The third act is but a faint _replica_ of the first—without its vigor or novelty. Here the librettist is in sore straits. So he drags in Magdalen washing the feet of Parsifal which is offensively puerile. We again see the scenery acting, pantomimic scenery, and once more we are transported to the Hall of the Holy Grail, where the music of Allegri, Palestrina, and Vittoria is marvellously mimicked. Wagner, not being a strikingly original theme-maker, always borrowed,—borrowed even from Berlioz,—and the results of his borrowings are often greater than the originals. In a beatific blaze of glory—after Parsifal has healed the King—this sacred melodrama ends, and the spectator, drugged by the music, confused by the bells chanting the tortuous story, and his eyes intoxicated by feasts of color, staggers away believing that he has witnessed a great work of art. So he has,—the art of debauch in color, tone, and gesture. “The highest perfection of an art,” says Ehlert, “is not always and necessarily the greatest massing together of forces. It depends upon entirely different conditions. The flower of an art arises only when a positively artistic individuality creates that particular work for which it possesses the most marked and exclusive vocation.” Now Wagner heaps up one art, one idea, upon another. He little cared for the dramatic proprieties or the feelings of his audience when he composed Kundry, a ridiculous hag, an Astarte, a Herodias, a Meg Merrilies, and a Mary Magdalen in one. She is Azucena when she reveals to Parsifal his parentage—perhaps Wagner had heard of Il Trovatore!—and she plays Potiphar’s wife to this effeminate lad. She is of the opera operatic. And Klingsor—is he a creation, this hater of men and women?—why, he is nothing else but any giant or any enchanter in any fairy tale. Parsifal, when he is not a simulacrum of Christ in white baptismal robes, is a peculiarly foolish bore. Without Siegfried’s buoyancy, Wagner tried hard to dower him with Siegfried’s youth. But he is only an emasculate Siegfried. The corpse of Titurel is a horrible idea—yet it fits in this bogie-man’s play. Wagner, after all, was the creature of his century, an incurable Romantic, with all the love of the Romantics for knights, mediæval mysteries, maidens in distress,—in this case a callow boy,—magicians, and dead men who tell tales. The scenery, too, never comes up to one’s realization, and as usual Wagner oversteps the mark by surrounding his hero with too many women. The duo with Kundry is much more effective. The eye and the ear can grasp the situation—a stirringly dramatic one, despite the morbid imagination of the poet who could in his search for voluptuous depravity mingle a mother’s with a courtesan’s kiss. Here Paris itself is surpassed in the piquant and decadent. Wagner’s admiration for Baudelaire’s poetry shows itself in this incident. By the magic of his mother’s name, Kundry evokes a maudlin filial passion, and with his mother’s name