hero attains perfect peace by
shutting himself up in a monastery with no women to disturb him. John
Willett recommended his son, when he went to London, to climb to the
top of the Monument--"there are no young women up there, sir"--and
Wagner evidently agreed with John Willett. Parsifal is left to pass
his days in walking, with the most preposterous steps ever seen on or
off the stage, in idle processions from nowhere to nowhere without any
object beyond walking, in making meals off invisible food, in
impressing his fellow-monks with puerile chemical and electrical
experiments, and perhaps, for a change, in going out to see trees and
rocks taking a constitutional. If to say