ows out of it. In
itself it is a scene of peculiar power, charged to overflowing with
the essence of the Scandinavian legends. The notion of the god,
"one-eyed and seeming ancient," wandering by night through the wild
woods, clad in his dark blue robe, calling in here and there and
creating consternation in the circle gathered round the hearth, is one
of the most poetic to be found in the Northern mythology; and the
music which Wagner has set to his entry and his conversation cannot be
matched for unearthliness unless you turn to the Statue music in "Don
Giovanni," where you find unearthliness of a very different sort. The
scene with Erda in the mountains is even more wonderful, so laden is
the music with the Scandinavian emotional sense of the impenetrable
mystery of things. The scene between Mime and Alberich, or Alberich
and the Wanderer, gives us the old horror of the creeping maleficent
things that crawled by night about the brooks and rock-holes. It is
true this last will bear cutting a little; for Wagner being a German,
but having, what is uncommon in the German, an acute sense of balance
of form, always tried to get balance by lengthening parts which were
already long enough, in preference to cutting parts that were already
too long. Hence much padding, which a later generation will ruthlessly
amputate.

All these things are the accessories, the environment, of the
principal figure; and their presence is justified by their beauty,
significance, and interest, and also by their being necessary for the
development of the larger drama of the whole "Ring." But in following
"Siegfried" that larger drama cannot altogether be kept in mind: it is
the hero that counts first, and everything else is accessory merely to
him. That Wagner, in spite of his preoccupation with the tragedy of
Wotan, should have accomplished this, proves how wonderful and how
true an artist he was. Siegfried is the incarnation, as I have said,
of the divine energy which enables one to make the world rich with
things that delight the soul; he is Wagner's healthiest, sanest,
perhaps most beautiful creation; he is certainly the only male in all
Wagner's dramas who is never in any danger of becoming for ever so
brief a moment a bore, whose view of life is always so fresh and novel
and at the same time so essentially human that he interests us both in
himself and in the world we see through his eyes. Never had an actor
such opportunities as here. The e