What Tolstoy’s raillery is really aimed at is not Wagner’s work, but the way in which his work was represented.  The splendours of the setting do not hide the childishness of the ideas behind them:  the dragon Fafna, Fricka’s rams, the bear, the serpent, and all the Valhalla menagerie have always been ridiculous.  I will only add that the dragon’s failure to be terrifying was not Wagner’s fault, for he never attempted to depict a terrifying dragon.  He gave it quite clearly, and of his own choice, a comic character.  Both the text and the music make Fafner a sort of ogre, a simple creature, but, above all, a grotesque one.

Besides, I cannot help feeling that scenic reality takes away rather than adds to the effect of these great philosophical fairylands.  Malwida von Meysenbug told me that at the Bayreuth festival of 1876, while she was following one of the Ring scenes very attentively with her opera-glasses, two hands were laid over her eyes, and she heard Wagner’s voice say impatiently:  “Don’t look so much at what is going on.  Listen!” It was good counsel.  There are dilettanti who pretend that at a concert the best way to enjoy Beethoven’s last works—­where the sonority is defective—­is to stop the ears and read the score.  One might say with less of a paradox that the best way to follow a performance of Wagner’s operas is to listen with the eyes shut.  So perfect is the music, so powerful its hold on the imagination, that it leaves nothing to be desired; what it suggests to the mind is infinitely finer than what the eyes may see.  I have never shared the opinion that Wagner’s works may be best appreciated in the theatre.  His works are epic symphonies.  As a frame for them I should like temples; as scenery, the illimitable land of thought; as actors, our dreams.

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The first act of Siegfried is one of the most dramatic in the Tetralogy.  Nothing satisfied me more completely at Bayreuth, both as regards the actors and the dramatic effects.  Fantastic creatures like Alberich and Mimi, who seem to be out of their element in France, are rooted deep down in German imaginations.  The Bayreuth actors surpassed themselves in making them startlingly lifelike, with a trembling and grimacing realism.  Burgstaller, who was then making his debut in Siegfried, acted with an impetuous awkwardness which accorded well with the part.  I remember with what zest—­which seemed in no way affected—­he played the hero smith, labouring like a true workman, blowing the fire and making the blade glow, dipping it in the steaming water, and working it on the anvil; and then, in a burst of Homeric gaiety, singing that fine hymn at the end of the first act, which sounds like an air by Bach or Haendel.