The Wagnerian Romances Part 16

He draws her gently to a flowery bank, sinks kneeling before her and lays his head within her arm. And they breathe forth together, with an equal dreamy devoutness, their invocation to the Night.

"Oh, close around us, night of love! Give forgetfuless of life!

Gather us up in your arms, release us from the world!..." Quenched is the last torch, quenched all thought, all memory. In a sacred twilight full of wondrous divinations, the dread illusions of the world melt away, leaving free the spirit. And the sun in the breast having set, softly s.h.i.+ne forth the stars of joy. And when, heart upon heart, lip against lip, breathing one breath, the lovers'

eyes are blinded with joy, the world with its dazzling deceits fades from sight, the world which the Day had flashed before their eyes for their delusion, and they themselves are the world, and the world is life, is love, is joy, is a beautiful wish come true, from which there shall be no awakening....

Reaching completely the state they describe, of forgetfulness of the world and the Day, each the whole world to the other, they sink back side by side, cheek to cheek, among the flowers.

From the turret comes the lonely voice of Brangaene, warning the lovers to have a care, have a care, the night is nearly over! There is a leisurely moment. Isolde stirs: "Hark, beloved!" But Tristan, too deeply steeped in the languor of night and dreams, replies with a sigh: "Let me die!" Isolde raises herself a little: "Oh, envious sentinel!" Tristan remains reclining: "Never to waken!"--"But the Day must rouse Tristan?" she softly exhorts. "Let the Day yield unto death!" She considers this quietly: "Day and death then with a simultaneous stroke shall overtake our love?" He comes a little more awake to protest that death cannot destroy such love as theirs, that love is stronger than death, is eternally living, that all that could die in death would be the disturbing things which now prevent him from being always with her, whereas were they to die,--inseparable,--to all eternity one,--nevermore to awake,--nevermore to know fear,--nameless, close enfolded in love,--belonging singly to themselves,--they should live wholly for love!... She says the words after him, dreamily, charmed, allured by the vista they open before her. And when Brangaene's voice is heard again from her turret warning them to have a care, have a care, day is at hand, and Tristan bends over her smiling to ask: "Shall I heed?" she sighs, as he had done before: "Let me die!"--"Shall I awake?" he very gently teases. "Never to wake again!"--"Must the Day rouse Tristan?"--"Let the Day yield unto death!"--"We will brave then the threats of the Day?" With increasing earnestness she cries: "To be rid of his malice forever!"--"Day-break shall never more frighten us apart?"--"Eternal shall be our night!"

This is really but a lovers' device for clinging together a little longer; one does not feel that they have seriously determined to remain where they are till they shall have been discovered and sacrificed on the altar of a husband's honour. They plainly are in the state they have described: quenched is thought, is memory; they are intoxicated with the _Liebes-wonne_ they celebrate, and so while day is whitening overhead, feeling really, as far as they are capable of thought, besottedly secure,--Frau Minne will protect!--they caress, clasped in each other's arms, the thought of the eternal night lying beyond the death they would die for love, where far from the sun, far from the lamentation of Day-decreed partings, delivered from fear, delivered from all ill, they shall dream, in exquisite solitude and in unbounded s.p.a.ce, a super-adorable dream. He shall be Isolde, she Tristan,--but no, there shall be no more Tristan, no more Isolde, but undivided, inexpressible, they shall move to ever-new recognitions, new ardours, possessed in everlasting of a single consciousness--Ineffable joy of love!

Their voices soar with these flights of fancy.... Of a sudden, as if with a crash, the sweet harmonies turn to discord. A shriek is heard from Brangaene. Kurwenal rushes in with drawn sword, crying: "Save yourself, Tristan!"

Hard upon his heels come Mark, Melot, and a flock of courtiers in hunting-attire. They stop in consternation before the lovers, who have seen nothing, heard nothing, and stand quietly lost in each other's embrace. It is only when Brangaene seizes her that Isolde becomes aware of the spectators. With a natural impulse of womanly shame she averts her face from all those eyes and hides it against the flowery bank. Tristan with one arm holds his mantle wide outspread so that it screens her from sight, and for long moments continues so, motionless, gazing rigidly at the motionless men who return his gaze in silence. In the pale first glimmer of dawn, he might well think them unreal, creations of a bad dream.

The spell of silence is broken by the cry bursting from his lips: "The desolate Day--for the last time!" Melot steps forward and points at him: "You shall now tell me," he speaks to Mark, "whether I rightfully accused him? Whether I am to retain my head which I placed at stake? I have shown him to you in the very act. I have faithfully preserved your name and honour from stain."

