at darkness, and only a great darkness
afterwards. Sorrow is so lofty and so consoling because it is no less
conscious of its passing hour.

And meanwhile action is not everything, as it is for other makers of
drama; is but one among many modes of the expression of life. Those long
narratives, which some find so tedious, so undramatic, are part of
Wagner's protest against the frequently false emphasis of action. In
Wagner anticipation and memory are seen to be often equally intense with
the instant of realisation. Siegfried is living with at least as
powerful and significant a life when he lies under the trees listening
to the song of the birds as when he is killing the dragon. And it is for
this that the "motives," which are after all only the materialising of
memory, were created by Wagner. These motives, by which the true action
of the drama expresses itself, are a symbol of the inner life, of its
preponderance over outward event, and, in their guidance of the music,
their indication of the real current of interest, have a spiritualising
effect upon both music and action, instead of, as was once thought,
materialising both.

Wagner's aim at expressing the soul of things is still further helped by
his system of continuous, unresolved melody. The melody which
circumscribes itself like Giotto's _O_ is almost as tangible a thing as
a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air,
flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying
poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood
and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of the
nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the whole
expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than any
person of the drama has ever found in his own soul.

It is here that Wagner unites with the greatest dramatists, and
distinguishes himself from the contemporary heresy of Ibsen, whose only
too probable people speak a language exactly on the level of their desks
and their shop-counters. Except in the "Meistersinger," all Wagner's
personages are heroic, and for the most part those supreme sublimations
of humanity, the people of legend, Tannhauser, Tristan, Siegfried,
Parsifal, have at once all that is in humanity and more than is hi
humanity. Their place in a national legend permits them, without
disturbing our critical sense of the probability of things, a superhuman
passion; for they