ece of nonsense, Love and death are
one, I cannot say. The Greek conception of Death as Eros with an
inverted torch is quite different: it is a kind of _Tod als Freund_
idea; we are called out of life by an irresistible force or god, which
god must be love, else he would not want us. The inverted torch is the
sign that shows whither he calls us. It had a mighty fascination for
many fine minds of the second-rate sort last century; and judging from
the phraseology of _Tristan_ it seems to have captured Wagner. He was
everlastingly bewildering himself with cheap catch-phrases which
happened, through suggestion or otherwise, to stir his emotions. He
took up one philosophical and political system after another, only to
abandon them in turn; but they left a kind of sediment in his mind,
and one never feels sure that the pellucid stream of his music-drama
will not the next moment be gritty to the palate with some of this
outworn stuff. The bits of Schopenhauer's broken brickbats embedded in
the libretto of _Tristan_ serve their turn, though a finer and more
poetical way of saying the same things might have been found. But
Wagner did not find that more poetical way, so let us rejoice that
through this uncouth lingo Wagner managed to get into a sort of verse
the idea that night was the friend of Tristan's love and day its
enemy, and that in the end everlasting night is best of all. In his
letters, however, we find him playing with the love and death notion,
though he must have known that love is not death, but life; that if
love and death are one, then death and love are also one, and to be in
love is to be in death, to be dead--which is preposterous: corpses
don't love. Presently we shall see that Isolda died in a state of
exaltation akin to the state of being in love; but that does not
establish the thesis. Blake, for hours before he died, shouted till
the ceiling rang for joy to think that he was soon to be with God:
does that prove that mysticism and death are one? Mr. Chamberlain, in
his exegesis of _Tristan_, will have it that Wagner composed the opera
to demonstrate the truth of a very trite and ridiculous lie. The fact
is, Wagner's was far more a feeling, emotional, imaginative brain than
a thinking one, and in the hazy, steamy, overheated thinking part he
often let idle phrases play about without himself firmly grasping
their meaning or want of it. Anyhow, if he had done what Mr.
Chamberlain and many others say he did, w