The King is deeply shaken. No anger is in his unsteady voice, but utter sorrow. Something deeper has been reached than his pride in his honour, and that is not his love for Isolde, but his faith in Tristan. "Have you really?" he bitterly takes up Melot's last a.s.surance and his boast of fidelity. "Do you imagine it? Behold him there, the most loyal among the loyal! Look upon him, the friendliest of friends! The most generous act of his devotion he has used to stab my heart with deadliest perfidy. If Tristan then has betrayed me, am I to hope that my honour, which his treason has struck at, has been loyally defended by Melot?"

These are strange words for Tristan the knight to hear. Applied to himself, such words as perfidy, treason.... He brushes his arm wildly across his eyes: "Phantoms of the Day! Morning-dreams! empty and lying,--vanish, disperse!" The heart-broken King, with a gentleness more effectual in punis.h.i.+ng than the angriest objurgations, goes on to sear the false friend's conscience by holding up before him, simply, what he has done; comparing the image of him as he has in fact proved with the image of him which Mark had cherished. The reproach is intolerable in view of what Mark himself is: n.o.ble, gentle, great-hearted, and toward Tristan so full of affection!

"To me--this? This, Tristan, to me? Where now shall one look for truth, since Tristan has deceived me? Where look for honour and uprightness, since the pattern of all honour, Tristan, has lost them? Whither has virtue fled, since she is gone from Tristan, who had made her into his s.h.i.+eld and defence, yet has now betrayed me?"

Tristan's eyes, which had been fixed steadily upon Mark, slowly sink to the ground; a wondering sadness overspreads his countenance, heavier and heavier as the royal master proceeds with his arraignment.

Why Tristan's innumerable services, the greatness he had won for his King, if they were to be paid with the receiver's dishonour? Was it too small a reward that the King had made him his heir? So dearly he had loved him that, having lost his wife, and being childless, he had resolved for his sake not to wed again. He had been obdurate to the prayers of his people, to Tristan's own entreaties, until Tristan had threatened to leave the kingdom unless he were himself despatched to bring home a bride for the King. And his courage had won for Mark this woman, lovely to a wonder, whom who could know, who behold, who proudly call his own, without accounting himself blessed? This one, to whom he, Mark, would never have presumed to aspire, Tristan, braving enemies and danger, had brought home to him. And now that through such a possession his heart had become more vulnerable to pain than before, wherefore wound him in the very spot where it was tenderest?--destroy his faith in his friend, fill his frank heart with distrust, bring him to the degradation of d.o.g.g.i.ng his friend by night and listening covertly? "Wherefore to me this h.e.l.l which no heaven can deliver me from? Wherefore to me this indignity which no suffering can wash out? The dreadful, deep, undiscoverable, thrice-mysterious reason,--who will reveal it to the world?"

Tristan's eyes, as, thus questioned, he lifts them at last again to Mark's, express boundless compa.s.sion. "Oh! King, I cannot answer; and that which you ask you never can learn!" No, for it is as strange, as full of black mystery, to Tristan as to Mark. It is the very impossible which has happened, the never to be accounted for. Tristan, the soul of honour, has betrayed his friend, and with all those circ.u.mstances of aggravation which the friend has just counted off. Nothing can explain it. It is surely like a dream, a curious dream, the worst of the Day's lies. But in a dream also, as we remarked before, there is a right thing to do, for a man of heart.

Tristan is not long deciding upon his course. But before acting he turns to Isolde, where she sits with eyes of undiminished love raised toward the companion in shame and agony. In following the call of honour he has no mind to forsake her. "Whither Tristan now departs, will you, Isolde, follow him? The country Tristan means no beam of the sun illumines. It is the dim nocturnal land from which my mother sent me forth, when dying she gave to the light a dead man's child. The refuge to which, having borne me, she carried her love, the wonder-kingdom of the night from which of old I woke. That is what Tristan offers. Thither he goes before. If she will follow, kind and true, let now Isolde say!" With touching more-than-readiness Isolde, trustful and unashamed, declares: "When once before the friend bade her to a strange land, Isolde, kind and true, must follow the unkind one. But now you lead to your own dominions, to show me your heritage. How should I avoid the realm which lies about the whole world? Where Tristan's house and home, there let Isolde take her abode. That she may follow, kind and true, let him now show Isolde the way!" Again for a moment so lost in her that it is no else than as if they were alone in all the world, he slowly bends over her and kisses her forehead. A cry of indignation breaks from Melot. "Traitor! Ha, King, revenge!

