one”; and poetasters and fiftieth-rate dramatists have ever since continued to assert as a profound and original truth that love and death are one.  What on earth they understand by it, if they mean anything at all, is much more than I can guess.  But I know that love and death are not one, that love is life, and death is death.  We have had it pointed out a thousand times that the “moral” of Tristan is that these two opposites are one; and in the latest books and articles about Wagner the same game is kept merrily going.  I can extract no such moral.  Perhaps some unfortunate essays and letters of Wagner gave the commentators their cue and lead; for Wagner, when he put away his music-paper and sat down to his writing-paper, often showed himself a willing victim of catch-phrases; also many sentences of the drama can be construed as paraphrases of this particular catch-phrase—­for example, “Nun banne das Bangen, holder Tod, sehnend verlangter Liebestod.”  Such utterances as these, however, have a specific and different meaning altogether, as will presently be seen.  I can by no means believe even Wagner capable of writing a three-act music-drama to prove the truth of a catch-phrase or that he would have dreamed of using such a catch-phrase as the motive of his music-drama.  The commonplaces drawn from Tristan and gravely set forth as the “meanings” of the operas are as numberless as sands on the sea-shore and rather less valuable.  That young women should not make a practice of marrying old men, that illicit passions and intrigues may bring on disaster, that it is madness to make love to another man’s wife in a garden, observable by all, that it is greater madness still to keep on when a maidservant is screaming that some one is coming—­these rules of conduct are very well in their way and might commend themselves to the denizens of Clapham; but, again, I hardly think Wagner would have constructed a great music-drama to enunciate them.  Nor did he construct his music-drama to expound a philosophy.  For a long time the air was thick with arguments pro and con with regard to the amount of Schopenhauer he had made use of in his libretto.  Now, it is true that both Tristan and Isolda indulge at times in something approximating to the Schopenhauer terminology; but of Schopenhauer’s or any other philosophy I cannot find a trace.  For that we must turn to Parsifal.  In Tristan there are no “meanings”—­none save the very plain meaning of the drama and the meaning of the music, which is plainer still.

It seems to me desirable in this way to clear off misunderstandings and to indicate with precision my point of view.  When Wagner wrote Tristan he wrote a tragic opera of passion and treachery and death, and only as a tragic opera can I regard it.  Every sentence in it is accounted for by the course the drama takes; no further explanation is called for; and I shall certainly not waste my readers’ time by picking out a few words here and there and