of the Paris episode would have to be faced again. We can
readily picture him coming in raging after a conflict at the theatre
with official imbecility, and Minna, instead of sympathizing,
counselling him to be wise and temporize. His exasperation grew, and
only the events of 1849 prevented a rupture--so much seems
certain--and he vented his spleen by making Elsa a stupid, shallow,
faithless creature who feels no gratitude towards the hero who saved
her from being burnt, but by maddening female pertinacity,
wrong-headedness and wilfulness destroys her own and his happiness. As
the reader will perceive later, I by no means defend Wagner in this
domestic squabbling, but something must be said for him; I don't say,
either, that he created Elsa to express his views about his wife, but
I do say that his feelings account for the excess of his rancour
against his own creation. So pitiable a specimen of feminine
inquisitiveness, bad temper and ungenerosity has never been put on the
stage as the heroine of a grand opera. Possibly Lohengrin saw this;
and, neglecting his recent marriage-vow, he went back to Montsalvat,
where, as we know, there were no women. All this would have to be said
in the course of this book; and I say it now because it helps us to
understand a defect in the art of a beautiful opera.

A beautiful opera _Lohengrin_ certainly is--the most beautiful of all
Wagner's operas. The story of it is a fairy story, as I have said, and
superficially a very ordinary sort of fairy story. We have the
distressed maiden in the hands of persecutors, the knightly hero who
rescues her, the maiden's faithlessness, and the contemptuous
departure of the hero. But Wagner has clothed the whole of this
work-a-day mediaeval legend in a wondrous atmosphere of mystical
beauty, and that beauty springs from the thought of the river.

II

It is necessary to discuss as briefly as may be the leitmotiv, because
with _Lohengrin_ Wagner first began to use it with serious purpose. In
the _Dutchman_ two themes may be rightly described as leitmotivs; in
_Tannhaeuser_ not one theme may be rightly so described. While in
_Lohengrin_ Wagner showed himself as much as ever the inspired
musician, he made for the first time use of the leitmotiv for dramatic
as well as musical ends. There we find three leitmotivs: one intended
by the power of association of ideas to evoke on the instant the
vision of Montsalvat and the Grail; a second to recall the t