tween
the stage and the audience only to obscure everything and bamboozle
people who are at least as capable as themselves of understanding the
drama. The platitudes read into _Tristan_ are of two sorts, truisms
and lying commonplaces. To take one of the latter kind, some one many
long years ago got off the pretty phrase, "love and death are one";
and poetasters and fiftieth-rate dramatists have ever since continued
to assert as a profound and original truth that love and death are
one. What on earth they understand by it, if they mean anything at
all, is much more than I can guess. But I know that love and death are
not one, that love is life, and death is death. We have had it pointed
out a thousand times that the "moral" of _Tristan_ is that these two
opposites are one; and in the latest books and articles about Wagner
the same game is kept merrily going. I can extract no such moral.
Perhaps some unfortunate essays and letters of Wagner gave the
commentators their cue and lead; for Wagner, when he put away his
music-paper and sat down to his writing-paper, often showed himself a
willing victim of catch-phrases; also many sentences of the drama can
be construed as paraphrases of this particular catch-phrase--for
example, "Nun banne das Bangen, holder Tod, sehnend verlangter
Liebestod." Such utterances as these, however, have a specific and
different meaning altogether, as will presently be seen. I can by no
means believe even Wagner capable of writing a three-act music-drama
to prove the truth of a catch-phrase or that he would have dreamed of
using such a catch-phrase as the motive of his music-drama. The
commonplaces drawn from _Tristan_ and gravely set forth as the
"meanings" of the operas are as numberless as sands on the sea-shore
and rather less valuable. That young women should not make a practice
of marrying old men, that illicit passions and intrigues may bring on
disaster, that it is madness to make love to another man's wife in a
garden, observable by all, that it is greater madness still to keep on
when a maidservant is screaming that some one is coming--these rules
of conduct are very well in their way and might commend themselves to
the denizens of Clapham; but, again, I hardly think Wagner would have
constructed a great music-drama to enunciate them. Nor did he
construct his music-drama to expound a philosophy. For a long time the
air was thick with arguments _pro_ and _con_ with regard to the amount
of