Tannhäuser

standpoint altogether complete, calm, and philosophical ; and the result of this review is the present story of Tannhauser, just as the isolated and often apparently contradictory incidents of the fight were recorded in that jungle of chaotic emotions which I printed under the title of " The Soul of Osiris," calling it a history so that my readers might discover for themselves (if they chose to take the trouble) the real continuity in the apparent disjointedness. The history of any man who seriously and desperately dares to force a passage into the penetralia of nature ; not with the calm philosophy of the scientist, but with the burn- ing conviction that his immortal destiny is at stake ; must be a strange one : to me at least strangely attractive. The con- stant illusions ; the many disappointments ; the bitter earnest- ness of the man amid the grim humour, or more often sheer cacchination of his surroundings ; all the bestial mockery of the baffling fiends ; the still more hideous mockery in which the Powers of Good themselves seem to indulge ; doubt of the reality of that which he seeks ; doubt even of the seeker ; the irony of the whole strife : are fascinating to me as they are, I make no doubt, to the majority of mankind. This is the subtler form of that mental bewilderment which the Greek Tragedians were so fond of depicting ; as subtle in effect, yet grosser in its determining factors. For we are thus changed from the times of Sophocles and Euripides ; that the fixed ideas of morality and religion which they em- ployed as the motives of pathos or of horror are now shattered. lO