nor the short-sighted impatience which rendered it impossible for him ever to attain them:  she saw only too clearly that at any moment he might kick over the traces, and that the starvation and misery of the Paris episode would have to be faced again.  We can readily picture him coming in raging after a conflict at the theatre with official imbecility, and Minna, instead of sympathizing, counselling him to be wise and temporize.  His exasperation grew, and only the events of 1849 prevented a rupture—­so much seems certain—­and he vented his spleen by making Elsa a stupid, shallow, faithless creature who feels no gratitude towards the hero who saved her from being burnt, but by maddening female pertinacity, wrong-headedness and wilfulness destroys her own and his happiness.  As the reader will perceive later, I by no means defend Wagner in this domestic squabbling, but something must be said for him; I don’t say, either, that he created Elsa to express his views about his wife, but I do say that his feelings account for the excess of his rancour against his own creation.  So pitiable a specimen of feminine inquisitiveness, bad temper and ungenerosity has never been put on the stage as the heroine of a grand opera.  Possibly Lohengrin saw this; and, neglecting his recent marriage-vow, he went back to Montsalvat, where, as we know, there were no women.  All this would have to be said in the course of this book; and I say it now because it helps us to understand a defect in the art of a beautiful opera.

A beautiful opera Lohengrin certainly is—­the most beautiful of all Wagner’s operas.  The story of it is a fairy story, as I have said, and superficially a very ordinary sort of fairy story.  We have the distressed maiden in the hands of persecutors, the knightly hero who rescues her, the maiden’s faithlessness, and the contemptuous departure of the hero.  But Wagner has clothed the whole of this work-a-day mediaeval legend in a wondrous atmosphere of mystical beauty, and that beauty springs from the thought of the river.

II

It is necessary to discuss as briefly as may be the leitmotiv, because with Lohengrin Wagner first began to use it with serious purpose.  In the Dutchman two themes may be rightly described as leitmotivs; in Tannhaeuser not one theme may be rightly so described.  While in Lohengrin Wagner showed himself as much as ever the inspired musician, he made for the first time use of the leitmotiv for dramatic as well as musical ends.  There we find three leitmotivs:  one intended by the power of association of ideas to evoke on the instant the vision of Montsalvat and the Grail; a second to recall the thought and emotion of Lohengrin the man; the third to remind us of the conditions which Lohengrin imposes on Elsa before he is willing to fight for her.  The first (a, p. 191) is perhaps the most lovely thing Wagner invented; the third (d)—­not second—­is a thing any one might have concocted, though not a thing that any one I ever heard of could use as Wagner uses it; the second (c) is by way of being a study for the best of the Parsifal themes.  It must be remarked, in passing, that the study is much more finely used than when his powers, largely exhausted by a tedious struggle with the world, had got into a state of decrepitude.