Shall you endure this outrage?" But Tristan has suddenly cast off the inertia of dreams, bared his sword, and turned about. "Who will match his life against mine?" He gazes full into Melot's face.

"He was my friend. He loved me, he held me high. He, more than any, was concerned for my honour, my fame. He made proud my heart to arrogance. He headed the band of those who urged me on to augment my glory and renown by wedding you to the King. Your eye, Isolde, has dazzled him too. From envy he betrayed me to the King--whom I betrayed!" With a feint of attack he springs toward Melot. "Defend yourself, Melot!" Melot quickly thrusts with his sword. Tristan who has not parried, who has let the sword drop from his hand, sinks back wounded in Kurwenal's arms. Isolde casts herself upon his breast. The music makes a brief sorrowful comment--and the curtain falls.

III

The introduction to the third act not only presents the emotions belonging to what shall follow, heaving deep heart-groans and expending itself in pity over the stricken hero; it paints with strange clearness a scene: the sea stretching to the horizon, under leaden suns.h.i.+ne, empty of every sail--the sea which lies in fact before us when the curtain rises, fading off into the sky beyond low battlements which enclose on the outer-side a neglected castle-garden.

Tristan lies with closed eyes upon a couch, in the shadow of a tree. Kurwenal, sitting at his head, bends a careworn face to listen for his breathing. A shepherd's pipe is heard playing a little wavering tune, melancholy in its simplicity to heartbreak. The tune grieves itself out. A shepherd looks over the wall and, after a moment watching, calls to Kurwenal, asking if _he_ does not yet awake? Kurwenal sadly shakes his head. "Even if he should awake, it would only be to take his leave forever, unless the Physician, the only one who can help us, should first arrive...." Has he seen nothing, he inquires, no s.h.i.+p on the sea? "In that case you should hear a different tune," the shepherd answers, "as merry a one as I can play! But tell me the truth, old friend, what has happened to our master?"--"Let be that question!" Kurwenal heavily turns from it: "not for any asking can you learn! Keep diligent look-out; go, and when you see a s.h.i.+p pipe loud and merrily." The shepherd shades his eyes and looks off over the endless blue waste of the waters. "Barren and empty the sea!" He sets his pipe to his lips again and plays over, withdrawing, the hauntingly melancholy tune of before.

Without premonitory sign of returning consciousness, Tristan's lips move. His voice comes very faint: "The ancient tune.... what does it wake me?" He opens his hollow eyes. "Where am I?" Kurwenal starts up with a shout of joy: "Ha, that voice! His voice! Tristan, my master! my hero! my Tristan!" Tristan by a great effort brings his mind to consider these sounds, and with great effort speaks: "Who... calls me?"--"At last! At last!" Kurwenal's heart overflows.

"Life! Oh, life! Sweet life, given back to my Tristan!" Tristan knows him now. "Kurwenal... is it you? Where have I been?... Where am I?" Kurwenal on the spot a.s.sumes that ultra-joyous tone of persons about a sick-bed when their faces are turned toward the patient whom they are determined to infect with hope. "Where you are? In peace, in safety, in freedom! At Kareol, master! Do you not recognise the castle of your fathers.?"--"Of my fathers?" Tristan murmurs stupidly. "Just look about you!"--"What--" the sick man asks after a vague glance, "what was the sound I heard?"--"The shepherd's pipe you heard again, after so many days! On the hillside he keeps your flocks."--"My flocks?..."--"Master, that is what I said! This is your house, your court and castle. Your people, loyal to the beloved lord, saved for you, as well as they could, the patrimony which my hero once made over to them outright, when he forsook all to travel to a distant land."--"To what land?"--"Cornwall, to be sure!" And the anxious grey-bearded nurse, to rouse in the patient some gleam of joy in being, of pride in past prowess, breaks enthusiastically forth: "Oh, what good fortune Tristan, brave and bonny, met with there! What splendour of glory, what honors he won in the teeth of his enemies!"--"Am I in Cornwall?" Tristan asks discouragingly. "No, no, I have told you! At Kareol."--"How did I get here?" Kurwenal almost laughs, and in the pride of the unhoped-for hour cracks a joke. "How you got here? Not on horseback!

