Elements of the legend can be traced back to the ancient literatures of the Aryan peoples.  The courtship by proxy has a prototype in Norse mythology in Skirnir’s wooing of Gerd for Van Frey.  The incident of the sails belongs to Greek story—­the legend of AEgeus and Theseus; the magic potion may be found in ancient Persian romance; the interlocked rose-tree and vine over the grave of the lovers is an example of those floral auguries and testimonies which I have mentioned in connection with the legend of Tannhauser and the blossoming staff:  in token of their innocence flowers spring miraculously from the graves of persons wrongly done to death.

A legend which lives to be retold often is like a mirror which reflects not only the original picture, but also the social and moral surroundings of different relators.  So this ancient tale has been varied by the poets who have told it; and of these variants the most significant are those made by Wagner.  If the ethical scheme of the poet-composer is to be observed, the chief of these must be kept in mind.  In the poems of Gottfried, Arnold, and Swinburne the love potion is drunk accidentally and the passion which leads to the destruction of the lovers is a thing for which they are in nowise responsible.  Wagner puts antecedent and conscious guilt at the door of both of his heroic characters; they love each other before the dreadful drinking and do not pay the deference to the passion which in the highest conception it demands.  Tristan is carried away by love of power and glory before man and Isolde is at heart a murderer and suicide.  The potion is less the creator of an uncontrollable passion than it is an agency which makes the lovers forget honor, duty, and respect for the laws of society.  Tennyson omits all mention of the potion and permits us to imagine Tristram and Iseult as a couple of ordinary sinners.  Swinburne and Arnold follow the old story touching the hero’s life in Brittany with the second Iseult (she of the White Hand); but while Swinburne preserves her a “maiden wife,” Arnold gives her a family of children.  Wagner ennobles his hero by omitting the second Isolde, thus bringing the story into greater sympathy with modern ideas of love and exalting the passion of the lovers.

The purpose to write a Tristan drama was in Wagner’s mind three years before he began its execution.  While living in Zurich, in 1854, he had advanced as far as the second act of his “Siegfried” when, in a moment of discouragement, he wrote to Liszt:  “As I have never in my life enjoyed the true felicity of love, I shall erect to this most beautiful of my dreams” (i.e. the drama on which he was working) “a monument in which, from beginning to end, this love shall find fullest gratification.  I have sketched in my head a ‘Tristan und Isolde,’ the simplest of musical conceptions, but full-blooded; with the ‘black flag’ which waves at the end I shall then cover myself—­to die.”  Three years later he took up the project, but under