Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/208

 touching poetry emanates from them. Thus Siegfried and Parsifal giving themselves up to recollection of their emotions in childhood—or Yseult enjoying with exquisite sensibility the beauty of the night, the murmur of the neighbouring stream, the sound of the distant horn. …

Apart from these five elements, we must pick out in Wagner's works two characteristics that largely contribute to give them their physiognomy.

First, their simplicity of construction. Their plot, disposition and arrangement are free from complication or overloading, and are easily surveyed. From every point one has a view of the whole. The author has shewn himself very clever in extracting from the rank growth of legend or old romances material for a clear and sharply-defined scenario. I am not speaking of that higher kind of simplicity that is proper to our classical theatre, where the action arises out of the natural movements of passion and of character, the hazard of events having only the smallest possible part in it, while "machines" have none at all, and where the theatrical effects themselves depend upon a moral cause. How could dramatic action in Wagner be thus developed, when his characters have, to say truth, no personality, or at most have only an elementary personality lacking fine shades, and bearing the same relation to the creations of Corneille and Racine that statuary of the dark ages bears to the figures of Donatello? The simplicity of Wagner's dramas is rather the simplicity of Perrault's tales, the simplicity of those happily conceived fairy stories, where little happens, but such events as there are are very strong in picturesqueness and colour, pleasant to the imagination, and connected with each other by a perfect logic—I mean of course fairyland logic.