A little s.h.i.+p brought you, but to the s.h.i.+p I carried you on these shoulders of mine. They are broad, they bore you to the sh.o.r.e.

And now you are safe at home, on your own land, the right land, the native land, where amid familiar pastures and homely joys, under the rays of the old sun, from death and wounds you blessedly shall recover!" The rough fellow presses his cheek to his master's breast, like a woman. There is silence. Tristan stares vacantly ahead, vaguely pondering the servant's last words, of which the echo has lingered teasingly in his ear. "Do you believe so?" he says at last. "I know a different thing--but the manner of it I cannot tell you! This where I have awakened is not the place where I have been,--but where I have been--I cannot tell you! I did not see the sun, I saw no earthly scene, nor any people, but what I saw--I cannot tell you! I found myself--where from everlasting I was, whither to everlasting I go: in the boundless realm of the night which girds the world. One knowledge alone belongs to us there,--divine eternal perfection of oblivion! How"--he faintly wails, with a beginning of restlessness--"how have I lost the sense of it? Is it you again, unforgotten longing, driving me back to the light of the day? All that still survives in me, a pitiless torturing love, impels me forth to gaze upon the light which, deceivingly bright and golden, s.h.i.+nes, Isolde, upon you!" With the memory of Isolde becoming clear-defined again, as he emerges more completely from the deathlike stupor which had chained him, agitation seizes upon him, greater from moment to moment. Isolde still in the region of the suns.h.i.+ne! Still in the light of the day, Isolde! Unendurable longing to see her repossesses him. For that it is he has turned back from the portals of death, come back from among the shadows, to seek for her, to behold her, to find her, in whom alone it is granted to Tristan to lose himself and cease to be! His old hatred of the day is upon him, and one's sympathy feels, well enough, the distress to his fever of being thus drawn from the dark of unconsciousness and thrust into this glare of summer. By a natural confusion of ideas, as his agitation turns to delirium, this day torturing him, this day upon which he calls a malediction, becomes his old enemy, the Day which used to keep him from her,--and s.h.i.+fts from that into the signal-light which even at night used to warn him off. His delusion complete, he calls imploringly to Isolde, Sweetest, Loveliest, "When, oh, finally, when, will you quench the torch, that it may announce to me my happiness? The light... when will it go out?... When will the house be wrapped in rest?" He falls back exhausted. Kurwenal, whose joy of a little while before has dropped at the contemplation of this torment, takes heart again from his hope in the good news he has to impart. "The one whom of old I braved, from devotion to you, how am I brought to longing for her now! Rely upon my word, you shall see her, here, and this very day, if only she be still among the living!"

The meaning of his words has not penetrated. Tristan is far away among old scenes. "The torch has not yet gone out! Not yet is the house wrapped in darkness!... Isolde lives and keeps watch.... She called to me out of the night!"--"If then she lives," Kurwenal eagerly, seizes the cue, "let hope comfort you. Dullard as you must esteem Kurwenal, this time you shall not chide him. Ever since the day when Melot, the infamous, dealt you the wound, you lay like one dead. The evil wound, how to heal it? Then I, thick-witted fellow, reflected that the one who closed the wound made by Morold could find easy remedy to the injury from Melot's sword. Not long was I deciding upon the best physician! I have sent to Cornwall,--a trusty fellow. It cannot be but that he will bring Isolde over the sea here to you!"

