rwards wrote in defence of it seems to me worth a moment's serious
consideration. Mr. Ernest Newman suggests that perhaps Wagner was
using the savage's notion that in giving up your name you are placing
yourself in some one's power; but there is not a hint of that in the
drama. The thing to me is simply a fairy story. We must accept
Lohengrin and the conditions in which he lives, moves and has his
being. He is not his own master: somewhere far away he has an
all-powerful over-lord who, for no useful purpose to be comprehended
by mortal, sent him to rescue Elsa under these conditions. And I say
that, far from having a meaning, a "purpose," _Lohengrin_ is pure
romance, as innocent of moral ideas as any genuine mediaeval romance.
Wagner's "explanations," like Bishop Berkeley's, take a great deal of
explaining; and though Glasenapp, Wolzogen and the rest have covered
many reams of paper in doing it, we are not an inch nearer to
perceiving a grain of sense in the whole affair. There is only one
part of it which can be, in one sense, explained--Wagner's intense
acrimony in his treatment of the female puppet Elsa. Even in 1845 he
had grown restive under the insults and stupidity of court officials
and the Press, and doubtless he had threatened often enough to quit
for ever the degraded German theatre. He never could see that the
German theatre had never been any better than it then was, but on the
contrary, a great deal worse; he never realized that it was on the
up-grade, and that he was to be instrumental in elevating it. He was
like a mechanic called in (by destiny) to repair a rickety machine,
who because it won't go when he "wills" it, kicks it to pieces. The
Reissigers and the rest were simply parts of the machine that were out
of order: time and patience were required to eliminate them and put in
sound working parts. Wagner could not understand this any more than he
could understand why all German (or rather, Saxon) mankind should not
at once be perfect, think alike and form the ideal State. So, as he
could not kick the Dresden Court Opera to pieces, he long meditated
quitting it--so much he explicitly affirmed afterwards--and he must
have worried Minna sadly. She understood neither his qualities nor his
defects, his ideals nor the short-sighted impatience which rendered it
impossible for him ever to attain them: she saw only too clearly that
at any moment he might kick over the traces, and that the starvation
and misery