This is entirely different from his procedure with the _Ring_, or indeed any of his works, not even excepting the _Dutchman_. The _Dutchman_, he said, grew out of Senta's ballad; but I have already shown that this statement was a mere piece of self-deception: not the whole of the _Dutchman_, not one-tenth of it, grows out of Senta's ballad; Senta's ballad is not an oak-trunk with all the solos, duets, choruses and the rest growing out as branches with leaves grow from a trunk--it is a scaffold-pole upon which these things are tacked in an almost unparalleled fervour of imagination. That Wagner recognized this is plainly seen in the prose remarks he penned, in very cold blood, in his after years, when he looked at his first really fine work as though it had come from the hand of some other composer. Gluck had not one-thousandth part of Wagner's sheer genius, or, born into the nineteenth century, he might have done the thing as Wagner did it in _Tristan_; Mozart had not one-hundredth part of Wagner's intellectual power, or, born into the nineteenth century, he might have done it. Wagner alone did it. _Tristan_ is a feat accomplished once and for all; at this moment it is impossible to imagine such a feat ever being done again. Those of us who live on for another five hundred years may see something like it; but even then _Tristan_ will not be old-fashioned--not older-fashioned, at any rate, than _Antigone_ or _Hamlet_, and perhaps less old-fashioned than _Macbeth_ or _Lear_. The breath, the spirit, which is eternal life, is in it, and it can only perish when the human race perishes.