Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/197

 in them and forms, one might say, the leit-motif of his dramatic poetry. That idea is "redemption." In all his operas someone or something is redeemed, and the principal character is the redeemer, male or female. The fidelity of Senta redeems the Flying Dutchman from the curse which constrained him to wander eternally upon the seas unable to die. The pious death of Elizabeth redeems Tannhäuser from the servitude of debauchery. Siegfried redeems the old world from the reign of the Laws and from the tyranny of Gold. Lohengrin, Elsa, Parsifal are redeemers.

The persistence of this theme has struck several critics, who with infectious gravity have drawn the attention of their contemporaries to "the problem of redemption in the work of Richard Wagner." Thereupon they have embroidered all kinds of comments. But these comments seem to me quite wide of the mark, and I am not convinced of the need of this gravity. Why? Because I do not see the problem. There are in fact two alternatives. Either Wagner has only applied (as in Tannhäuser and up to a certain point in Parsifal) the Christian idea of the Redemption, and in that case the question is no more bound up with his work than with all other literary works written in the last nineteen hundred years in which this dogma is postulated: or on the other hand we have to deal, as in the Nibelungen Ring, with some romantic, socialistic, humanitarian, and necessarily confused transposition of the Christian idea; in that case there is no problem, only a tangle. Wagner as artist, as a being of exceptional sensibility, feels with peculiar keenness the social evils that belong to modern humanity. But the notion which he forms of them