Artistically Rienzi was a sin.  Remembering that Die Feen had been written years before, it is useless to contend that Wagner did not know he was aiming at something lower than the best he could produce.  He never again fell away from his highest and truest self, though he was sorely tempted.

II

The simple, terrible old legend of the Flying Dutchman had in it no elements of drama.  The irascible mariner of ancient times, vainly struggling to round Cape Horn (or some other cape) against a head wind, swore in his wrath that he would succeed if he tried until the Day of Judgment; a lightning flash in the sky proclaimed that he was taken at his word; thenceforward his ship sailed the seas without stopping; it never could reach any port, and release would only come at the last day.  The crew died and their ghosts worked the vessel; the vessel rotted and the ghostly crew continued to work a phantom ship; only Vanderdecken, the skipper, seems to have lived on in the flesh.  Other ships passed through the phantom as though it was a cloud; and the living crews shuddered, and cursed the dead.  Before this thing of terror and mystery could form a part of any drama, adventures had to be invented and grafted on to it.  As with the legend of the Wandering Jew, this was done in a hundred, perhaps a thousand, instances; and never had a good piece of work been the result.  Whether Heine did or did not himself devise the form in which the legend is used in his reminiscences of Herr von Schnabalewopski it is not worth troubling to find out.  It is enough that in Heine, Wagner found the story more or less as he employed it.  It is an odd compound—­odd at this time of day at least—­of the hard old superstition with soft German sentimentality of the Romantic period.  A good Angel, thinking the Dutchman’s fate too hard, interceded for him; and though his sentence could not be wholly remitted, a bargain was struck.  Once in seven years Vanderdecken could land and spend a certain time ashore.  If during this interval of peace he could find a maiden who would love him faithfully to death, he would be released:  his wanderings would be o’er, and death would swallow him up.  How the maiden’s fidelity could be tested does not appear.

Wagner would have it that with the Dutchman he ceased to be a mere stringer of opera verses and became the full poet.  The work does not support that view; nor is the construction of the plot one whit better than a hundred others put together by hacks before he was born.  Each act is crammed with conventional tricks out of the hack’s common stock; in each scene, from the very first, characters come on or go off, not because it is inherent in the action that they should do so, but because without such helps the librettist, or “poet,” could not have got along.  The curtain rises on a rocky Norwegian fiord where a sailing-vessel has found shelter