He has understood, Tristan has understood, and started up ablaze, so beside himself with joy that after the great incredulous cry: "Isolde is coming! Isolde is near!" he struggles vainly for breath and words. Then his overflowing grat.i.tude finds an immediate, a pertinent thing to do, and Kurwenal has all in a moment the reward of his long pa.s.sionately-devoted service. The master in his madness of joy throws his arms around the servant to whom he owes the hope which in a moment has made him strong and well again. "My Kurwenal, you faithful friend, whose loyalty knows no wavering, how shall Tristan ever thank you? My s.h.i.+eld and defence in battle and warfare, in pleasure and pain equally prompt at command,--whom I have hated, you have hated, whom I have cherished, you have cherished; when in all truth I served the good Mark, how were you true to him as gold! When I must betray the n.o.ble King, how willingly did you deceive him! Not your own, but wholly mine, you suffer with me when I suffer, but what I suffer--that you cannot suffer!" As before the excitement of his pain, now the excitement of his joy is gradually turning to delirium. "This dreadful longing which consumes me, this languis.h.i.+ng fire which devours me, if I could describe it, if you could comprehend it, not here would you loiter but would haste to the watch-tower, with every sense astrain longingly would you reach out and spy toward the point where her sail shall appear, where, blown by the wind and urged on by the fire of love, Isolde comes steering to me!... There it comes!..." he points wildly, "There it comes, with brave speed!... See it wave, see it wave, the pennant at the mast!... The s.h.i.+p! The s.h.i.+p! It streaks along the reef! Do you not see it?... Kurwenal, do you not see it?" With watchful intensity he scans Kurwenal's face. Kurwenal hesitates, between the wish to humour him by going to the watch-tower, and the fear of leaving him, when the shepherd's pipe is heard again in the same plaintive tune, and Kurwenal has no heart to pretend. "No s.h.i.+p as yet on the sea!" he announces heavily. Tristan's excitement, as the notes spin out their thin music, whose message he seems to divine, gradually dies; the happy delusion fades; a deeper sadness than ever, of reaction, closes down upon him. The minor strains which now for a moment hold his flickering attention are full of a.s.sociations for him, all sorrowful. The sound of them came wafted to him upon the breath of evening when as a child he was told the manner of his father's death; it came again, plaintive and more deeply plaintive, in the morning grey, when he learned his mother's fate. And in their day, he wanderingly reflects, "when leaving an unborn son he died; when she in dying gave me birth, the ancient air, full of yearning and foreboding, no doubt pierced its sorrowful way to them too,--the ancient air, which has asked me before this, and asks me again in this hour, to what possible end, what destiny, I was born into the world?... To what destiny?... The ancient song tells me over again: To spend myself in longing and to die!...

"No! No!" he in a moment corrects himself, and his misery surges back upon him in all its violence, "That is not what it says! Longing!

Longing! To spend myself in longing, not in longing to find death!

This longing which cannot die to the distant physician calls out for the peace of death!" Confused images crowd upon him of the beginning of this affliction. The voyage to Ireland, the wound of which he was dying, her healing of his wound--only to open it again; her offering him the poisoned cup which when he drank, hoping to be cured of ills forever, a fiery charm was upon him, dooming him never to die, but exist eternally in torture! We remember how in the fragrant summer night and the balmy presence of Isolde he blessed the magic draught which opened the region of all enchantment; but in this hour, parted from her, it seems, forever, the draught which keeps him vainly aching for her presence, which will not let him die apart from her, or find a little rest, which makes him a spectacle of torture for the Day to feed its eyes upon, the draught seems to him verily no blessing. They are the bitter dregs he is drinking now of the cup of wonder. "The dreadful draught,"

he terms it, and reaching, with the enumeration of his sufferings, the point of cursing it, he has the flashed intuition of a truth; by a poet's spring reaches a conclusion worthy of a philosopher: that he, he himself is responsible for the effect upon him of the drink. "The dreadful draught," he cries, "which devoted me to torment, I myself, I myself, I brewed it! From my father's anguish and my mother's woe, from the tears of love of all my life, from laughing and weeping, joys and hurts, I furnished the poisoned ingredients of the cup!" He had, more plainly, if we seize the sense of his raving, fed and fostered an inherited emotional nature which made him the cup's easy victim. And recognising it, he adds to his curse upon the dreadful cup, with all the strength of his tortured heart, his curse upon him who brewed it,--and exhausted with his own delirious violence drops back in a swoon. Kurwenal, who has vainly striven to calm his frenzy, now sees him with horror relapsed into deathlike stillness; he calls him, laments over him and over this fatal love, the world's loveliest madness, which rewards so ill those who follow its lure. "Are you then dead?" he weeps, "Do you still live?...

Have you succ.u.mbed to the curse?" He listens almost hopelessly for his breathing, and starts up with a return of joy: "No! He lives! He rises! How softly his lips stir...."--"The s.h.i.+p!" Tristan murmurs, "Do you not see it yet?"--"The s.h.i.+p?... Certainly!" the poor nurse answers, with his determined cheerfulness, "It will arrive this very day.... It cannot delay much longer!"--"And upon it"--Tristan describes the vision which is calling back the light to his eyes--"upon it, Isolde. How she beckons, how graciously she drinks to our peace! Do you see her?... Do you not see her yet?... How sweetly, lovely and gentle, she comes wandering over the plains of the sea. On soft billows of joyous flowers she advances, luminous, toward the land. She smiles comfort to me and delicious rest, she brings me utmost relief.... Ah, Isolde, Isolde! How kind, how fair are you!... What, Kurwenal," he breaks off with that return to agitation toward which his fever by its law begins from the moment of returning consciousness to drive his poor brain, till, reaching a violence his strength cannot support, it plunges him back exhausted into unconsciousness, "What, Kurwenal, you do not see her? Away, to the watch-tower, dull-witted churl, that the sight may not escape you which is so plain to me! Do you not hear me?... To the tower! Quick, to the tower!... Are you there?... The s.h.i.+p! The s.h.i.+p! Isolde's s.h.i.+p! You must--must see it! The s.h.i.+p!...

