not choose but fly over the paper.  None the less we are compelled to marvel at the industry, the concentrated and continuous and patient energy of the man; for the Tristan score is as complicated as any ever written, and the mere number of notes to be set down might well have appalled him.  Handel could write a Messiah in three weeks and Mozart a Don Giovanni overture in a few hours; but their scores are mere skeletons compared with Tristan, a score which neither Handel nor Mozart could copy in a much longer time than three weeks.  We may hope that Wagner received his remaining hundred louis d’or, for the Brazilian scheme came to nothing, and he had to wait seven long years before Tristan got its first performance.  But for the “kingly friend,” mad Ludwig II, it would not have been performed at all; and afterwards other theatres found it too difficult, or the directors, with true inborn official insolence, seemed to glory in not so much as looking at the score.  We will now look at it.

Out of one or another of the various versions of the legend Wagner extracted the core—­the plain, direct story of the passion of a pair of tragic lovers.  Tristan and Isolda love one another with a devouring love, and circumstances will not allow them to be united; they find a refuge in death from an existence intolerable without love; and this is essentially the whole story.  In its older form the tale consisted mainly of what to the modern mind are excrescences—­the intrigues, fights, adventures and what not so dear to the mediaeval mind.  Wagner sheared away this mass of overgrowth; or perhaps it would be truer to say he hewed his way to the statue within, from out of the old stuff picked out the elements that made just the drama as it had shaped itself in his brain.  Here is the story.  Tristan, nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, had gone a-warring in Ireland and had there slain Morold, the betrothed of Isolda; and to Isolda he sends as a present Morold’s head.  He is himself wounded, and by chance it is Isolda, “a skilful leech,” who nurses him back to health.  She has found in Morold’s head a splinter of a sword-blade, and finds it was broken out of Tristan’s weapon.  Full of anger, she raises the sword to slay the sick man:  he opens his eyes, and “the sword dropped from my fingers”—­her doom is upon her:  henceforth she loves the slayer of her lover.  Though Tristan loves her he does not ask for her, but with many protestations of gratitude and friendship sails away to Cornwall.  Next occurs one of those things at which most of us are apt to boggle:  Tristan goes home, it would appear, only to suggest that his aged uncle should marry Isolda the peerless beauty; Mark consents, and sends Tristan to ask for her.  Tristan afterwards confesses that ambition led him to do this; but in any case it was very close to a deed of downright treachery, unless the fact was that Tristan did not suspect Isolda’s love for him, or thought his station too humble.  Wagner’s