The thought of achieving a man’s salvation through a great and steadfast love, is the subject of the Flying Dutchman, and plays, as is well known, an important part with Wagner.  Strange to say he has for this very reason frequently been scoffed at by those who call themselves admirers of Goethe.  Dante-Goethe’s great problem of salvation is represented in Tannhaeuser with the utmost lucidity.  The essence of it is that love can positively intervene in the life of a man whose soul is turned towards it, but who is confused and beset by temptations.  His vacillating heart feels the love which is brooding over him and ultimately abandons itself to it, to be saved by its unswerving loyalty.  Maybe this is as much a miracle as “grace,” but it is also a psychical fact, because the love which yearns for the sinner awakens and increases not only his faith in its power to help, but also in his own strength; darkness and evil dismay him and he turns towards the light.  In Tannhaeuser this spiritual condition, which is of such primary importance in the last scene of Faust, is clearly expressed; his love for Elizabeth has been strong enough to kill desire kindled in his heart again and again by Venus; yet again he is on the point of succumbing to his senses.  The vision of Venus appears before his eyes, but at Wolfram’s exclamation, “Elizabeth!” he realises in a flash that Elizabeth has been praying for him day and night, and has given her life to save him.  Before this sudden illumination the power of Venus sinks into nothing; divine love falls into his darkness like a ray of light—­“Oh, sacred love’s eternal power!”—­it quickens his own love which is striving upwards, and with the words:  “Saint Elizabeth, pray for me!” he sinks to the ground.  His way, like Faust’s, although one-sidedly emotional, leads from chaos and sin to pure love and salvation, not through his own strength but by the help vouchsafed to him in the love of his glorified mistress.

By the side of the struggling, suffering Tannhaeuser, tossed hither and thither between God and the devil, between Elizabeth and Venus, stands Wolfram, the untempted woman-worshipper.  The two extremes clash upon each other in the contest of the minnesingers.  Tannhaeuser, at war with himself, exasperated by the calm, matter-of-fact way in which Wolfram sings the praise of spiritual love, rushes to the other extreme and bursts into rapturous praise of the goddess of love and the pleasure of the senses.  I need not lay stress on the fact that at that time of his life Wagner’s own heart was the arena in which the conflict was fought out; a work like Tannhaeuser is not made, it is conceived in the innermost soul of its creator.  Every one of Wagner’s great works bears the unmistakable stamp of sincerity and intensity, while with Goethe, on the other hand, it is not difficult to distinguish the genuine ones, that is to say, those which were written under the pressure of a compelling impulse, from those which owed their existence to the intellect rather than to the soul.