as to be inseparable. In the Attic drama the more striking spectacular
events had, for technical reasons, to be kept out of sight. Ajax
piercing himself with his sword, Oedipus tearing out his own eyes,
are, like the thunderstorm in _Lear_, the outcome of terrific
internal motives bursting all confines with the force of an
irresistible torrent. Our interest is centred, not in the actions
themselves, but in the motives which produced them, in the characters.

Wagner, with his conscientious habit of accounting to himself for
everything that he did, found his artistic level more slowly than do
most poets. When the stylistic crudities of his earlier productions
had been overcome, he began the work of his maturer life with
_Rheingold_, the most spectacular drama ever written. _Walkuere_
and _Siegfried_ were continued in the same vein, and it is very
significant that he broke off the composition and laid the work aside
just at the monstrous dragon-fight. It is no strained conjecture that as
the difficulties of his gigantic subject accumulated he at last realized
the practical impossibility of what he had undertaken. To bring the
whole story of the fall of the ancient Germanic gods into a spectacular
drama on the scale of the _Ring_ was beyond even his mighty powers,
and in _Die Walkuere_ he is like a man trying to break away from the
path which he has laid down for himself, to get rid of the cumbersome
spectacular element and let the action develop itself naturally from
within. With all its unrivalled beauties the _Ring_ as a _drama_ is a
monstrosity. It turns upon motives which are not apparent from the
actions and have to be explained in dreary and most undramatic length.
Its very foundation is wrong; its central figure, the prime author of the
new and more blessed world which is to follow, is the offspring of an
incestuous union for which there is no occasion whatever. The myth
itself has sometimes been held responsible, and it has been asserted