Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/188

 preserve to any extent worth mentioning the liberty of feeling and thinking like natural beings. Between these two obligations, of which the second is no less mechanical than the first, the margin left for the manifestation of life and human truth is likely to be very much reduced.

It is not reduced to nothing. There are in the Tetralogy a few expressions of real humanity, some natural touches drawn from life. Fricka really does resemble a jealous wife, domineering and of narrow outlook, and her domestic scenes with Wotan are sometimes good comedy—not divine, but middle-class. There is a spirit of pleasantry in the dialogues of Mime and Siegfried, which though very Germanic does does [sic] not lack wit or relief; they have the moralist's touch. Siegried is agreeable, if one puts aside the anarchic signification of his personality; but the author too has been careful not to let that be explained to him. This young Hercules charms not only by the splendour of his physical youth, but also by a certain child-like quality of heart. Brünnhilde is tiresome, with her final prophesy, to which nothing led up in her career as wild amazon, artless lover of even as betrayed wife, for she was only that in a roundabout way, and the experience cannot have taught her much about humanity. Apart from this point, why should this Sleeping Beauty be any more unwelcome in the Tetralogy than in a fairy story by Perrault? Take them all round, all these figures are pretty elementary. To us these persons give the effect of elements quite as much as persons. There remains, it is true, Wotan, the complexity of whose thoughts and sentiments might make a real moral