That quality is their old-world atmosphere, their power of
filling us with a sense of the old time before us. When the fire plays
round Bruennhilde's fell--Hinde Fell, Morris calls it--lighting the icy
tops of the farthest hills, or when Mime and Alberich squabble in the
dark of early morning at the mouth of Fafner's hole, or again when the
Wanderer comes in and scarifies Mime out of his wits, we are taken
back to the remotest and dimmest past, to the beginnings of time, to a
time that never existed save in the imagination of our forebears. This
may be partly the result of our unconscious perception of the fact
that these things never happen nowadays, and partly the result of our
having been familiar with the story of Bruennhilde and the gods since
earliest boyhood; but it is in the main due to Wagner's intense
historical sense, his sense of the past, and to his unapproached power
of expressing in music any feeling or combination of feelings he
experienced. So cunningly do music and scenery work together that we
credit the one with what the other has done; but, wonderful though the
pictures of "Siegfried" are, there cannot be a doubt that the
atmosphere we discover in them reaches us through the ear from the
orchestra.
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