But by all these means Wagner imposed on his listener a constant strain of attention: _leit-motifs_ recurring, developing, and disintegrating, every note significant, a huge and eloquent orchestra, a voice singing phrases which are not parts of a complete melody then and there being evolved,--as in an opera by Verdi,--but which are related to something first heard perhaps half an hour before in a preceding act (or a week before in another drama): we have all this to strain every possibility of our appreciative faculty, and _at the same time_ he asks us to watch an actual combat between a hero and a dragon, or to observe another between two heroes half in the clouds with a God resplendent stretching out a holy spear to end the duel as he wills it, while a Valkyrie hovers above on her flying steed. Or he sets his drama under water, with Undines swimming about and a gnome clambering the slippery rocks to filch a jewel in exchange for his soul. Yes, even this, and more; for he asks us to witness the end of the world--the waters rising, the very heavens aflame--when our heart is so torn by the stupendous _inner_ tragedy of Brunhilde’s immolation that the end of the world seems utterly and completely irrevelant and impertinent.
After all, we are human. We cannot be men and women and, at the same time, children. We should like to crouch down in our seat in the opera house and forget everything save the noble, splendid, and beautiful music, seeing only just so much action as would accord with our state of inner exaltation. An opera must be objective or subjective; it cannot be both at the same time. The perfection of “Don Giovanni” is due to the exact equality between the amount and intensity of the action and of the musical expression--or, in other words, to the complete union of matter and manner, of form and style. The “Ring” cycle is objective and subjective; it is the extreme of stage mechanism (and more), and, at the same time, everything that is imaginatively profound and moving. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Wagner in those great music-dramas lost sight of the balance between means and ends, and the proportion between action and thought. His own theories, and the magnitude of his subject, led him to forget the natural limitations which are imposed upon a work of art by the very nature of those beings for whom it was created. The “Ring” dramas should be both _acted_ and _witnessed_ by gods and goddesses for whom time and space do not exist, and who are not limited by a precarious nervous system. No one can be insensitive to the great beauty of certain portions of these gigantic music-dramas,--every one recognizes Wagner’s genius as it shows itself, for example, in either of the great scenes between Siegfried and Brunhilde,--but the intricate and well-nigh impossible stage mechanism and the excursions into the written drama constitute serious defects. (For the scene between Wotan and Fricka in “Das Rheingold” and similar passages in the succeeding dramas are essentially scenes to be read rather than acted.)