gives them of his love only more clearly defines his real significance and relation to them.  Tristan does not fear Melot:  he dreads Mark’s affection.  He (Tristan) calls out, “Daylight phantoms! morning visions, empty and vain—­away, begone!” but Mark continues, putting in a dozen ways the same question, “Why, why have they done this?” It is not the behaviour of a barbaric king; but we must remember that Wagner’s Mark is not, and is not intended to be, the legendary Mark any more than Tristan and Isolda are the legendary Tristan and Isolda:  he is the personification of human affection, a thing to which they, enthralled by elemental love, are indifferent—­detest, indeed, as interfering with their love.  When he ends Tristan knows he has no explanation to offer—­none that Mark could possibly understand:  human affection and elemental human passion are unintelligible to one another.  He replies that he cannot answer Mark’s “Why?” and turning to Isolda asks whether she will follow him whither he is now going—­the land of eternal night.  He, not Mark, plans his death.  Isolda answers straightway that she will follow.  Tristan and Melot fight, but Tristan allows his treacherous foe to run the sword through him, and he falls. Then we get the curtain; Tristan has done with this world and has started out for another, and the drama has taken a second step towards its goal.

This, held for long to be bad craftsmanship, is consummate, daring craftmanship. Tristan is a drama of spiritual conflicts; and those who do not like that sort had better try something by the trade playwrights of to-day.

V

The music of the first act is largely fierce, angry, turbulent, often bitter music, blent and merging into music expressive of fierce desire, the hunger of the man after the woman, of the woman after the man.  There is one moment of sweet longing—­the moment after Isolda and Tristan have drunk the fatal potion; but instantly the torrent breaks forth, and though it is in a way sweet, the sweetness is mixed with fire; the stream is as a stream of molten lava, scalding, consuming.  The note of the music to the second act is utterly different; there is fire, indeed, a golden fire; there is greedy impatience and restlessness; but the fire does not scorch nor scald, the impatience is not despairing, the love is not—­as it certainly is in the first act—­that passion which is but one remove from deadly hate.  Almost at the beginning of the first act Isolda, devoured by a longing for revenge, schemed to murder Tristan, and she does not falter in her purpose until he has taken the drink; the reaction has all the violence of a cataclysm; all is delirium; there is not a moment of happy lingering over the joy of a possible; new life; there is no time for that, no thought of it.  All is burning wrath and hate and equally burning lust and greed for the possession of the beloved one’s body.  In the second act the anger has died out, and in the whirl of the music, though at its maddest, there is a fulness, an assured sense of coming satisfaction; and the excitement settles down into long, drawn-out, luscious, voluptuous strains as the lovers, held in each other’s arms, exchange the sweet confidences usual (I suppose) on such occasions.