ly as a common-sense
dramatist-musician should, building up the whole edifice with two
hands at once, the dramatist's pen in one hand, the musician's in the
other. He also said that when he set down the words the music was
already (in an amorphous state--we must presume he meant) in his
brain. It was to this effect he wrote in _Opera and Drama_ the most
skilful defence ever put together by a creative artist--or rather not
so much a defence as a plea for his particular form of art, or perhaps
an explanation of the form.

This is entirely different from his procedure with the _Ring_, or
indeed any of his works, not even excepting the _Dutchman_. The
_Dutchman_, he said, grew out of Senta's ballad; but I have already
shown that this statement was a mere piece of self-deception: not the
whole of the _Dutchman_, not one-tenth of it, grows out of Senta's
ballad; Senta's ballad is not an oak-trunk with all the solos, duets,
choruses and the rest growing out as branches with leaves grow from a
trunk--it is a scaffold-pole upon which these things are tacked in an
almost unparalleled fervour of imagination. That Wagner recognized
this is plainly seen in the prose remarks he penned, in very cold
blood, in his after years, when he looked at his first really fine
work as though it had come from the hand of some other composer. Gluck
had not one-thousandth part of Wagner's sheer genius, or, born into
the nineteenth century, he might have done the thing as Wagner did it
in _Tristan_; Mozart had not one-hundredth part of Wagner's
intellectual power, or, born into the nineteenth century, he might
have done it. Wagner alone did it. _Tristan_ is a feat accomplished
once and for all; at this moment it is impossible to imagine such a
feat ever being done again. Those of us who live on for another five
hundred years may see something like it; but even then _Tristan_ will
not be old-fashioned--not older-fashioned, at any rate, than
_Antigone_ or _Hamlet_, and perhaps less old-fashioned than _Macbeth_
or _Lear_. The breath, the spirit, which is eternal life, is in it,
and it can only perish when the human race perishes.

Far too much theorising has been done about Wagner, and I would not
add my quota did I not hope that this small contribution would save
complicated explanations, now that I come to deal with the concrete,
so to say, with the very stuff of _Tristan_, the words and the music.
We are to be prepared for a drama of human passion