the women in the world swore to love him eternally, so long as he was
unable to love one of them? The true Wandering Jew is not the unloved
man, but the man who cannot love, who is destitute of creative emotion
and cannot build up for himself a world in which to dwell, but must
needs live in hell--a world that others make, a world where he has no
place. Wagner knew this, and makes the Dutchman fall in love with
Senta; and that only leaves the drama more than ever in a muddle. One
wants a reason for his suddenly being able to love. It cannot be
because Senta promises to love him till death; for he has had hundreds
of fruitless love-affairs before, and knows that all women promise
that, and some of them mean it. Besides, the highest moment of the
drama ought either to arrive when he feels love dawning in his
loveless heart, or when he renounces his chance of salvation and sails
away to eternal torment, believing that Senta made her promise in a
passing fit of enthusiasm; and at one or other of those moments we
ought to have some sign that he is redeemed. There is no such sign.
The phantom ship falls to pieces, and the Dutchman is freed from his
curse when Senta casts herself into the waves; and the highest moment
of the whole drama is that in which the dreamy monomaniac, the modern
Jeanne d'Arc, the real heroine of the opera, wins her own salvation,
masters the world and makes it her heaven, by taking her fate in both
hands and setting out to do the thing she feels most strongly impelled
to do. If the Dutchman's salvation depends on himself, it is evidently
unnecessary for Senta to be drowned; if it depends upon her, it only
shows that Wagner, writing fifty years ago, and dazzled by the
brilliance of a new idea, could not see so clearly as can be seen
to-day that Senta was her own and not the Dutchman's saviour; and if
(as it apparently does) it depends upon both Dutchman and Senta, then,
at a performance at least, one can merely feel that something in the
drama is very much askew, without knowing precisely what.

In minor respects "The Flying Dutchman" falls considerably short of
perfection, even of reasonableness. For example, the comings and
goings of Daland are fearfully stagy. But worst of all are the
arrangements of the first act. I can go as far as most people in
accepting stage conventions. If Wagner brought on a four-eyed,
eight-horned, twenty-seven-legged monster and called it a Jabberwock,
I should not so much