way to the great compromise—­the compromise foredoomed to bring him to ruin.  He will put Bruennhilda to sleep to await the hero; but he will hedge her in with fire so that the hero shall be a true one.  With the indescribable finesse, subtlety, of his own particular art, Wagner lets us feel how Bruennhilda, in begging to be protected in this (rather unusual) way, is reading only her own father’s thought:  he seems for a long time to contend, but at last yields.  The music steadily increases in force and passion, and at each stage where one would think the composer could strike no harder he immediately does it.  More and more of the divine fury pours into the music, until the climax is reached in the bars preceding the Farewell.

In the meantime we have had the wonderful Eternal Love theme—­not sexual love, but the mystic force that created the worlds and holds them in their courses:  in all Wagner there is no nobler and sweeter passage than that in which Bruennhilda first sings it.  The vivid musical description of the crackling flames which are to surround her is another of an unequalled series of marvels.  The Farewell I have already compared with that at the end of Lohengrin:  the voice part is at times in Wagner’s own style of song-recitative, but a great deal of it is sheer simple melody.  No master has excelled, or perhaps matched, Wagner in the art of expressing the most profound and poignant pathos without ever a suspicion of letting it lapse into bathos; and this he does by—­what at first it may seem ridiculous to say of so opulent and luxurious a genius as Wagner’s—­by his instinctive artistic austerity.  The word is not too strong to be applied to the resolute simplicity which enabled him to write such melodies as those of which I am now speaking and the Farewell in Lohengrin:  the temptation to let himself go, to wallow in sadness and to wring our bowels must have been almost too tremendous to be resisted by the man who within a year or so planned Tristan.  In art, harrowing our feelings never pays, and his self-repression has its exceeding great reward:  we could not feel more with Wotan’s desolating grief—­one stroke more and we should rebel:  we should know that our most sacred feelings were being exploited—­that an endeavour was being made to gain our applause for a work of art by an illegitimate appeal at one particular moment to those feelings.  I have dwelt a little on this because we all know Tristan and its author, and though there is little self-repression in that work—­where it is not required—­and physically there was little but self-indulgence in its author’s nature, it is well to realise that the artist rose immeasurably superior to the man.  It must have come to us all at one time or another with something of a shock to find that the voluptuous Wagner of Tannhaeuser could be as austere as Milton.  Austerity is not barrenness—­not the barrenness that would result from imitating the austerity of the old church composers with their hundred rules and regulations:  the harmony is as free as could be wished; at the needful moment the melodies pass without hesitation from key to key; but when we have long known them and learnt to understand them we find them at heart to be idealised folk-tunes—­simple and indescribably pathetic, as the situation demands.