Is it possible," he cries despairingly, "that you do not see it yet?"

He has been starting up from his bed, in his eagerness. Kurwenal has struggled with him to keep him down. While he hesitates as before between obedience and fear to leave his patient, the servant realises that the shepherd's pipe has changed its tune,--has changed it for a shrill, lively, tripping air. He listens with all his soul for a second, then with a shout of triumph dashes to the battlements and sends his eyes sweeping the sea. "Ha! The s.h.i.+p!...

I see it nearing from the north!"--"Did I not know it?" Tristan exults like a child. "Did I not say so? Did I not say she lived and knit me still to life? From the world which for me contains her only, how should Isolde have departed?" His joy is new life poured into him; his agitation this time produces no exhaustion, he has strength for the moment to squander. "Hahei! Hahei!" shouts Kurwenal from his post, "How boldly it steers, how the sails strain in the wind! How it chases, how it flies!"--"The pennant?... The pennant?" Tristan holds his breath for the answer. "The bright pennant of joy floats gaily from the topmast!"--"Cheer! The pennant of joy!... In the bright light of day, Isolde coming to me! To me, Isolde!... Do you see her self?"--"The s.h.i.+p has disappeared behind the reef..." Tristan's joy drops like a shot bird. One seems to feel his heart stop. "The reef?..." he asks trembling, "Is there danger in it?... That is where the surf rages, the s.h.i.+ps founder....

Who is at the helm?"--"The safest of sea-men."--"Could he betray me? Might he be a confederate of Melot's?"--"Trust him as you would myself!"--"But you, wretch, are a traitor too!... Do you see her again?"--"Not yet!"--"Lost!" wails Tristan--but at Kurwenal's shout in a moment more that the s.h.i.+p has cleared the rocks and is sailing up the safe channel into port, springs again to the peaks of joy and promises Kurwenal the bequest of all his worldly goods. And now Kurwenal from his outlook communicates that he sees Isolde,--she is waving,--the keel is in the harbour,--Isolde has sprung ash.o.r.e.

"Down!" Tristan orders wildly, "Down to the sh.o.r.e! a.s.sist her!

a.s.sist my lady!"--"I will bring her up here in my arms--trust to them! But you, Tristan," the poor nurse stops on his hurried way down to enjoin, "stay reliably on the bed!"

Tristan, left alone, falls to tossing and writhing with impatience.

His burning fever is confused to his sense with the heat of the sun, and this day of joy he calls the sunniest of all days. This tumult of the blood, this julibant urge to action, this immeasurable delight, this frenzy of joy, how, how to endure them prostrate upon the couch? Up, bravely up and away, where hearts are alive and throbbing! We can see his fever again working itself toward delirium. It reaches this time complete madness. With the proud cry: "Tristan, the hero, in jubilant strength has raised himself up from death!" he in fact lifts himself suddenly quite up. And then no doubt some reminder, at the violent motion, of his wound, suggests to his madness its next wild fancy, that a sort of glory is in a streaming wound, such as he bore while fighting Morold, that he will meet Isolde in the same manner, gloriously bleeding, not ign.o.bly constrained by a bandage. And prompted by some obscure instinct perhaps to relieve a torture of which his flaming brain will not permit him duly to take account, he tears the wrappings from his wound, shouting with gladness, and bidding his blood now flow merrily forth. He jumps from the couch, he goes a few feet in swaying progress toward the castle-gate: She who shall heal the wound forever draws near like a hero, draws near bringing health, let the world fade away before his victorious haste!... The victorious haste has taken him a staggering step or two, when Isolde's voice comes borne to him, calling before she appears. "Tristan, Tristan!

Beloved!" He stops short and listens, shocked out of the idea of what he was trying to do, losing his grasp on the present. "What?...

