subject and treatment merge inseparably one in the other, substance and form are one; for the idea is all in all, and the complete idea cannot be perceived apart from the dress which makes it visible.  Besides, in the Wagnerian music-drama, it is intended that beauty of idea and of arrangement of ideas shall be as of great importance as beauty of ornament.  Wagner certainly intended “Parsifal” to be such a music-drama; and indeed the idea is only too clearly visible.  The main idea of the “Ring” is so much obscured by the subsidiary ideas twined about it that very few people know that the real hero is Wotan, and the central drama Wotan’s tragedy, that Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried and Bruennhilde, and their loves—­all the romance and loveliness that enchant us—­are merely accessory.  But in “Parsifal” there is nothing superfluous, no rich and lovely embroidery on the dress of the idea to divert us from the idea itself—­the idea is as nearly nude as our limited senses and our modern respectability permit.  And the idea being what it is, it follows that the play, after the drama once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless.  The first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent:  never were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in more masterly fashion, set forth.  Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining all manner of wounds and evils where no evils or wounds existed, had he made Parsifal a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to learn this, and brought him back to break up the monastery, to set Amfortas and the knights to some useful labour, and to tell them that the sacred spear, like Wotan’s spear, had power only to hurt those who feared it, then we might have had an adequate working-out of so noble a beginning.  Instead of this, Kundry kisses Parsifal, Parsifal squeals, and we see him in a moment to be only an Amfortas who has had the luck not to stumble; and he, the poor fool who is filled with so vast a pity because he sees (what are called) good and evil in entirely wrong proportion—­as, in fact, a hypochondriac sees them—­he, Parsifal, this thin-blooded inheritor of rickets and an exhausted physical frame, is called the Redeemer, and becomes head of the Brotherhood of the Grail.  Beside this inconsequence, all other inconsequences seem as nothing.  One might ask, for instance, how, seeing that no man can save his brother’s soul, Parsifal saves the soul of Amfortas?  This is a fallacy that held Wagner all his life.  We find it in “The Flying Dutchman”; it is avoided in “Tannhaeuser”—­for, thank the gods, Tannhaeuser is not saved by that uninteresting young person Elizabeth; it plays a large part in the “Ring”; it is the culmination of the drama of “Parsifal.”  Had Wagner thought more of Goethe and less of the Frankfort creature who formulated his hypo-chondriacal nightmares, and