And, in his treatment of scenery also, we have to observe the admirable dexterity of his compromises. The supernatural is accepted frankly with almost the childish popular belief in a dragon rolling a loathly bulk painfully, and breathing smoke. But note that the dragon, when it is thrown back into the pit, falls without sound; note that the combats are without the ghastly and foolish modern tricks of blood and disfigurement; note how the crowds pose as in a good picture, with slow gestures, and without intrusive individual pantomime. As I have said in speaking of "Parsifal," there is one rhythm throughout; music, action, speech, all obey it. When Brünnhilde awakens after her long sleep, the music is an immense thanksgiving for light, and all her being finds expression in a great embracing movement towards the delight of day. Siegfried stands silent for I know not what space of time; and it is in silence always, with a wave-like or flame-like music surging about them, crying out of the depths for them, that all the lovers in Wagner love at first sight. Tristan, when he has drunk the potion; Siegmund, when Sieglinde gives him to drink; Siegfried, when Brünnhilde awakens to the world and to him: it is always in the silence of rapture that love is given and returned. And the gesture, subdued into a gravity almost sorrowful (as if love and the thought of death came always together, the thought of the only ending of a mortal eternity), renders the inmost meaning of the music as no Italian gesture, which is the vehemence of first thoughts and the excitement of the senses, could ever render it. That slow rhythm, which in Wagner is like the rhythm of the world flowing onwards from its first breathing out of chaos, as we hear it in the opening notes of the "Ring," seems to broaden outwards like ripples on an infinite sea, throughout the whole work of Wagner.
And now turn from this elemental music, in which the sense of all human things is expressed with the dignity of the elements themselves, to all other operatic music, in which, however noble the music as music (think of Gluck, of Mozart, of Beethoven!), it is for the most part fettered to a little accidental comedy or tragedy, in which two lovers are jealous, or someone is wrongly imprisoned, or a libertine seduces a few women. Here music is like a god speaking the language of savages, and lowering his supreme intellect to the level of their speech. The melodious voice remains, but the divine meaning has gone out of the words. Only in Wagner does God speak to men in his own language.