the man who within a year or so planned _Tristan_. In art,
harrowing our feelings never pays, and his self-repression has its
exceeding great reward: we could not feel more with Wotan's desolating
grief--one stroke more and we should rebel: we should know that our
most sacred feelings were being exploited--that an endeavour was being
made to gain our applause for a work of art by an illegitimate appeal
at one particular moment to those feelings. I have dwelt a little on
this because we all know _Tristan_ and its author, and though there is
little self-repression in that work--where it is not required--and
physically there was little but self-indulgence in its author's
nature, it is well to realise that the artist rose immeasurably
superior to the man. It must have come to us all at one time or
another with something of a shock to find that the voluptuous Wagner
of _Tannhaeuser_ could be as austere as Milton. Austerity is not
barrenness--not the barrenness that would result from imitating the
austerity of the old church composers with their hundred rules and
regulations: the harmony is as free as could be wished; at the needful
moment the melodies pass without hesitation from key to key; but when
we have long known them and learnt to understand them we find them at
heart to be idealised folk-tunes--simple and indescribably pathetic,
as the situation demands.

An instance of Wagner's subtle feeling is the passage where Wotan
"kisses away" Bruennhilda's godhood and lays her to sleep, as one with
the rocks and stones of mother earth, Erda, whose music accompanies
the act. Wotan, like Alberich, has renounced love; so just previously
we have heard the corresponding passage from the _Rhinegold_. We have
the lulling Sleep theme, and then comes the Fire-music, a thing
unmatched--and, so far as I know, never attempted--in all music. The
mighty Spear strikes the ground to the mighty Spear theme; the earth
seems to shiver as the fire comes up; then the flames mount, yellow
against the deep blue sky; the Loge music sparkles in the orchestra,
the strings sustain a continuous whizz and roar, and over it all, and
at times in it or under it, swings that lulling Sleep theme. If it is
not too futile a word to use, the Siegfried "heroic" theme, as Wotan
uses it in commanding the fire (Loge) that only the noblest hero ever
born shall pass to Bruennhilda, is the most pompous form in which it
appears throughout the _Ring_; but the situation