the hero of the other.  Wagner cast a loving glance at the older child of his brain when he quoted some of the “swan music” of “Lohengrin “in “Parsifal”; but he built an insurmountable wall between them when he forsook the sane and simple ideas which inspired him in writing “Lohengrin” for the complicated fabric of mediaeval Christianity and Buddhism which he strove to set forth in “Parsifal.”  In 1847 Wagner was willing to look at the hero of the quest of the Holy Grail whom we call Percival through the eyes of his later guide, Wolfram von Eschenbach.  To Wolfram Parzival was a married man; more than that—­a married lover, clinging with devotion to the memory of the wife from whose arms he had torn himself to undertake the quest, and losing himself in tender brooding for days when the sight of blood-spots on the snow suggested to his fancy the red and white of fair Konwiramur’s cheeks.  Thirty years later Wagner could only conceive of his Grail hero as a celibate and an ascetic.  Lohengrin glories in the fact that he is the son of him who wears the crown of the Grail; but Parsifal disowns his son.

This is one instance of the incoherency of the two Grail dramas.  There is another, and by this second departure from the old legends which furnished forth his subject, Wagner made “Lohengrin” and “Parsifal” forever irreconcilable.  The whole fabric of the older opera rests on the forbidden question:—­

Nie solist du mich befragen, noch Wissen’s Sorge tragen, woher ich kam der Fahrt, noch wie mein Nam’ und Art. {2}

So impressed was Wagner with the significance of this dramatic motive sixty years ago, that he gave it a musical setting which still stands as the finest of all his many illustrations of the principle of fundamental or typical phrases in dramatic music:—­

[Musical excerpt—­“Nie sollst du mich befragen”]

And no wonder.  No matter where he turned in his studies of the Grail legend, he was confronted by the fact that it was by asking a question that the seeker after the Grail was to release the ailing king, whom he found in the castle in which the talismans were preserved, from his sufferings.  In the Welsh tale of Peredur and the French romances the question went only to the meaning of the talismans; but this did not suffice Wolfram von Eschenbach, who in many ways raised the ethical standard of the Grail legend.  He changed the question so as to make it a sign of affectionate and compassionate interest on the part of the questioner; it was no longer, “What mean the bloody head and the bleeding lance?” but “What ails thee, uncle?”

Wagner was fond, a little overfond, indeed, of appealing to the public over the heads of the critics, of going to the jury rather than the judge, when asking for appreciation of his dramas; but nothing is plainer to the close student than that he was never wholly willing to credit the public with possession of that high imaginativeness to which his dramas more than those of any other composer make appeal.  His first conception of the finale of “Tannhauser,” for instance, was beautiful, poetical, and reasonable; for the sake of a spectacle he reconstructed it after the original production and plunged it into indefensible confusion and absurdity.