are ideals, this of chivalry, that of love, this of
the bravery, that of the purity, of youth. Yet Wagner employs infinite
devices to give them more and more of verisimilitude; modulating song,
for instance, into a kind of chant which we can almost take for actual
speech. It is thus the more interesting to note the point to which
realism conducts him, the limit at which it stops, his conception of a
spiritual reality which begins where realism leaves off.

And, in his treatment of scenery also, we have to observe the admirable
dexterity of his compromises. The supernatural is accepted frankly with
almost the childish popular belief in a dragon rolling a loathly bulk
painfully, and breathing smoke. But note that the dragon, when it is
thrown back into the pit, falls without sound; note that the combats are
without the ghastly and foolish modern tricks of blood and disfigurement;
note how the crowds pose as in a good picture, with slow gestures, and
without intrusive individual pantomime. As I have said in speaking of
"Parsifal," there is one rhythm throughout; music, action, speech, all
obey it. When Bruennhilde awakens after her long sleep, the music is an
immense thanksgiving for light, and all her being finds expression in a
great embracing movement towards the delight of day. Siegfried stands
silent for I know not what space of time; and it is in silence always,
with a wave-like or flame-like music surging about them, crying out of
the depths for them, that all the lovers in Wagner love at first sight.
Tristan, when he has drunk the potion; Siegmund, when Sieglinde gives
him to drink; Siegfried, when Bruennhilde awakens to the world and to
him: it is always in the silence of rapture that love is given and
returned. And the gesture, subdued into a gravity almost sorrowful (as
if love and the thought of death came always together, the thought of
the only ending of a mortal eternity), renders the inmost meaning of the
music as no Italian gesture, which is the vehemence of first thoughts
and the excitement of the senses, could ever render it. That slow
rhythm, which in Wagner is like the rhythm of the world flowing onwards
from its first breathing out of chaos, as we hear it in the opening
notes of the "Ring," seems to broaden outwards like ripples on an
infinite sea, throughout the whole work of Wagner.

And now turn from this elemental music, in which the sense of all human
things is expressed with the dignity of the