he tried to express dramatically a state of mind which is essentially undramatic.  Parsifal is supposed to transcend almost at one bound the will to live, to rise above all animal needs and desires; and though no human being can transcend the will to live, any more than he can jump away from his shadow—­for the phrase means, and can only mean, that the will to live transcends the will to live—­yet I am informed, and can well believe, that those who imagine they have accomplished the feat reach a state of perfect ecstasy.  Wagner knew this; he knew also that ecstasy, as what can only be called a static emotion, could not be expressed through the medium that serves to express only flowing currents of emotion; he himself had pointed out, that for the communication of ecstatic feeling, only polyphonic, non-climatic, rhythmless music of the Palestrina kind served; and yet, by one of the hugest mistakes ever made in art, he sought to express precisely that emotion in Parsifal’s declamatory phrases.  The thing cannot be done; it has not been done; all Parsifal’s bawling, even with the help of the words, avails nothing; and the curtain drops at the end of the second act, leaving one convinced that the drama has untimely ended, has got into a cul-de-sac.  And in a cul-de-sac it remains.  There is much glorious music in the last act; the “Good Friday music” is divine; the last scene is gorgeously led up to; and the music of it, considered only as music, is unsurpassable.  But heard at the end of a drama so gigantically planned as “Parsifal,” it is unsatisfying and disappointing.  It is to me as if the “Ring” had closed on the music of Neid-hoehle with the squabblings of Alberich and Mime.  The powers that make for evil and destruction have won; one knows that Parsifal is eternally damned; he has listened and succumbed, even as Wagner himself did, to the eastern sirens’ song of the ease and delight of a life of slothful renunciation, self-abnegation, and devotion to “duty.”  The music of the last scene sings that song in tones of infinite sweetness; but it cannot satisfy you; you turn from the enchanted hall, with its holy cup and spear and dove, its mystic voices in the heights, its heavy, depressing, incense-laden atmosphere; and you hasten into the night, where the winds blow fresh through the black trees, and the stars shine calmly in the deep sky, just as though no “Parsifal” had been written.

“Parsifal” does not imply that Wagner in his old age went back on all he had thought and felt before.  Born in a time when the secret of living had not been rediscovered, when folk still thought the victory, and not the battle, the main thing in life, he always sought a creed to put on as a coat-of-mail to protect him from the nasty knocks of fate.  Nowadays we do not care greatly for the victory, and we go out to fight with a light heart, commencing where Wagner and all the pessimists ended.  Wagner wanted the victory, and also, lest he should not gain