He had gone quietly to visit Liszt at Weimar, meaning to “lie low” till the storm had blown by.  He was apparently quite unconscious of having broken any laws.  Liszt was not so easy in his mind.  He made inquiries:  found that Wagner must bolt at once:  it is supposed he somehow “squared” the local police official to defer executing the warrant; he got a passport in a false name, and six days after his arrival Richard set out again on his travels.  What need be recorded about the journey to Zurich and the getting of Minna there, will best be described when I come to tell of his settling down in his new abode and the years he spent there.

CHAPTER VIII

‘TANNHAeUSER’

I

Wagner alternated between what we may call the worldly—­the sensual or animal, or love of outward show—­and the magical, mystical or religious.  After Die Feen, a story of magic, he went to Das Liebesverbot, a story of lust; then he went on to a drama of warring ambitions, with the outer brilliant show of armed men, gorgeous processions, conflagrations and what not in the way of spectacle.  After that we have the Dutchman, strange and remote and mysterious, with some pages of passionless ecstasy as its culminating point.  The reaction came, and he wrote Tannhaeuser, the opera we are now to examine.  It is largely based on sheer animal passion, though another reaction takes place before the end is reached.  That reaction proceeds further in Lohengrin, which is sheer mysticism. Tristan is pure human passion—­Tristan’s soul is the antithesis of Lohengrin’s.  The Ring is, from beginning to end, a gorgeous spectacle, a glorification of the grandeur and loveliness of the earth, the splendour and beauty and strength of human life.  Not even Wotan’s renunciation takes away a jot from its note of praise of humanity—­one might even say praise of the joy of living. Parsifal is a denial of the value and richness and worthiness of human life:  the world is pushed away; and the hero attains perfect peace by shutting himself up in a monastery with no women to disturb him.  John Willett recommended his son, when he went to London, to climb to the top of the Monument—­“there are no young women up there, sir”—­and Wagner evidently agreed with John Willett.  Parsifal is left to pass his days in walking, with the most preposterous steps ever seen on or off the stage, in idle processions from nowhere to nowhere without any object beyond walking, in making meals off invisible food, in impressing his fellow-monks with puerile chemical and electrical experiments, and perhaps, for a change, in going out to see trees and rocks taking a constitutional.  If to say this is to be flippant, well then, I am flippant.  The drama of Parsifal is the least intelligent, the most pretentious to intellectuality,-the most absurd and