it must not be too anti-Wagnerian.  Mr. Goetze prided himself on being in the movement.  Now, if Evelyn Innes would sing the title role, “Grania” was the very thing he wanted.  And in such a frame of mind, he listened to Ulick Dean.  He was glad that “Grania” was based on a legend; Wagner had shown that an opera could not be written except on a legendary basis.  The Irish legends were just the thing the public was prepared to take an interest in.  But there was one thing he feared—­that there were no motives.

“Tell me more about the music?  It is not like the opera you showed me a year or two ago in which instead of motives certain instruments introduce the characters?  There is nothing Gregorian about this new work, is there?”

“Nothing,” Ulick answered, smiling contemptuously—­nothing recognisable to uneducated ears.”

“Plenty of chromatic writing?”

“Yes, I think I can assure you that there is plenty of modulation, some unresolved dissonances.  I suppose that that is what you want.  Alas, there are not many motives.”

“Ah!”

Ulick waited to be asked if he could not introduce some.  But at that moment Tannhaeuser’s avowal of the joys he had experienced with Venus in Mount Horsel had shocked the Landgrave’s pious court.  The dames and the wives of the burgesses had hastened away, leaving their husbands to avenge the affront offered to their modesty.  The knights drew their swords; it was the moment when Elizabeth runs down the steps of the throne and demands mercy from her father for the man she loves.  The idea of this scene was very dear to Ulick, and his whole attention was fixed on Evelyn.

He was only attracted by essential ideas, and the mysterious expectancy of the virgin awaiting the approach of the man she loves was surely the essential spirit of life—­the ultimate meaning of things.  The comedy of existence, the habit of life worn in different ages of the world had no interest for him; it was the essential that he sought and wished to put upon the stage—­the striving and yearning, and then the inevitable acceptation of the burden of life; in other words, the entrance into the life of resignation.  That was what he sought in his own operas, and from this ideal he had never wavered; all other art but this essential art was indifferent to him.  It was no longer the beautiful writing of Wagner’s later works that attracted him; he deemed this one to be, perhaps, the finest, being the sincerest, and “Parsifal” the worst, being the most hypocritical.  Elizabeth was the essential penitent, she who does penance not for herself, she has committed no sin, but the sublime penitent who does penance for the sins of others.  Not for a moment could he admit the penitence of Kundry.  In her there was merely the external aspect.  “Parsifal” was to Ulick a revolting hypocrisy, and Kundry the blot on Wagner’s life.  In the first act she is a sort of wild witch, not very explicit to any intelligence that probes below the