y understand: human affection and elemental human passion
are unintelligible to one another. He replies that he cannot answer
Mark's "Why?" and turning to Isolda asks whether she will follow him
whither he is now going--the land of eternal night. He, not Mark,
plans his death. Isolda answers straightway that she will follow.
Tristan and Melot fight, but Tristan allows his treacherous foe to run
the sword through him, and he falls. _Then_ we get the curtain;
Tristan has done with this world and has started out for another, and
the drama has taken a second step towards its goal.

This, held for long to be bad craftsmanship, is consummate, daring
craftmanship. _Tristan_ is a drama of spiritual conflicts; and those
who do not like that sort had better try something by the trade
playwrights of to-day.

V

The music of the first act is largely fierce, angry, turbulent, often
bitter music, blent and merging into music expressive of fierce
desire, the hunger of the man after the woman, of the woman after the
man. There is one moment of sweet longing--the moment after Isolda and
Tristan have drunk the fatal potion; but instantly the torrent breaks
forth, and though it is in a way sweet, the sweetness is mixed with
fire; the stream is as a stream of molten lava, scalding, consuming.
The note of the music to the second act is utterly different; there is
fire, indeed, a golden fire; there is greedy impatience and
restlessness; but the fire does not scorch nor scald, the impatience
is not despairing, the love is not--as it certainly is in the first
act--that passion which is but one remove from deadly hate. Almost at
the beginning of the first act Isolda, devoured by a longing for
revenge, schemed to murder Tristan, and she does not falter in her
purpose until he has taken the drink; the reaction has all the
violence of a cataclysm; all is delirium; there is not a moment of
happy lingering over the joy of a possible; new life; there is no time
for that, no thought of it. All is burning wrath and hate and equally
burning lust and greed for the possession of the beloved one's body.
In the second act the anger has died out, and in the whirl of the
music, though at its maddest, there is a fulness, an assured sense of
coming satisfaction; and the excitement settles down into long,
drawn-out, luscious, voluptuous strains as the lovers, held in each
other's arms, exchange the sweet confidences usual (I suppose) on such
occasions.