the red sunset creating a landscape that a Dutch master would delight in. Its natural scenery is, like that of a domestic beauty,

"Not too bright or good

For human nature's daily food;"

but it grows into the soul, and makes it, with a hundred other associations, a difficult place to leave.

I remarked in my former letter how much is done at Weimar by the reigning prince and his estimable lady for the education of the people; and I consider his liberal patronage of the drama and all branches of the fine arts to belong to this department. I cannot help thinking that we in England too much overlook the drama in this respect. We found mechanics' institutes, industrial schools, adult and ragged schools, inaugurate monster meetings of social science, build temples for sensation preachers; but we forget that the labouring classes have a very hard life of it, and that, if we wish to wean them from the gin-palace, we must provide instruction for them in some manner at once innocent, pleasant, and palatable. Now there is no more reason why the drama should be vicious in itself than that music, books, or pictures should be vicious in themselves. What it represents is only an accident, its essence is representation. But it is representation of a more vivid kind than any other, because it addresses itself to more of the senses; and therefore it is more capable than any other kind of representation of unbending the mind, and removing it from the actual world, where it does and suffers only too much, into an ideal world, which engrosses it for the time with imaginary interests. I mentioned to you that I was present at a representation of the Divine Passion in Unteramnergau.* Profane as such an exhibition must ever seem to educated eyes and minds brought up in Protestant notions,

it seemed to produce no such effect on the mass of spectators. A picture or series of pictures would have failed to realise the Scripture story half so vividly; and the rustics, had they heard it read in church, would probably have dozed over it; moreover, for the most of them, reading it themselves was probably out of the question. But it is needless to discuss the debatable propriety of representing such very solemn scenes; and, putting the mysteries of religion aside, there is no lesson in morals, or incident of general human interest, which may not be appropriately illustrated by the drama. To make the theatre available as a public schoolmaster, it must cease to be associated with dissipation. Why should it keep late hours? Why should it not be well ventilated, or occasionally be in the open air? The demon of all human assemblies is carbonic acid gas. All audiences, from a prayer-meeting down to a penny gaff, are doomed to be poisoned by their own breaths, at least in these northern countries, for the Athenians and Romans had their open-air theatres, and the Spaniards have their open-air bullfights, and nowhere is the atmosphere so agreeable as in St Peter's at Rome. What a powerful instrument nationally-supported theatres in England might be made for teaching the history of our country, and indirectly infusing patriotism. into all classes! As it is, many persons get their only notions of history from the plays of Shakespeare and the historical novels of Scott. Every one of these novels might be made available for scenic exhibition, quite as well as the Cockney-life novels of Dickens. Vulgarity cannot be improved by representations of kindred vulgarity, but there is no doubt it might be insensibly modified by bringing before it living delineations of chivalrous sentiments and times. Now, at Weimar, under the Grand-Ducal patronage, this is precisely what the drama is about.

lungen Lied. The discord of two women is as a little spark of evil passion, which ere long enlarges itself into a crime: foul murder is done; and now the sin rolls on like a devouring fire, till the guilty and the innocent are alike encircled with it, and a whole land is ashes, and a whole race is swept away." I refer you to the Miscellanies for the excellent analysis of the poem which Mr Carlyle has written, with singularly little of his usual mannerism. Some have supposed that the Iliad and the Nibelungen are developed from a common origin of unknown antiquity, the original stock of legend having taken in the one case the shape of the tale of Troy divine; in the other, the tale of Siegfried's death and Chriemhild's vengeance. The Nibelungen in its present shape contains names of historical personages-for instance, Etzel or Attila; but its unity has never been insisted upon, as that of the Iliad has, on what many great authorities think perfectly just grounds. In the comparison of the two poems, one great distinction must be borne in mind, which is, that tradition assigns no author

Re

to the Nibelungen, while belief in the man Homer was always a leading element of the orthodox creed of Greece. There is a striking resemblance between Achilles and Siegfried, especially in the point of their invulnerability-which, by the way, as an attribute of Achilles, is not mentioned in the Iliad. Achilles became invulnerable by his mother Thetis dipping him in the Styx, save in the heel, by which she held him. Siegfried became invulnerable by bathing in the blood of the dragon or big worm which he had slain (it gives its name to the city of Worms), the only place left open to injury being a spot on his back where a lime-leaf had rested during the operation. Of course he finds his death by being smitten in that spot, as Achilles found his death by the arrow of Paris hitting his exposed heel (during a truce, for he would never have seen his heel in battle). When, however, he is smitten through the embroidered cross, the additions of Christian times are at once betrayed. mark the poetical pathos concerning the manner of Siegfried's death. He was struck by his wife's kinsman, in the moment of drinking at a well in security-struck through the cross, and through the cross that Von Tronje Hagene had induced his own loving wife to embroider, on the pretence that he might know the spot that he had especially to shield in battle. No wonder that such treachery turns a woman into a tigress. The disconsolate widow will only give her hand to her new suitor (Etzel) on condition of his making himself the minister of her revenge. The revenge culminates in the blood-bath in the banquet-hall, and the slaughter of the whole of the original party, Chriemhild having the satisfaction, before she was slain herself, of killing the fettered Hagene with the Balmung or enchanted sword (like Arthur's Excalibur) which he had taken from Siegfried. The bloodbath at the finale reminds us more of the Odyssey than the Iliad; but

