the thousand ideas that the merest chance sentences of Feuerbach aroused in his seething brain.  Feuerbach, however, was sent about his business as soon as Schopenhauer entered.  Wagner immediately wrote enthusiastically to Liszt, telling how peace and light had come into his soul; and one might wonder what particular doctrine of the grumpy old pseudo-philosopher had this remarkable effect. (This is to assume it to have had the effect.  As a bare matter of fact it hadn’t.  Wagner’s soul knew no peace until he died.) It was the great gospel of Renunciation.  After reading this, in his own way, Wagner realized, if you please, that both Tannhaeuser and Lohengrin preached the same doctrine; and one can only retort that, if they preach any doctrine at all—­which they don’t, thank heaven!—­it is not that.  But Schopenhauerism might easily have ruined Tristan—­did not ruin it only because Wagner himself, when writing it, was consumed with a fervour of passion that is the negation of Schopenhauerism.  It is responsible, however, for many of the longueurs of the Ring, as, for instance, in Act II of the Valkyrie, when Wotan stops the action to give Bruennhilde an elementary lesson in Schopenhauer-cum-Wagner metaphysics.  The funny thing is that Wagner never renounced anything:  to the end he was greedy, avid of life.  He might have benefited by a careful study of Schopenhauer’s pungent phrases; but instead of thus developing his own natural gift in that direction, his sentences afterwards grew longer and more complicated than ever.  His Beethoven is a splendid essay; how much finer it might have been had he not wasted so many pages on what he took to be Schopenhauer’s science!

CHAPTER XI

‘TRISTAN AND ISOLDA’

I

For those who have ears, eyes and understanding Tristan and Isolda is Wagner’s most perfect work, is the finest opera in the world.  Unluckily there are in the world far too many persons who are not content to have a work of supreme art, but must needs read into it old, stale platitudes:  when they have proved it to be an exposition of these platitudes they conceive that they have deserved the gratitude of the people for interpreting the artist and of the artist for having interpreted him, having made his meaning clear.  As I have written elsewhere of Tristan, “Wagner’s consummate dramatic art, stage-craft and knowledge of stage effect have combined to make all clear as the day”; but the commentators have rushed in with their comments between the stage and the audience only to obscure everything and bamboozle people who are at least as capable as themselves of understanding the drama.  The platitudes read into Tristan are of two sorts, truisms and lying commonplaces.  To take one of the latter kind, some one many long years ago got off the pretty phrase, “love and death are