surface.  In the second, she is a courtesan with black diamonds.  In the third, she wears the coarse habit of a penitent, and her waist is tied with a cord; but her repentance goes no further than these exterior signs.  She says no word, and Ulick could not accept the descriptive music as sufficient explanation of her repentance, even if it were sincere, which it was not, and he spoke derisively of the amorous cries to be heard at every moment in the orchestra, while she is dragging herself to Parsifal’s feet.  Elizabeth’s prayer was to him a perfect expression of a penitent soul.  Kundry, he pointed out, had no such prayer, and he derisively sang the cries of amorous desire.  The character of Parsifal he could admit even less than the character of Kundry.  As he would say in discussion, “If I am to discuss an artistic question, I must go to the very heart of it.  Now, if we ask ourselves what Siegfried did, the answer is, that he forged the sword, killed the dragon and released Brunnhilde.  But if, in like manner, we ask ourselves what Parsifal did, is not the answer, that he killed a swan and refused a kiss and with many morbid, suggestive and disagreeable remarks?  These are the facts,” he would say; “confute them who may, explain them who can!” And if it were urged, as it often was, that in Parsifal Wagner desired the very opposite to what he had in Siegfried, the Parsifal is opposed to Siegfried as Hamlet is opposed to Othello, Ulick eagerly accepted the challenge, and like one sure of his adversary’s life, began the attack.

Wagner had been all his life dreaming of an opera with a subjective hero.  Christ first and then Buddha had suggested themselves as likely subjects.  He had gone so far as to make sketches for both heroes, but both subjects had been rejected as unpractical, and he had fallen back on a pretty mediaeval myth, and had shot into a pretty mediaeval myth all the material he had accumulated for the other dramas, whose heroes were veritable heroes, men who had accomplished great things, men who had preached great doctrines and whose lives were symbols of their doctrines.  The result of pouring this old wine into the new bottle was to burst the bottle.

In neither Christ nor Buddha did the question of sex arise, and that was the reason that Wagner eventually rejected both.  He was as full of sex—­mysterious, sub-conscious sex—­as Rossetti himself.  In Christ’s life there is the Magdalen, but how naturally harmonious, how implicit in the idea, are their relations, how concentric; but how excentric (using the word in its grammatical sense) are the relations of Parsifal to Kundry....  A redeemer is chaste, but he does not speak of his chastity nor does he think of it; he passes the question by.  The figure of Christ is so noble, that whether God or man or both, it seems to us in harmony that the Magdalen should bathe his feet and wipe them with her hair, but the introduction of the same incident into “Parsifal” revolts.  As Parsifal merely killed a swan and refused to be kissed—­the other preached a doctrine in which beauty and wisdom touch the highest point, and his life was an exemplification of his doctrine of non-resistance—­“Take ye and eat, for this is my body, and this is my blood.”