or Mackenzie would have made of it!  And then think of what the “Ring” actually is, and especially of the splendour and weirdness of some parts the “dulness” of which moves dull people to dull grumbling.  For example, a great many persons share Mime’s wish for the Wanderer to go off almost as soon as he comes on, “else no Wanderer can he be called.”  They tell us that this scene breaks the action, neglecting the trifling fact that were it omitted the remainder of the act would be inconsequent nonsense, only worthy to rank with the librettos of English musical critics, and that the truth happens to be that nearly the whole of the subsequent drama grows out of it.  In itself it is a scene of peculiar power, charged to overflowing with the essence of the Scandinavian legends.  The notion of the god, “one-eyed and seeming ancient,” wandering by night through the wild woods, clad in his dark blue robe, calling in here and there and creating consternation in the circle gathered round the hearth, is one of the most poetic to be found in the Northern mythology; and the music which Wagner has set to his entry and his conversation cannot be matched for unearthliness unless you turn to the Statue music in “Don Giovanni,” where you find unearthliness of a very different sort.  The scene with Erda in the mountains is even more wonderful, so laden is the music with the Scandinavian emotional sense of the impenetrable mystery of things.  The scene between Mime and Alberich, or Alberich and the Wanderer, gives us the old horror of the creeping maleficent things that crawled by night about the brooks and rock-holes.  It is true this last will bear cutting a little; for Wagner being a German, but having, what is uncommon in the German, an acute sense of balance of form, always tried to get balance by lengthening parts which were already long enough, in preference to cutting parts that were already too long.  Hence much padding, which a later generation will ruthlessly amputate.

All these things are the accessories, the environment, of the principal figure; and their presence is justified by their beauty, significance, and interest, and also by their being necessary for the development of the larger drama of the whole “Ring.”  But in following “Siegfried” that larger drama cannot altogether be kept in mind:  it is the hero that counts first, and everything else is accessory merely to him.  That Wagner, in spite of his preoccupation with the tragedy of Wotan, should have accomplished this, proves how wonderful and how true an artist he was.  Siegfried is the incarnation, as I have said, of the divine energy which enables one to make the world rich with things that delight the soul; he is Wagner’s healthiest, sanest, perhaps most beautiful creation; he is certainly the only male in all Wagner’s dramas who is never in any danger of becoming for ever so brief a moment a bore, whose view of life is always so fresh and novel and at the same time so essentially human that he interests