us both in himself and in the world we see through his eyes.  Never had an actor such opportunities as here.  The entry with the bear exhibits the animal strength and spirits of the man, and the inquiries about his parents, his purely human feeling; his temper with Mime the unsophisticated boy’s petulant intolerance of the mean and ugly; the forging of the sword the coming power and determination of manhood.  The killing of the dragon is unavoidably rather ridiculous; but the scene with the bird is fascinating by its naturalness and simplicity as well as its tenderness and sheer sweetness.  Finally, after the scene with the Wanderer, the scene of the awakening of Bruennhilde affords an opportunity for love-making, and it is love-making of so unusual a sort that one does not feel it to be an anti-climax after all the big things that have gone before.  In fact, not even Tristan has things quite so much to himself, nor is given the opportunity of expressing so many phases of emotion and character.  And the music Siegfried has to sing is the richest, most copious stream of melody ever given to one artist; in any one scene there is melody enough to have made the fortune of Verdi or any other Italian composer who wrote tunes for the tenor and prima donna; not even Mozart could have poured out a greater wealth of tune—­tune everlastingly varying with the mood of the drama.  Every scene provides a heap of smaller tunes, and then there are such big ones as the Forge song, Siegfried’s meditation in the forest and the conversation with the bird, and the awakening of Bruennhilde—­every one absolutely new and tremulous with intense life.

“THE DUSK OF THE GODS”

Quite a fierce little controversy raged a little while ago in the columns of the “Daily Chronicle,” and all about the “meaning” of “The Dusk of the Gods” and the behaviour of Bruennhilde.  Mr. Shaw played Devil’s Advocate for Wagner, declaring “The Dusk of the Gods” to be irrelevant and operatic (as if that mattered); and Mr. Ashton Ellis and Mr. Edward Baughan, two mad Wagnerians, rushed in to protect Wagner from Mr. Shaw (as if he needed protection).  In reading the various letters, my soul was moved to admiration and reverent awe by the ingenuity displayed by the various correspondents in their endeavours to make the easy difficult, the perfectly plain crooked.  Wagner took enormous pains to make Bruennhilde a living character—­that is to say, to show us her inmost soul so vividly that we know why she did anything or everything without even thinking about it; he set her on the stage, where we see her in the flesh behaving precisely as any woman—­of her period—­would behave.  And then these excellent gentlemen come along and tell us that because Wagner at one time or another thought of handling her story, and the story of Wotan and Siegfried, in this or that way, therefore Wagner “meant” this or that, and failed or succeeded, or changed his original plan or held fast to it.  All these things have nothing to do with the drama