to give reality to abstract comprehension,
maintaining, in fact, that reality has no other meaning. Now he could
apply this process to poetic love only by following it back to its
alleged origin in sexual passion, the emotional phenomena of which he
has expressed in music with a frankness and forcible naturalism which
would possibly have scandalized Shelley. The love duet in the first act
of The Valkyries is brought to a point at which the conventions of our
society demand the precipitate fall of the curtain; whilst the prelude
to Tristan and Isolde is such an astonishingly intense and faithful
translation into music of the emotions which accompany the union of a
pair of lovers, that it is questionable whether the great popularity of
this piece at our orchestral concerts really means that our audiences
are entirely catholic in their respect for life in all its beneficently
creative functions, or whether they simply enjoy the music without
understanding it.

But however offensive and inhuman may be the superstition which brands
such exaltations of natural passion as shameful and indecorous, there is
at least as much common sense in disparaging love as in setting it up as
a panacea. Even the mercy and loving-kindness of Shelley do not hold good
as a universal law of conduct: Shelley himself makes extremely short
work of Jupiter, just as Siegfried does of Fafnir, Mime, and Wotan; and
the fact that Prometheus is saved from doing the destructive part of
his work by the intervention of that very nebulous personification of
Eternity called Demogorgon, does not in the least save the situation,
because, flatly, there is no such person as Demogorgon, and if
Prometheus does not pull down Jupiter himself, no one else will. It
would be exasperating, if it were not so funny, to see these poets
leading their heroes through blood and destruction to the conclusion
that, as Browning's David puts it (David of all people!), "All's Love;
yet all's Law."

Certainly it is clear enough that such love as that implied by
Siegfried's first taste of fear as he cuts through the mailed coat of
the sleeping figure on the mountain, and discovers that it is a woman;
by her fierce revolt against being touched by him when his terror gives
way to ardor; by his manly transports of victory; and by the womanly
mixture of rapture and horror with which she abandons herself to the
passion which has seized on them both, is an experience which it is much
bette