And I beg leave here to make a digression.  I have spoken of Wagner’s obsession by the notion that he could by his union of drama, music, pictorial art, etc., make his work clear enough to be understood at a first performance:  in his letters he referred to a plan for giving the Ring only once and then burning the theatre and the score—­he did not add the composer and the artists.  Unfortunately this view has been taken as a tenable one by good critics, and it has been argued seriously that such a phrase as (d) is meaningless, because its significance becomes apparent only in the second act.  No great work of art can be seen at one glance—­least of all Wagner’s.  If a painter puts before us a picture, say, of Perseus and Andromeda, we know at any rate what it is about; and there is no difficulty in understanding a Madonna.  But, with the exception of the Dutchman, Wagner reshaped all his subjects so that, for instance, an acquaintance with the Nibelung legends is rather a hindrance than a help to a swift understanding of the Ring.  At first his King Mark is a puzzle to those who know the Arthurian legends; and in the same way, if the Sachs of history is confounded with Wagner’s Sachs, we are at once utterly at sea.  But a knowledge of Wagner’s Sachs can scarcely be acquired from the words alone:  more is told us in the music than in the words; and before we can grasp the drama as well as Wagner’s use of phrases we must hear the opera many, many times.  I deny that this is an illegitimate mode of appeal to an audience; I deny that the indispensability of knowing an opera thoroughly before you judge it is to imply that it is less than a very great work of art; I affirm that the nobler, profounder, more beautiful a work of art, the more necessary it is to be able to look at every passage with a full consciousness of all that is to come after, as well as of what has gone before.  Wagner himself was compact of contradictions, and so, while trying to create his operas in such fashion that a single performance would suffice to reveal their splendour, he took the precaution to write detailed explanations which might serve the same purpose as many previous performances; and he also wrote explanations of Beethoven’s symphonies.

Throughout this long scene the tender stream of melody flows on, never lapsing into anything approaching prettiness or feebleness, flooding us with an overwhelming sense of a far-away past, while full utterance is found for Eva’s anxiety, then her despair, and her wish, timidly spoken, to give herself to Sachs rather than to be won by Beckmesser.  A scene of such length, constructed on such a plan, could have been carried through by no other composer than Wagner—­the sweetness, variety and dramatic strength and truth are Wagner at his ripest and best.  After Eva’s heart has been opened to us he takes up (d), and though Sachs is a little grumpy—­the effort to resign Eva inevitably though insensibly