Almighty has little to do with the matter:  it is the foul fiend who snaps up Vanderdecken in his momentary lapse.  Again, after the first act Vanderdecken is second to Senta.  Even the belated attempt to show him heroic in his determination to sail off alone to his doom has no dramatic point; it has no bearing on his salvation, for nothing happens until Senta jumps into the sea, and we feel sure nothing would have happened if she had not jumped. That lesson, at any rate—­a childish, inept, inane, insane one at best—­is not set forth in the Dutchman.  The only other possible one is that self-sacrifice is a worthy and beautiful thing in itself.  In itself, I say, for Senta’s self-sacrifice is purely a fad:  she knows nothing of Vanderdecken save a rumour shaped into a primitive ballad.  Such self-sacrifice is not worthy, not beautiful; but, on the contrary, a very ugly and detestable form of lunacy.  In truth, not only is there no lesson in the Dutchman, but the whole idea is so absurd that only the power of the music enables us to swallow it at all.  The condition on which the Dutchman can be saved is purely arbitrary; what difference ought it to make to him that some one, for the sake of an idea, sacrifices herself?  The “good angel” who proposed it must have been temporarily out of her senses, and the Creator when he agreed must have been nodding.  And the whole business is smeared over with German mawkish sentimentality—­this business, I mean, of Senta loving the Dutchman.  Had he seen and loved her, and resolutely sailed off without her, and found his salvation in that, there would be some semblance of reason; but the fumbling attempt to make something of the man at the last moment is futile, and we are left with nothing but sentimental sickliness, nauseating and revolting.  In a word, then, we must take the Dutchman libretto as it is, unreasonable, false:  only a series of occasions for writing some fine music.  That it is nothing more than such a series I have endeavoured to establish at all this length; because if it is worth understanding Wagner at all, and if we wish to understand him, we must realise the point he started from in his half-conscious groping after the opera form which he only found in its full perfection in his Tristan period.

III

In the music the head and shoulders of the real Wagner emerge boldly from the ruck of commonplace which constitutes the bulk of the operatic music of the time.  How any one could have failed to see the strength and beauty of much of the Dutchman is one of those things almost impossible to understand to-day.  Of the tawdry vulgarity, the blatant clamour, of Rienzi there is not a hint.  The opera is by no means all on the highest level, but a good third of it is, and there are pages which Richard never afterwards surpassed.  A dozen passages are prophetic of the Wagner of Tristan and the Ring.