CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY MUSIC Cornell University Library ML 410.W12N55 3 1924 022 297 877 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022297877 A STUDY OF WAGNER A STUDY OF WAGNER BY ERNEST NEWMAN AUTHOR OF " GLUCK AND THE OPERA "' NEW YORK : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS LONDON: BERTRAM DOBELll 1899 [-4// rights reser'ved'\ Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &• Co. At the Ballantyne Press TO MY WIFE PREFACE THE present volume is not intended to add another to the many " Lives " of Wagner, but to make an attempt at estimating the work of his practical achievements on the one hand and of his theoretical speculations on the other. It is hoped that the " Synthetic Table " will not only supply the reader with all the biographical and other details material to the subject, but will present the information in a very easily apprehensible form. The Table will show at a glance the direction of Wagner's musical and specu- lative activities in any given year, as well as certain contemporaneous events that are of interest in con- nection with the development of Wagner's mind and of music in general. It may be necessary to forewarn readers that no account is taken here of sundry writings that do not bear closely on a general study of Wagner's genius. Thus such works as the treatise On Conducting, and others dealing with the purely practical side of music, are scarcely, if at all, mentioned, partly for the reason that writings of this kind must be read in their entirety if they are to be of any value to the student ; no mere via Preface brief exposition of them could serve any useful purpose. Some readers may feel astonished that while I have passed over a portion of Wagner's ablest and most interesting work in this way, I have discussed at fair length many of his treatises that are of far less intrinsic value. The reason is that these latter, though not finally educational or illuminative in themselves, are factors that cannot be overlooked in the attempt at a veracious diagnosis of Wagner ; while such writings as the purely musical ones merely illustrate points in his mental structure that are dealt with in other connec- tions. My object has been to study Wagner as a psychological and aesthetic phenomenon ; to try to answer the questions " In virtue of what constitution of brain was he so great a musician ? " and " How did his peculiarities of mental structure affect his views of the other arts and of hfe in general ? " I may also put forward an explanation by way of apology for the apparent discursiveness of such chapters as the fifth, and their treatment of many subjects that at first sight may seem foreign to a discussion of Wagner and his work. In the first place, the chapter I have mentioned is intended not only as a criticism of Wag- ner's theory of poetry, music, and music-drama, but as a contribution to an aesthetic question of very much wider interest than the work of any one musician a question involving a discussion of many more things than the opera itself. In the second place, I have Preface IX thought myself justified in discussing the opinions of a number of theorists and aestheticians besides Wagner. One duty of any writer who is conducting an argument is to anticipate, if he can, whatever objections might be urged against his thesis, and attempt to meet them in advance. In the case of an artist like Wagner, on whom there already exists a huge mass of literature from every possible standpoint, a new critic, it seems to me, is in duty bound to take account of the works of previous labourers in the same field. If he thinks it well to anticipate arguments that have not yet been employed against his own theory, it is plainly necessary for him to deal with these opposing views when they are actually in print ; otherwise the statement of his own thesis will look like mere dogmatism. The edition of Wagner's Gesammelte Schriften to which I refer in the present volume (as G. S.) is the second German edition, in ten volumes. By the kind- ness of Mr. W. Ashton Ellis I am enabled to quote from his translation of Wagner's Prose Works, of which six volumes have already been issued. Only those who have had occasion to study Wagner's writings closely can estimate the debt of all English Wagnerians to Mr. Ellis for his extremely careful and faithful translations, the valuable prefaces and editorial information he supplies, and the magnificent indexes of the volumes. 