Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/210

 they who told me about it. They laughed over it as seminarists might after allowing themselves some innocent though rather daring pleasantry on sacred subjects. The American wanted to know what was the evil, the "wound" from which King Amfortas suffers, and which betrays itself all through Parsifal by such violent physical manifestations of pain. "An ulcerated stomach," they told him. The reply satisfied him, for he could now see why Amfortas is unable to take part in a certain much desired meal, which is no other than the Lord's Supper. The joke is assuredly very irreverent, for Amfortas' suffering is no empty name, it is not connected with silly ideologies, like the famous despair of Wotan, longing to die because in his soul "Knowledge has ousted Love"; it is the suffering of sin, of moral taint, of remorse. Yet my Wagnerians ought to have realised that the mere possibility, were it only in the mind of this man from overseas, of believing their story, implied a sufficiently serious blemish in the work; namely an excess of materialism and of material detail in the manner in which this suffering, which postulates a higher degree of spirituality, is presented to our gaze. This does not prevent Amfortas from singing some very fine things in the second act of Parsifal: their accent is in places sublime.

The second point to pick out in Wagner's dramas is the abundance of repetitions. This feature might seem to be inconsistent with the last—for if the plots of Wagner's dramas are simple and clear, we may well wonder why the poet finds it necessary for one or another of his characters to be recurring at every opportunity to the recital of past events. Let us refer to the terrible scene between Fricka and Wotan