erica it is the same; on the two continents
innumerable fortunes have been made by bawling the word "religion." So
Wagner's conviction, Ludwig's desire, and advertisement possibilities,
all coincided; and thenceforth Bayreuth flourished--financially, if
not artistically or morally.

I shall devote little attention to _Parsifal_. The plot would disgrace
Wagner's memory if we did not know it to be the work of his tired-out
old age. The central idea is that of Renunciation; and I will give the
reader a skeleton, but a fair skeleton, of the plot, and ask him, Who
renounces anything? who gains anything by renouncing? or loses
anything by not renouncing? and, above all, what is any one called on
to renounce?

At the Montsalvat of _Lohengrin_--ah! what a different
Montsalvat--Amfortas, lord of the tribe of monks, has flirted with a
lady, and a magician, Klingsor, has seized the sacred spear with which
Christ's side was pierced and inflicted on Amfortas an incurable
wound. That is the state of affairs when the curtain rises. Gurnemanz,
a faithful warder, talks with sundry squires, not yet fully degraded
to the order of knighthood, and tells them how through a certain
wondrous woman Amfortas fell from his high estate. The wondrous woman,
Kundry, disguised as a sort of Indian squaw, enters, coming, she says,
from far lands; exhausted, she flings herself in a thicket to
sleep--sleep--she says. Gurnemanz does not know who she is--nor, for
that small matter, do I--but she comes and serves these knight-monks
faithfully for whiles and then disappears; and generally, it seems,
during her period of disappearance disaster falls on some treasured
pearl of a saint of a knight. Enter Parsifal, "the pure
fool"--Siegfried with all his bull-strength and energy shorn away. He
carries a bow and arrow, and promptly shoots a Swan, one of the prides
of Montsalvat. He is too stupid to understand that he has done any
wrong--wrong to a helpless bird or his own nature. Gurnemanz explains
in very unconvincing accents; Parsifal, the poor, "pure" fool, bursts
into tears, breaks his weapons and throws them away. And now the
reader must bear with me if I am both tedious and inexplicable in my
explanation. At some unknown period in the past it was prophesied that
only the "pure fool" taught by suffering could redeem suffering
Amfortas: mankind, that is, could only be made perfect by a perfect
idiot. Gurnemanz thinks he has found the required man--and he ha