ntry with the bear exhibits the
animal strength and spirits of the man, and the inquiries about his
parents, his purely human feeling; his temper with Mime the
unsophisticated boy's petulant intolerance of the mean and ugly; the
forging of the sword the coming power and determination of manhood.
The killing of the dragon is unavoidably rather ridiculous; but the
scene with the bird is fascinating by its naturalness and simplicity
as well as its tenderness and sheer sweetness. Finally, after the
scene with the Wanderer, the scene of the awakening of Bruennhilde
affords an opportunity for love-making, and it is love-making of so
unusual a sort that one does not feel it to be an anti-climax after
all the big things that have gone before. In fact, not even Tristan
has things quite so much to himself, nor is given the opportunity of
expressing so many phases of emotion and character. And the music
Siegfried has to sing is the richest, most copious stream of melody
ever given to one artist; in any one scene there is melody enough to
have made the fortune of Verdi or any other Italian composer who
wrote tunes for the tenor and prima donna; not even Mozart could have
poured out a greater wealth of tune--tune everlastingly varying with
the mood of the drama. Every scene provides a heap of smaller tunes,
and then there are such big ones as the Forge song, Siegfried's
meditation in the forest and the conversation with the bird, and the
awakening of Bruennhilde--every one absolutely new and tremulous with
intense life.

"THE DUSK OF THE GODS"

Quite a fierce little controversy raged a little while ago in the
columns of the "Daily Chronicle," and all about the "meaning" of "The
Dusk of the Gods" and the behaviour of Bruennhilde. Mr. Shaw played
Devil's Advocate for Wagner, declaring "The Dusk of the Gods" to be
irrelevant and operatic (as if that mattered); and Mr. Ashton Ellis
and Mr. Edward Baughan, two mad Wagnerians, rushed in to protect
Wagner from Mr. Shaw (as if he needed protection). In reading the
various letters, my soul was moved to admiration and reverent awe by
the ingenuity displayed by the various correspondents in their
endeavours to make the easy difficult, the perfectly plain crooked.
Wagner took enormous pains to make Bruennhilde a living character--that
is to say, to show us her inmost soul so vividly that we know why she
did anything or everything without even thinking about it; he set her
on the stag