the theories far behind.  That is, he constructed his dramas, without thinking of theories or traditions, simply as a common-sense dramatist-musician should, building up the whole edifice with two hands at once, the dramatist’s pen in one hand, the musician’s in the other.  He also said that when he set down the words the music was already (in an amorphous state—­we must presume he meant) in his brain.  It was to this effect he wrote in Opera and Drama the most skilful defence ever put together by a creative artist—­or rather not so much a defence as a plea for his particular form of art, or perhaps an explanation of the form.

This is entirely different from his procedure with the Ring, or indeed any of his works, not even excepting the Dutchman.  The Dutchman, he said, grew out of Senta’s ballad; but I have already shown that this statement was a mere piece of self-deception:  not the whole of the Dutchman, not one-tenth of it, grows out of Senta’s ballad; Senta’s ballad is not an oak-trunk with all the solos, duets, choruses and the rest growing out as branches with leaves grow from a trunk—­it is a scaffold-pole upon which these things are tacked in an almost unparalleled fervour of imagination.  That Wagner recognized this is plainly seen in the prose remarks he penned, in very cold blood, in his after years, when he looked at his first really fine work as though it had come from the hand of some other composer.  Gluck had not one-thousandth part of Wagner’s sheer genius, or, born into the nineteenth century, he might have done the thing as Wagner did it in Tristan; Mozart had not one-hundredth part of Wagner’s intellectual power, or, born into the nineteenth century, he might have done it.  Wagner alone did it. Tristan is a feat accomplished once and for all; at this moment it is impossible to imagine such a feat ever being done again.  Those of us who live on for another five hundred years may see something like it; but even then Tristan will not be old-fashioned—­not older-fashioned, at any rate, than Antigone or Hamlet, and perhaps less old-fashioned than Macbeth or Lear.  The breath, the spirit, which is eternal life, is in it, and it can only perish when the human race perishes.

Far too much theorising has been done about Wagner, and I would not add my quota did I not hope that this small contribution would save complicated explanations, now that I come to deal with the concrete, so to say, with the very stuff of Tristan, the words and the music.  We are to be prepared for a drama of human passion in sharpest conflict with a dispassionate, indifferent, even antagonistic world.  The passion is the naked elemental thing, the love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man; and these twain, had they lived on an island by themselves, might have been happy or unhappy, and felt the passion fade away and no one a penny the worse.  As it is, everything