Ernest Newman, in his Study of Wagner, an epoch-making work in musical criticism, puts the question in its exact bearings. Wagner is a great _musical_-dramatist—his dramas alone could not stand on their legs, so otiose are they. His poetry, _quâ_ poetry, is second-rate; but as “words for music,” words that fly well in the wind of his inspiration, they are unique. This composer was harassed all his life long by the word “drama.” He believed that a perfect union of music and drama could be effected—vain dream—and wasted much valuable time and good white paper trying to prove his thesis. To the end his musical ruled his dramatic instincts; he was always the composer. Tristan and Isolde is the most signal instance of this. Its Greek-like severity of form in the book, its paucity of incident, were so many barriers removed for the poet-composer who, hampered by the awful weight of material in the Ring, had to write ineffectual music at times. Newman thinks that the last scene of Act II of Isolde and Tristan is an anti-climax. From a theatric viewpoint, yes; but not so if Wagner the composer be considered. If he had dropped the curtain on the infatuated pair—as he does in Act I of Die Walküre—a whole skein of the moving story would have been missing. The action is pulled up with a jerk by Melot’s entrance; yet what follows is worth a volume of plays with the conventional thrilling “curtain.” Think of the drama without Marke’s speech, without that compassion and love which Isolde and Tristan exhibit, oblivious to all about them! Besides, the scene needs a quieter, withal more tragic, note than the endings of Acts I and III. Suppose that the King, Tristan’s uncle, had been like that other monarch sung of by Heinrich Heine:— Oh, there’s a king, a grim old king, with beard both long and gray. The king is old. The queen is young. Her face is fresh as May. And there’s a lad, a laughing lad, so blithe and debonair, The queen herself has chosen him, her silken train to bear. How runs the tale, that good grave tale the peasant women tell? “So both of them were put to death, for loving over well.”