some sign that he is redeemed.  There is no such sign.  The phantom ship falls to pieces, and the Dutchman is freed from his curse when Senta casts herself into the waves; and the highest moment of the whole drama is that in which the dreamy monomaniac, the modern Jeanne d’Arc, the real heroine of the opera, wins her own salvation, masters the world and makes it her heaven, by taking her fate in both hands and setting out to do the thing she feels most strongly impelled to do.  If the Dutchman’s salvation depends on himself, it is evidently unnecessary for Senta to be drowned; if it depends upon her, it only shows that Wagner, writing fifty years ago, and dazzled by the brilliance of a new idea, could not see so clearly as can be seen to-day that Senta was her own and not the Dutchman’s saviour; and if (as it apparently does) it depends upon both Dutchman and Senta, then, at a performance at least, one can merely feel that something in the drama is very much askew, without knowing precisely what.

In minor respects “The Flying Dutchman” falls considerably short of perfection, even of reasonableness.  For example, the comings and goings of Daland are fearfully stagy.  But worst of all are the arrangements of the first act.  I can go as far as most people in accepting stage conventions.  If Wagner brought on a four-eyed, eight-horned, twenty-seven-legged monster and called it a Jabberwock, I should not so much as ask why the legs were not all in pairs, like the horns and eyes, so long as I saw in the animal’s habits a certain congruity, a conformity to what I would willingly regard as Jabberwock nature.  But who can pretend to believe in a ship which comes against the rocks in a storm and anchors there while the captain goes ashore to see whether shipwreck is imminent?  That the majority of opera-goers cannot live near the sea is self-evident, and that few of them should ever have seen a shipwreck unavoidable; but surely anyone who has crossed the Channel must have a vague suspicion that to place this vessel against the rocks in a tempest is the last thing a seaman would dream of doing, and that, if he were driven there and managed to get ashore, he would call his men after him (if they needed calling), and trouble neither about casting anchor nor going aboard again.  The thing is ludicrously stagy.  I suppose that Wagner was too sea-sick to observe what happened during his weeks of roughing it in the North Sea.  But the second scene is admirable.  That monotonous drowsy hum of the Spinning song is exactly what is needed to put one in the mood for sympathising with Senta and her dreams.  With the third there is an occasional return to the bad stagecraft of Scribe; but there are also hints of the simple directness of the later Wagner.