Do I hear the light?" he falters, taken back by the spell of that voice to the old time, when never the light called to him, or never the beloved called to him out of the light, but ever and only out of the night. The suggestion of the darkness now gathering over his eyes is that the torch is going out,--her signal to him to come. "To her!" therefore he cries, "To her!" and is making such effort to hurry as one makes in a dream, when behold, there she is!

There she comes flying to him through the castle-gate, breathless with her haste. He has strength enough still, in his transporting joy, to get as far as her arms; but, with the relief of being caught in them, all relaxes, he sinks to the earth. Frightened, she calls him. He turns his eyes upon her with the last of their long yearning, and softly breathes forth his life upon her name. He could not die before she came, but now at once it is grown sweet and easy.

Isolde cannot believe this which she seems to see. She falls on her knees beside him, beseeches, coaxes, reproaches him, and wrings her hands over his obdurate unresponse. "Just for one hour! Just for one hour, be awake to me still! Such long days of terror and yearning Isolde has endured for the sake of one hour to spend with you! Will Tristan defraud her, defraud Isolde of this single infinitely-short last earthly joy? The wound,--where? Let me heal it, that we may have the joyous night together!... Oh, do not die of the wound! Let the light of life go out for us clasped together!...

Too late! Too late!... Hard-hearted!... Do you punish me so with ruthless sentence? Do you shut your heart to my complaint?... Only once... only once more!... Look, he wakes! Beloved!..." Consciousness mercifully forsakes her. She sinks senseless upon his body.

Kurwenal has been standing apart with eyes bent in dumb and rigid despair upon his master. A confused tumult of arms is heard. The shepherd climbs hurriedly over the parapet with the announcement: "A second s.h.i.+p!" Kurwenal starts from his trance of grief and rushes to look off. He breaks into curses, recognising Mark and Melot among the men just landed. His resolution is instantly taken. "Arms and stones! Help me! To the gate!" With the shepherd's help he is fastening and barricading the castle-gate, when Isolde's skipper hurries in with the cry: "Mark is behind me with men-of-arms and folk. Vain to attempt defence, we are overpowered!" Kurwenal does not pause in his preparations: "While I live, no one shall look in here! Take your post and help!" Brangaene's voice is heard, calling her mistress. Kurwenal's excitement, his rage of determination to keep the sight of those helpless embraced bodies sacred from profane eyes, shuts his reason to every sign. Brangaene's cry to him not to close the gate he takes to signify that she is in league with the enemy. Melot's voice, just outside: "Back, madman! Bar not the way!" calls forth a fierce laugh: "Hurrah for the day which gives me the chance to have at you!" The gate resists but a moment; Melot is first to break in. Kurwenal with a savage cry cuts him down. Brangaene is heard calling to him that he labours under a mistake; Mark calling upon him to desist from this insanity. He sees, understands but one thing, to keep out these enemies of Tristan's, defend the master to the last against this intrusion. He orders one of his party to throw back Brangaene, who is coming by the way of the wall; he hurls himself at the invaders now crowding in. In self-defence they draw arms upon the slas.h.i.+ng madman. He extorts his death-wound as it were by force from one of them...

Painfully he drags himself along the earth, until he can touch his master's hand: "Tristan, dear lord! Chide not that the faithful one comes along too!" The last note about him as he expires is a fragment of the theme of determined cheerfulness, his pitiful sick-nurse encouragements to Tristan.

Brangaene has reached Isolde and is making frightened efforts to restore her. Mark stands regarding the still forms with profound emotion. Reproach is in his tone when he now speaks, as earlier, the gentle complainingness of one in all things blameless, who, doing all for the best, has met with unmerited suffering. "Dead!

All dead!" he mourns, "My hero! My Tristan! Most tenderly-beloved friend! To-day again must you betray your friend, to-day when he comes to give you proof of highest faith. Awake! Awake at the voice of my sorrow, O faithless, faithfullest friend!"

Brangaene's ministrations have brought back a little life to Isolde.

Brangaene holds her in her arms and labours to rea.s.sure her. "Hear me, sweetest lady, happy news let me report. Would you not trust Brangaene? For her blind fault she has made amends. When you disappeared, quickly she sought the King. No sooner had the secret of the potion been made known to him than in all haste he put to sea, to overtake you, to renounce you, to lead you himself to the friend!" Mark completes the revelation: "When I was brought to understand what before I could not grasp, how happy was I to find my friend free from blame! To wed you to the peerless hero with full sails I flew in your wake,--but how does ravaging misfortune overtake him who came bringing peace! I but made greater the harvest of death! Madness heaped the measure of disaster!"

