I know only the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet which may be said to approach it.  Melody upon melody, delicate and sweet to the ear as the perfume of night flowers and grasses to the nostrils, floats past; until at last the sheer delight of the thing seems to work up the lovers to a state of heavenly rapture, and in the final verse of the hymn to night they pray only to be removed from the dangers of returning day; and here the strains swell to an intensity of yearning for peace quite unprecedented in music.  And, as we know, their prayer is immediately answered in a fashion they were hardly prepared for.

Mark’s address is deeply touching; and it is odd that when attacked by Melot Tristan’s accents are almost his.  The sublime is again touched when Tristan asks Isolda to follow him and in her answer.  Melot then stabs him, and the curtain drops to one of Mark’s reproachful phrases thundering from the orchestra.  This, then, is Tristan’s answer to Mark’s questioning—­told in the music, not in the words.

VI

Who first uttered that immortal piece of nonsense, Love and death are one, I cannot say.  The Greek conception of Death as Eros with an inverted torch is quite different:  it is a kind of Tod als Freund idea; we are called out of life by an irresistible force or god, which god must be love, else he would not want us.  The inverted torch is the sign that shows whither he calls us.  It had a mighty fascination for many fine minds of the second-rate sort last century; and judging from the phraseology of Tristan it seems to have captured Wagner.  He was everlastingly bewildering himself with cheap catch-phrases which happened, through suggestion or otherwise, to stir his emotions.  He took up one philosophical and political system after another, only to abandon them in turn; but they left a kind of sediment in his mind, and one never feels sure that the pellucid stream of his music-drama will not the next moment be gritty to the palate with some of this outworn stuff.  The bits of Schopenhauer’s broken brickbats embedded in the libretto of Tristan serve their turn, though a finer and more poetical way of saying the same things might have been found.  But Wagner did not find that more poetical way, so let us rejoice that through this uncouth lingo Wagner managed to get into a sort of verse the idea that night was the friend of Tristan’s love and day its enemy, and that in the end everlasting night is best of all.  In his letters, however, we find him playing with the love and death notion, though he must have known that love is not death, but life; that if love and death are one, then death and love are also one, and to be in love is to be in death, to be dead—­which is preposterous:  corpses don’t love.  Presently we shall see that Isolda died in a state of exaltation akin to the state of being in love; but that does not establish the thesis.  Blake,