t. Besides, what he had already done had
reached the limit of even his immense energy and perseverance and so
he did the best he could with the unfinished and for ever unfinishable
work, rounding it off with an opera much as Rossini rounded off some of
his religious compositions with a galop. Only, Rossini on such occasions
wrote in his score "Excusez du peu," but Wagner left us to find out the
change for ourselves, perhaps to test how far we had really followed his
meaning.

WAGNER'S OWN EXPLANATION

And now, having given my explanation of The Ring, can I give Wagner's
explanation of it? If I could (and I can) I should not by any means
accept it as conclusive. Nearly half a century has passed since the
tetralogy was written; and in that time the purposes of many half
instinctive acts of genius have become clearer to the common man than
they were to the doers. Some years ago, in the course of an explanation
of Ibsen's plays, I pointed out that it was by no means certain or even
likely that Ibsen was as definitely conscious of his thesis as I. All
the stupid people, and some critics who, though not stupid, had not
themselves written what the Germans call "tendency" works, saw nothing
in this but a fantastic affectation of the extravagant self-conceit
of knowing more about Ibsen than Ibsen himself. Fortunately, in taking
exactly the same position now with regard to Wagner, I can claim his own
authority to support me. "How," he wrote to Roeckel on the 23rd. August
1856, "can an artist expect that what he has felt intuitively should
be perfectly realized by others, seeing that he himself feels in the
presence of his work, if it is true Art, that he is confronted by a
riddle, about which he, too, might have illusions, just as another
might?"

The truth is, we are apt to deify men of genius, exactly as we deify the
creative force of the universe, by attributing to logical design what
is the result of blind instinct. What Wagner meant by "true Art" is the
operation of the artist's instinct, which is just as blind as any other
instinct. Mozart, asked for an explanation of his works, said frankly
"How do I know?" Wagner, being a philosopher and critic as well as
a composer, was always looking for moral explanations of what he had
created and he hit on several very striking ones, all different. In the
same way one can conceive Henry the Eighth speculating very brilliantly
about the circulation of his own blood without ge