Isolde has neither heard what they say, nor does she appear to recognise them. Half of her clearly has gone with Tristan, the rest is near taking wing, according to her word: "Where Tristan's house and home, there will Isolde abide." Her own swan-song takes us a little way with her into her _Liebes-tod_, her love-death.

Her eyes, fixed in contemplation of his face, have the vision of it returning to life. She sees him re-arise, powerful and loving, growing in glory till he a.s.sumes transcendent splendour. "Do you see it, friends,--do you not see it?" she asks, of what s.h.i.+nes so vividly before her that her face is transfigured as if with reflected light. And music is shed from this luminous ascending form.... "Am I alone to hear it?" she exclaims, it is so clear to her,--music wonderful and soft, which says everything, which gently reconciles one to all. It grows, it swells, it penetrates, uplifts.... And what is this enfolding her? Floods of soft air!

Billows of perfume! They softly surge and murmur around her....

She is in wonder whether to inhale, or to listen, or drink and be immersed and yield up the breath sweetly amid perfumes.... Ah, yes, in the billowing surge, in the great harmony, in the breath of the spheres, to sink under, to drown, to be lost... that, that will be the supreme ecstasy!... As the mysterious experiences she describes absorb her soul, her body sinks softly upon Tristan's.

Mark extends his hands in blessing over the dead.

And so the curtain fans on this wonderful and moving drama, and the thousands scatter in an exalted mood, impressed once more with the incomprehensible loveliness of love. The point of fascination of this work does not lie surely in any celebration of enviable joys, or sorrows nearly as enviable; it is not that it is spiritual, which would strengthen its appeal for some, neither that it is sensuous, which would make it alluring to others; it is that it breathes love,--love, indefinable but unmistakable, mysterious but absolute, understood of all, explainable by none, and of greater, or at least more universal, interest than any other emotion. Those equally fitted to enjoy all Wagner's operas show, it is observed, a predilection usually for Tristan and Isolde. If the pre-eminent beauty of the music accounts for this, the fact suggests none the less that Wagner could reach his utmost eloquence on the theme. It is as if the composer had wished for once a fair field to render all he felt and understood of love, and so had chosen a story in which it moves free from ordinary trammels and is permitted an intensity more prolonged, more fervid deeps, languors more abandoned, than love in the shackles of thought and will.

A thing which must not be forgotten. The love of Tristan and Isolde is not to be brought under the head of what is vulgarly termed a guilty love. We have seen how Mark learning the secret of the potion instantly and completely exonerated them and rejoiced that he could return to his faith in Tristan. We know little of love-potions, and had best forget such attempts at rational explanation of them as we may have read, accepting the old story as it is offered, with its cup of magic by which all struggle against the power of love became vain. The lovers must be regarded as essentially innocent.

The language of their hearts is always perfectly n.o.ble, their music is never sultry.

It seems to matter less, in the case of this opera than of Wagner's other operas, that one should be able to distinguish the motifs. When Fasolt falls, or the dragon, or Mime, it is distinctly interesting to know that the conspicuous phrase thrilling the air is the Curse of the Ring; but we are easily willing to let Glances and Sighs and the Effect of the Love-draught melt into one general fire of tenderness.

There is likewise less need in the case of this opera than, I think, any other of Wagner's, to be familiar beforehand with the argument.

Any one seeing the Rhine-gold unprepared would probably not understand anything whatever, as far as the story is concerned. The same is in some degree true of Walkuere and Goetterdaemmerung; even of Parsifal one need to know the inwardness of the plot. But Tristan and Isolde can be grasped through the eye by the dullest. A Woman is seen expressing great anger; there is a scene of coldness and incrimination between her and a Man. They drink from a golden cup and are from that moment lovers. They talk lengthily and most mellifluously of love in a garden at night. They are surprised by one with an evident right to be incensed. The lover is wounded. In a different scene he lies dying. His love comes to him. He expires in her arms and she follows him in death. Any one can understand, everyone sympathises.

In spite of which the study of the original text is full of great reward; not only because one will hear the music after all with a richer intellectual enjoyment, but even if one had no hope of hearing the music. The text produces upon one to a singular extent--or do we imagine it?--the effect of music. Its musical counterpart is contained somehow in the written poetry, and mists rise before our eyes when the small black type informs us that Isolde cries in the ears of deaf love: "_Isolde rutt!... Isolde kam!_" no otherwise than if the violins played upon our hearts.

LOHENGRIN

LOHENGRIN

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