he loving Elsa. Doubts and jealousy show
that he has not been understood but simply adored, and this draws from
him the confession of his divinity, after which he returns, his
purpose unaccomplished, to his solitude.

We must bear in mind how highly our poet even at that time prized this
artistic wealth. To Goethe, art was "like good deeds;" Schiller hoped
with its aid to unify the nation, and Wagner, especially after the
discovery of such grand art-material as those myths contained,
regarded it as the real fountain of health for the nation and the
time. We shall soon observe that at last his art embraced our highest
ideals in religion as well. Such an art, however, exists only in the
heart which believes in it, and we have seen how antagonistic was the
spirit of the time, particularly to this artist, who had emerged from
the blissful solitude of his own creative mind and sought the sympathy
of the warm human heart. He justly felt that the theme was a tragic
symbol of the time, and he was therefore enabled to present Lohengrin
as an entirely new artistic conception, something no poet had
previously succeeded in accomplishing.

More than this he discloses to us that which his Elsa imparted to
him--the nature of the feminine heart. "I could not help justifying
her in the outbreak at last of jealousy and at that moment for the
first time I fully comprehended the purely human nature of love," he
says. "This woman, who by passion is brought from the heights of
rapturous adoration back to her real nature and reveals it in her
ruin, this magnificent woman, from whom Lohengrin disappeared because
his peculiar nature prevented him from understanding her, I had now
discovered." The effect of this was to clarify his vision, as we shall
likewise learn. The lost arrow that he sent after this valuable
treasure had been his Lohengrin, which he had to sacrifice in order to
discover the track of the "true womanly" which Goethe was the first to
long for ardently, and which music had revealed as it were the sound
of a bell in the dark forest. This alone can explain why the
masculine egoism, even in so noble a form as our idealism had hitherto
assumed, was forced to yield to its influence. But this Elsa was only
the unconscious spirit of the people and the perception of this must
of necessity have made him, as he says, "a thorough revolutionist."
He felt that this spirit of the people was restrained by wrong
conceptions of morality and f