Wagner always selected librettos that threw up a lot of dust for the erudite. His Tristan demands much delving, and with the Ring and its complementary literature we shall never finish. The plain fact in the case is this: Parsifal, despite all its wealth of legend, its misty, poetic allusiveness, its manufactured mysticism, is simple old-fashioned opera. And its verse _quâ_ verse is very bad. The Wagnerites reject this statement as does the devil holy water. Supposing you enter the Wagner theatre, your brain cells unencumbered with the memories of Perceval, Parzival, Parsifal, Fal-Parsi, and the rest of the philological mystification, what do you see?—and remember that the ideal drama should set forth without previous knowledge or explanation its dramatic content. You see an old-fashioned and very tedious opera—setting aside some of the music; and there is throughout an abuse of the _tremolo_ that sounds suspiciously Italian. You see a lot of women-hating men, deceiving themselves with spears, drugs, old goblets, all manners of juggling formulas, and yet being waited upon by a woman—a poor, miserable witch. You see a silly youth treated as if he had murdered a human being because he shot a swan. You see this same dead bird borne away on a litter of twigs, to noble, impressive music like a feathered Siegfried. Surely Wagner was without a sense of the humorous; or was he parodying his own Death of Siegfried, as Ibsen parodied Ibsen in A Wild Duck? You see a theatrically imposing temple, modelled after the Duomo of Siena, wherein a maniacal King raves over an impossible wound, and performs ceremonies recalling the Roman Catholic communion service. In Act II you are transported to the familiar land of Christmas pantomime. There a bad magician seeks to destroy the castle of the noble knights, and evokes a beautiful phantom to serve his purpose. There are spells, incantations, blue lights, screaming that makes the blood run cold, and the whole bagful of tricks that Weber, Marschner, and even Mozart delighted in. Follows fast the magic garden, and the sirens with rose petals on head. The foolish boy still eludes temptation. Even the beautiful witch cannot lure him. All is fairy play, pantomimic transformations, castles that crumble, thunder-riven gardens, and the whizzing of a malignant lance. Even that old Gounod ruse, the sign of the cross, is employed, and with overpowering effect. Now what possesses a generation which knows Darwin, has read Herbert Spencer, and can follow with delight the unerring logic of events that unroll themselves in the Ibsen plays—what possesses this generation of ours to sit enthralled before all this nebulosity?