phrase the effect is marked enough, but to one who knows every phrase and its associations the double meaning is almost horrifying.  It is idle to search out such points as this with the aid of a guide, for while you are waiting for them you lose the music in which they are set; the prevailing mood eludes you, and the points themselves fail to make their effect.  There is another danger.  People easily go leit-motif mad, and their insane imagination creates a leit-motif out of any two phrases that have a superficial and accidental resemblance. Tristan and the Ring are not musical puzzles.  The themes are quite able to look after themselves, and to assert themselves at the proper moment.  Many of them are not leit-motifs at all.  The passage out of the sea-song, which is heard constantly through the first act, is not a leit-motif, nor are many of the other subjects.  They receive symphonic development; but, after all, the opening four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony do not form a leit-motif.  I have dwelt at length upon this, for misguided people have blinded both themselves and others as to Wagner’s true aims and methods and the splendour of the accomplished thing by trying to read into his music a host of trifling and pettifogging allusions which he never intended.  There is enough to break our minds upon without troubling about these.

In the second act we are left in the dark as to what has happened since we left Isolda in Tristan’s arms on the deck of the ship.  Some years ago an excited discussion took place on a very momentous question—­“Did Isolda marry King Mark or not?” If not, it was strange that she should have been left free enough apparently to see Tristan whenever she wished, and Mark’s expostulations at the end of the act seem rather unwarranted in the mouth of a man whose honour, in the Divorce Court sense, has not been smirched; yet, on the other hand, it is unlikely that a legendary King, with the bride in his palace, would wait so long for the marriage as to allow the many pretty incidents mentioned by Brangaena to happen.  Yet again, if they were married, Mark, in the third act, shows a more than heroic willingness and less than cuckold readiness to let Isolda go free.  Probably Wagner never gave the problem a moment’s consideration, which is hardly surprising when we consider his own multitudinous love affairs.  He was not writing a Sunday-school tract, but a drama of passion so intense that purity, prudence and all such considerations were thrown to the winds.

The act opens with a very Proteus of a theme.  Its entrance is like a thunder-clap in a cloudless sky.  The conductor lifts his stick, and then—­

[Illustration:  Some bars of music]

—­an unprepared discord which must have pained the ears and grieved the hearts of the ordinary opera-goers and pedants when the opera was first given.  This subject is used in connection with the notion of daylight as a nuisance to lovers in the subsequent conversation of Tristan and Isolda—­a notion which we shall examine presently.  Presently another subject is heard, one of which extensive use is made in the first scene—­