actors always fill up their idle intervals, and how he would beg them, in Wotan’s name, rather to do nothing than do that.  But to take the first bungling representation of the “Ring” as an ideal to be approached as closely as possible, to insist on competent actors and actresses standing doing nothing when some movement is urgently called for, is to deny to Wagner all the advantages of the new acting which modern stage singers have learnt from his music.  The first act of “The Valkyrie,” for example, will be absurd so long as Sieglinde, Hunding, and Siegmund are made to stand in solemn silence, as beginners who cannot hear the prompter’s voice, until Sieglinde has mixed Hunding’s draught.  And some of the gestures and postures in which the singers are compelled to indulge are as foolish as the foolishest Italian acting.  Who can help laughing at the calisthenics of Wotan and Bruennhilde at the end of “The Valkyrie,” or at Wotan’s massage treatment of Bruennhilde in the second act?  The Bayreuth acting is as entirely conventional as Italian acting, and scarce a whit more artistic and sane.  Even the fine artists are hampered by it; and the lesser ones are enabled to make themselves and whole music-dramas eminently ridiculous.  On the whole, perhaps, acting and singing were at their best in “Siegfried.”  In “The Rheingold” some of the smaller parts—­such as Miss Weed’s Freia—­were handsomely done; the Mime was also excellent; but I cannot quite reconcile myself to Friedrichs’ Alberich.  “The Dusk of the Gods” was marred by Burgstaller, and “The Valkyrie” by the two apparently octogenarian lovers.  That is Bayreuth’s way.  It promises us the best singers procurable, and gives us Vogl and Sucher, who undoubtedly were delightful in their parts twenty years ago; and it would be shocked to learn that its good faith is questioned so far as lady artists are concerned.  Whether it is fair to question it is another matter.  In Germany feminine beauty is reckoned by hundredweights.  No lady of under eighteen stones is admired; but one who is heavier than that, instead of staying at home and looking after her grandchildren, is put into a white dress and called Sieglinde, or into a brown robe and called Kundry; and a German audience accepts her as a revelation of ideal loveliness through the perfection of human form.

The Germans are devoid of a sense of colour, they are devoid of a sense of beauty in vocal tone, and I am at last drawing near to the conclusion that they have no sense of beauty in instrumental tone.  Throughout this cycle the tone of many of the instruments has been execrable; many of them have rarely been even in approximate tune.  The truth is that the players do not play well unless a master-hand controls them; and a master-hand in the orchestra has been urgently wanted.  Instead of a master-hand we have had to put up with Master Siegfried Wagner’s hand (he now uses the right), and in the worst moments we have wished there was no hand at all, and in the best we