London: the roaring waves, the whistling of the salt winds, the
loneliness of the bitter North Sea--these set his imagination aworking
on the old legend of the mariner doomed to sail the ocean until the Day
of Judgment. In this there was colour and atmosphere enough, but no
drama. The dramatic idea he took from Heine's sentimental version. In
this the Dutchman's lot is softened and mitigated by a possibility of
salvation. He can go ashore once in seven years, and if he can find a
maiden who will love him and be faithful unto death he will be released
from the necessity to wander. That is to say, his chances of redemption
depend upon constancy of some unknown young lady. All the Dutchman has
to do is to find her, make himself agreeable, and trust to luck. A more
childish notion never occurred to an intellectual man, nor a more
selfish one. The lady might have done nothing wrong; she was to be
punished for loving not wisely but too well; and there is nothing in the
old legend or in the Wagner-Heine form of it to show the Dutchman to
have been a deserving person. Yet, on the other hand, Wagner, with still
vivid memories of the agonies he had endured during his voyage, may have
thought the punishment excessive for a momentary loss of temper in
trying circumstances and a passing swear-word; and the girl was to find
the fullest joy her nature was capable of in sacrificing herself. But
there is no fundamental verity inherent in the idea: the Dutchman's
salvation might as well depend on a throw of dice; and all this early
nineteenth-century romantic sentimentalism, with one of its main
notions--that a woman cannot be better occupied than in "saving" a
man--this, grafted on to the stern, relentless old story, makes a
compound that is always unreal and sometimes ludicrous. But it gave
Wagner three opportunities: of painting the stormy sea, of depicting the
hopeless misery of the Dutchman Vanderdecken, and of expressing in music
woman's most passionate and unselfish love.