Now I would ask the reader if this story is reasonable, if any “meaning” or moral can be read into it.  On the face of it Lohengrin’s conditions are preposterous.  Yet he is bound by the laws of the magic domain he comes from; he trusts Elsa and does battle on her behalf without any proof of her innocence; and she has no patience to wait for him to explain matters.  On the other hand, he hears her prayer in a magical way, and comes drawn in a magic boat; and she has a perfect right to assume that he would not have fought for her if he had not known by his arts that she was innocent.  It was just over this denouement, this forsaking of Elsa because of her inquisitiveness, that many of Wagner’s friends boggled; and nothing that he then or afterwards wrote in defence of it seems to me worth a moment’s serious consideration.  Mr. Ernest Newman suggests that perhaps Wagner was using the savage’s notion that in giving up your name you are placing yourself in some one’s power; but there is not a hint of that in the drama.  The thing to me is simply a fairy story.  We must accept Lohengrin and the conditions in which he lives, moves and has his being.  He is not his own master:  somewhere far away he has an all-powerful over-lord who, for no useful purpose to be comprehended by mortal, sent him to rescue Elsa under these conditions.  And I say that, far from having a meaning, a “purpose,” Lohengrin is pure romance, as innocent of moral ideas as any genuine mediaeval romance.  Wagner’s “explanations,” like Bishop Berkeley’s, take a great deal of explaining; and though Glasenapp, Wolzogen and the rest have covered many reams of paper in doing it, we are not an inch nearer to perceiving a grain of sense in the whole affair.  There is only one part of it which can be, in one sense, explained—­Wagner’s intense acrimony in his treatment of the female puppet Elsa.  Even in 1845 he had grown restive under the insults and stupidity of court officials and the Press, and doubtless he had threatened often enough to quit for ever the degraded German theatre.  He never could see that the German theatre had never been any better than it then was, but on the contrary, a great deal worse; he never realized that it was on the up-grade, and that he was to be instrumental in elevating it.  He was like a mechanic called in (by destiny) to repair a rickety machine, who because it won’t go when he “wills” it, kicks it to pieces.  The Reissigers and the rest were simply parts of the machine that were out of order:  time and patience were required to eliminate them and put in sound working parts.  Wagner could not understand this any more than he could understand why all German (or rather, Saxon) mankind should not at once be perfect, think alike and form the ideal State.  So, as he could not kick the Dresden Court Opera to pieces, he long meditated quitting it—­so much he explicitly affirmed afterwards—­and he must have worried Minna sadly.  She understood neither his qualities nor his defects, his ideals