we can, of course, build no arguments for common origin from coincidences which may be accidental. Taking place as it did in a banquethall, it was probably suggested by the amusements of the shades of good warriors in Valhalla, who cut themselves to pieces for exercise all the morning, but are miraculously made whole again before the dressing-bell sounds, that they may sit down with proper decency at Odin's table. However, you know enough about the widow of the Nibelungen; I only wish to give you a notion of the kind of appearance it made on the stage at Weimar. It was presented in two parts-"Siegfried's death" and "Chriemhild's revenge." Do not, I pray you, go to sleep over my details, as we descendants of the Jutes and Angles and Danes have quite as much an interest in this story as the modern High Dutchmen. Siegfried belongs to us as much as to them, and not less so, I maintain, than their national hero, Hermann the Cheruscan. The dresses were devised from the pictures of that fabulous time which are current in Germany and the traditions of the Franks. The warriors have helmets ornamented with wings and heads of birds and dragons-rather apt, we should think, to drop off in a hand-to-hand skirmish. The spirit of that barbarous time is admirably seized by the actors, especially by Herr Lehfeldt, who, as Von Tronje Hagene, is the prominent person of the piece. Herr Wünzer is also very good in Siegfried. Brunhild is given with some talent and originality by the charming comedian Frau Hettstedt; and Chriemhild is represented in the first part gracefully by Fraulein Daun; in the second part terribly by Frau Hebbel, the wife of the poet. Lehfeldt is an admirable incarnation of the loyal, defiant, and desperate Hagene. With what stoical indifference he hears his death prophesied by the rivernymphs! with what reckless gusto he throws the chaplain overboard, accomplishing unwittingly the pro

phecy that he should be the only man in the party who would return alive! Beautiful in dramatic expression above all the other scenes is that one where the Burgundians are gone to sleep in the deadly banquet-hall; but Hagene and Volker the minstrel, his sworn friend (Herr Klotz), alone keep watch. The treacherous Huns, at the bidding of Chriemhild, come onward towards the two sitting warriors, Volker contriving to play a sort of lullaby lay of such enchanting sweetness that their motions are fettered, and they drop their arms on the floor (the music of this lay is due to Herr Musik-director Lassen, and deserves unqualified praise.) But they steal on again, till one sway from Balmung in the hand of Hagene puts them all to flight. Second only to this scene in stage-effect is that in Siegfried's death, in which the dead body of the hero is exposed in the church, and bleeds at the touch of Hagene. On the whole, the drama is an excellent picture of the barbarous world in which the common ancestors of ourselves and the Germans lived. In extreme antiquity they were probably more civilised, as the older people of Homer undoubtedly are. In Homer we find no viragos like Brunhild, unless we except the goddess Athene, who somewhat resembles her; but all the women of Homer, virtuous or frail, are emphatically ladies, and even in their sins and shortcomings they never forget decorum. hild's virginal ferocity, and Chriemhild's bloodthirsty revenge, tell of the real age of darkness which intervened between the heroic and chivalric ages.

Brun

Since I last wrote to you on the subject of Weimar, Wagner's Taunhauser, which is such a favourite there, has made a fiasco in Paris. Its supporters say that an unfair cabal was got up against it, and that it was partly hissed by persons who were interested in bets as to whether it would succeed or not, and this in spite of the Imperial favour being shown it

in a marked manner. This was probably one of the reasons of its failure; the French love to assert the remnant of their liberty and the last palladium of their independence in the sanctum of Taste. Besides this, more than any other nation, they are bigoted against foreign innovations. It has turned out, anyhow, just as I prophesied in that letter. From what I said then, you must not think that I am against Wagner; I only object to the almost exclusive devotion which is paid him by his countrymen. I have been corrected, however, in my supposition that the late Capel Meister Melard was a Wagnerian; he was rather of the opposite school to his successor Liszt, who certainly is so. Wagner's stormy marches are magnificent when they are played by a military band in the open air; in the theatre the sounds drown one another in echo; and this applies more to Taunhauser than to Lohengrin and the Flying Dutchman. Lohengrin is a beautiful drama. A lady is slanderously accused of making away with her younger brother; she is solemnly tried, and the interest of the piece turns on her being able to find a champion before she is condemned, the German Kaiser administering justice under an oak. In the nick of time a silver-harnessed champion appears on the adjoining lake in a boat drawn by a swan, and of course discomfits her accusing adversary. She is to marry him, but she has listened to bad advice, and the spell is broken by her wanting to know all about him (a very pardonable piece of curiosity in an affianced bride), and her silver knight is come for by the punctual swan to take him back to his old employment, the custody of the Holy Grail. The young brother of course turns up in the mean time. The music of the piece is sweet, and the pageants are grand. The Flying Dutchman is yet grander; and the scenery is the coast of Norway, a name which no true son of the sea-kings can ever

