a theatre; and I
have often, since then, tried to realise for myself exactly what it was
that one might learn from that incarnation of the ideas, the theoretical
ideas, of Wagner. The music itself has the abstract quality of Coventry
Patmore's odes. I cannot think of it except in terms of sight. Light
surges up out of it, as out of unformed depths; light descends from it,
as from the sky; it breaks into flashes and sparkles of light, it
broadens out into a vast sea of light. It is almost metaphysical music;
pure ideas take visible form, humanise themselves in a new kind of
ecstasy. The ecstasy has still a certain fever in it; these shafts of
light sometimes pierce the soul like a sword; it is not peace, the peace
of Bach, to whom music can give all he wants; it is the unsatisfied
desire of a kind of flesh of the spirit, and music is but a voice.
"Parsifal" is religious music, but it is the music of a religion which
had never before found expression. I have found in a motet of Vittoria
one of the motives of "Parsifal," almost note for note, and there is no
doubt that Wagner owed much to Palestrina and his school. But even the
sombre music of Vittoria does not plead and implore like Wagner's. The
outcry comes and goes, not only with the suffering of Amfortas, the
despair of Kundry. This abstract music has human blood in it.

What Wagner has tried to do is to unite mysticism and the senses, to
render mysticism through the senses. Mr. Watts-Dunton has pointed out
that that is what Rossetti tried to do in painting. That mysterious
intensity of expression which we see in the faces of Rossetti's latest
pictures has something of the same appeal as the insatiable crying-out
of a carnal voice, somewhere in the depths of Wagner's latest music.

In "Parsifal," more perhaps than anywhere else in his work, Wagner
realised the supreme importance of monotony, the effect that could be
gained by the incessant repetition of a few ideas. All that music of
the closing scene of the first act is made out of two or three phrases,
and it is by the finest kind of invention that those two or three
phrases are developed, and repeated, and woven together into so splendid
a tissue. And, in the phrases themselves, what severity, what bareness
almost! It is in their return upon themselves, their weighty reiterance,
that their force and significance become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche
says, they end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypn