In “Parsifal,” more perhaps than anywhere else in his work, Wagner realised the supreme importance of monotony, the effect that could be gained by the incessant repetition of a few ideas.  All that music of the closing scene of the first act is made out of two or three phrases, and it is by the finest kind of invention that those two or three phrases are developed, and repeated, and woven together into so splendid a tissue.  And, in the phrases themselves, what severity, what bareness almost!  It is in their return upon themselves, their weighty reiterance, that their force and significance become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche says, they end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic process, a cunning absorption of the will of another.

“Parsifal” presents itself as before all things a picture.  The music, soaring up from hidden depths, and seeming to drop from the heights, and be reflected back from shining distances, though it is, more than anything I have ever heard, like one of the great forces of nature, the sea or the wind, itself makes pictures, abstract pictures; but even the music, as one watches the stage, seems to subordinate itself to the visible picture there.  And, so perfectly do all the arts flow into one, the picture impresses one chiefly by its rhythm, the harmonies of its convention.  The lesson of “Parsifal” is the lesson that, in art, rhythm is everything.  Every moment in the acting of this drama makes a picture, and every movement is slow, deliberate, as if automatic.  No actor makes a gesture, which has not been regulated for him; there is none of that unintelligent haphazard known as being “natural”; these people move like music, or with that sense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest.  Gesture being a part of a picture, how should it but be settled as definitely, for that pictorial effect which all action on the stage is (more or less unconsciously) striving after, as if it were the time of a song, or the stage direction:  “Cross stage to right”?  Also, every gesture is slow; even despair having its artistic limits, its reticence.  It is difficult to express the delight with which one sees, for the first time, people really motionless on the stage.  After all, action, as it has been said, is only a way of spoiling something.  The aim of the modern stage, of all drama, since the drama of the Greeks, is to give a vast impression of bustle, of people who, like most people in real life, are in a hurry about things; and our actors, when they are not making irrelevant speeches, are engaged in frantically trying to make us see that they are feeling acute emotion, by I know not what restlessness, contortion, and ineffectual excitement.  If it were once realised how infinitely more important are the lines in the picture than these staccato extravagances which do but aim at tearing it out of its frame, breaking violently through it, we should have learnt a little, at least, of what the art of the stage should be, of what Wagner has shown us that it can be.