hear without his heart beating. The Flying Dutchman is to wander eternally on the seas until he can find a maid to marry him, and give her pure life for his guilty soul. That he should wish such a thing appears unchivalrously selfish, but then he suffers the torments of the Lost, and it is but a life, not a soul, that he asks for. He lands, in a storm, in a Norwegian harbour, and his boxes, heavy with gold, induce a Norwegian, who confesses he has a fair daughter, to part with her. But his way has been paved by the lady herself having heard the story, and having fallen in love with his picture. Her demon-lover relents at the last moment, and nobly prefers endless doom to such a sacrifice in a girl that he has since learned to love. He resigns her into the hands of another, a heart-broken fleshly suitor. He sails off in a gale of wind, but she watches her opportunity, makes a rush after him, and disappears in the sea over a rock. The spell is broken, his ship sinks, and the scene changes to a cloudy apotheosis, where the rescued Dutchman and his martyred bride stand hand in hand in glory. That this pair is represented by Herr von Milde and his wife, who are both of them personally dear to all Weimar, does not detract from the local interest of the piece. The music of this piece, which many judges account the finest of all Wagner's compositions, is remarkable for the weirdness and wildness of its sea-storms. Wagner's world is certainly an entirely different one from that of Verdi and Rossini; but there is no reason why admiration for the one school should exclude that for the other. In these matters change has a charm; and I should love to hear the Flying Dutchman and the Trovatore on two consecutive nights. How the departure of Liszt from Weimar will influence the

standing of the Wagnerian school it is difficult to prognosticate. It is feared that imperial favour has caused that maestro to

take up his permanent residence at Paris; it is hoped, on the other hand, that in due time he will return again, quitting a place where he has many adversaries, for one where, in a musical sense, he is monarch of all he surveys. Weimar has also lost the charming violinist Herr Singer, who has been seduced away to the Stuttgardt theatre. Not only has the stage of Weimar endeavoured to invest itself with a thoroughly national character, but it extends its patronage to local talent. Professor Biedermann has had the good fortune to see his tragedy of the Emperor Henry IV. produced on the Weimar boards. The moral of this play is the essential inconsistency with all good government, and the accidental moral iniquity, of the assumption of temporal power by the Pope. In this case the power of the Christian Church is exerted in inciting a son to rise in arms against the father that begat him. In that fine Kaisersaal at Frankfort where stand all the emperors of Germany, each like a saint in his niche, and each with his moral motto completing the number so exactly that there is not room for one more, there are two together, father and son. The father stands upright and unabashed, but the son half averts his face from the spectator and turns his back to the father, and there is a shadow of guilt on his otherwise fine countenance. These are Henry IV. and V. of that name. Their unnatural conflict, inspired by the greatest of popes and villains, Hildebrand, forms the main interest of Professor Biedermann's tragedy, which, although he allows himself some poetical licence as to the events, and prevents a tragic reconciliation between the dying father and penitent son, yet keeps as close to actual history as the exigencies of the drama will allow him. Henry IV. is an excellently chosen character for the hero of a tragedy; truthful, honourable, just, and trusting, but wrathful, impul

VOL. XC.-NO. DLIII.

sive, and self-indulgent, bringing to mind the Agamemnon of Eschylus, and Edipus of Sophocles. His misfortunes are chiefly excused to poetical justice by his treatment of his wife Bertha, whom he has forced to take refuge in a convent on the Nahe, having deserted her for an Italian leman. Through the unnatural rebellion of the sons which Bertha bore him, his heart is wellnigh broken, and she is made the chief engine of his enemies' accusations. The drama opens with an act of his beneficence. Henry is the darling of the people, and deplores the miseries of the land, vexed by the rapacity and divisions of temporal and spiritual nobles. He proclaims a solemn peace and amnesty as a remedy. This peace is broken by a recalcitrant Count Sieghard, who, provoking a popular tumult at Mainz, is murdered by the burghers almost in the presence of the emperor, who might have prevented the murder, but that he recognises the justice of his fate. At the same time with the proclamation of the peace, Henry had pronounced the deposition of his son and heir, Conrad, in favour of his second son Henry, afterwards the Fifth, on the ground of the treason of the first, who had made himself an instrument of the Papal See. This second son was to bear the title of king during the lifetime of the emperor. The nobles rise to avenge Sieghard's death. Henry, the king, is tampered with by the Pope's legate, and induced to desert the party of his father, though not without difficulty, the death of his brother Conrad in Italy being reported to him just in time to fix his wavering resolution. The arguments used by the clerical Mephistopheles are much on a par with those which poor Pio Nono uses to discomfit the Sardinians. The king pleads the duty of a son.

"How could I so disown my own blood that I should betray the emperor, my lord and father, and pass over to his enemies?"

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