Compared with “The Valkyrie,” “The Flying Dutchman” is ill-contrived and stagy.  It is flecked here and there with vulgarity.  It has far less of pure beauty; it has only its moments, whereas “The Valkyrie” gives hours of unbroken delight.  “The Valkyrie” appeals to the primary instincts of our nature—­instincts and desires that will remain in us so long as our nature is human; while for a large part of its effect the “Dutchman” trusts to a feeling which is elusive at all times and has no permanent hold upon us.  Horror of the supernatural is not very deeply rooted in us, after all.  Modern training tends to eliminate it altogether.  In later life Goethe could not call up a single delightful shiver.  There are probably not half a dozen stories in the world from which we can get it a second time.  The unexpected plays a part in producing it, and the same means does not produce it twice with anything approaching the same intensity.  Hence the Dutchman’s phantom ship must be more ghost-like at each representation, its blood-red sails a bloodier red; and in the long-run, do what the stage carpenters will, we coldly sit and compare their work with previous ships.  True, the music which accompanies its entry is always impressively ghastly; yet, while we know this, we are acutely conscious that our feeling is more or less a laudable make-believe—­a make-believe that requires some little effort.  Then Heine’s notion, which seemed so brilliant at first, that the Dutchman could be redeemed by the unshakable love of a woman, has now all the disagreeable staleness of a decrepit and obvious untruth.  It has no essential verity to give it validity, it is no symbol of a fact which is immediately and deeply felt to be a fact.  The condition of redemption is entirely arbitrary:  it might as reasonably be that the Dutchman should find a woman who would not shrink from eating his weather-stained hat.  What was it to the Dutchman’s damned soul if all the women in the world swore to love him eternally, so long as he was unable to love one of them?  The true Wandering Jew is not the unloved man, but the man who cannot love, who is destitute of creative emotion and cannot build up for himself a world in which to dwell, but must needs live in hell—­a world that others make, a world where he has no place.  Wagner knew this, and makes the Dutchman fall in love with Senta; and that only leaves the drama more than ever in a muddle.  One wants a reason for his suddenly being able to love.  It cannot be because Senta promises to love him till death; for he has had hundreds of fruitless love-affairs before, and knows that all women promise that, and some of them mean it.  Besides, the highest moment of the drama ought either to arrive when he feels love dawning in his loveless heart, or when he renounces his chance of salvation and sails away to eternal torment, believing that Senta made her promise in a passing fit of enthusiasm; and at one or other of those moments we ought to have