1 have also to express my obligations to Messrs. H. Grevel & Co. for permission to quote from the English X Preface translations of the Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, and the Letters to Uhlig, Fischer, and Heine; and- to Messrs. Schott & Co. for permission to make musical quotations from the Meistersinger and Parsifal; to Messrs. Breitkopf and Hartal for permission to quote from Tristan; and to the editors and proprietors of the Fortnightly Review, the University Magazine, the Musician, the Monthly Musical Record, and Music (Chicago), for permission to reprint such portions of the book as first saw the light in those periodicals. E. N. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE i^-I.— A PSYCHOLOGICAL PRELIMINARY i \\.—RIBNZI AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN . . . i6 III.— TANNHAUSER and LOHENGRIN 30 IV.— ART AND LIFE 53 v.— WAGNER'S THEORY OF MUSIC, POETRY, AND MUSIC-DRAMA 78 VI.— THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG .... 202 VII.— WAGNER AS GERMAN . 259 Vlll.— TRISTAN AND ISOLDE AND DIE MEISTERSINGER 279 IX.— SOME LATER PROSE-WORKS 322 X.— PARSIFAL ... . 352 " XI.— GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 366 INDEX . . . 395 SYNTHETIC TABLE OF WAGNER'S LIFE AND WORKS AND SYNCHRONOUS EVENTS Year. Life. Musical Works. Prose and Poetical Works. Synchronous Events. 1813 1818 1821 1823 1824 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 22nd May. Born at Leipzig. Overture in B flat (performed at Leipzig under H. Dorn). Sonata in B flat. Polonaise in D, k 4 mains (both pub- lished by Breitkopf and ll^rtel, 1832). Fantasia in F sharp minor (never pul> hshed). Overture to Rau- (never pubUshed). Concert Overture in D minor (never published). Concert Overture in C, with fugue (never published). Rossini's Tancredi Spohr's Faust. Weber's Der Freisckiiiz. Weber's Eury- anthe. Schubert's Rosa- jnunde. gth Beethoven's SyTnphony, Weber's Oberon. Death of Weber. Death of Beet- hoven. Death of Schubert. Marschner's Der Vampyr. Kxioa'sMasaniello Rossini's William Tell. Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique. Auber's Fra Dia- •volo. Meyerbeer' s Robert the Devil. Bellini's La Son- Tiambula. Harold's Zampa. XIV Synthetic Table Year. Life. Musical Works. Prose and Poetical Works. Synchronous Events. 1832 Symphony in C major (performed loth Jan. 1833). Part of the music to Die Hochzeit. Compositions for Goethe's Faust. Bellini's Norma. 1833 At Wurzburg. The Fairies (not per- formed during his lifetime. First per- formance at Mun- ich, 29th June 1888). Marschner's ffans Heiling. Brahms born. 1834 At Magdeburg. 2nd Symphony in E major (unfinished). Donizetti's Lucre- zia Borgia. First numberof the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik pub- lished. 183s Columbus Overture (never published). Hal^vy's La Juive. Donizetti's Lucia di Lamm^r- moor. 1836 Marries Minna The Novice of Meyerbeer's Les Planer. Palermo. ' ' Rule Britannia " Overture (never published). " Polonia " Overture (never published). Huguenots. 1837 At Konigsbergand Riga. 1S38 Sketches Rienzi. ' 'Der Tannenbaum. " Berlioz' Ben-venuto Cellini. 1839 Completes first two Acts oi Riernsi. At Paris. A Faust-Overture (finished February 1840 ; rehearsed by Habeneck at Paris, but not per- formed). Songs : — Sleep, ray Baby. Mignonne. Attente. The Two Grena- diers. 1840 Finishes Rienzi, Schumann's Myr- then, Frauen- liebe, and Dich- terliebe. Donizetti's Favo- rita. Synthetic Table XV Year. Life. Musical Works. Prose and Poetical Works. Synchronous Events. 1840-1 A German Musi- cian in Paris : Essays and Stories ; — 1. A Pilgrimage to Beethoven. 2. An End in Paris. 3. A Happy Even- ing. 4. Music in Ger- many. 5. The Virtuoso and the Artist. 6. The Artist and Publicity. 7. Rossini's Stabat Mater. On the Overture. Der Freischiitz in Paris. Account of a new Parisian Opera, Hal^vy's Queen of Cyprus. 1841 Engaged on the Plying Dutch- man. ... 1842 At Dresden. 20th Oct. First per- Autobiographi- Death of Cheru- formance of ^8«««j cal Sketch. bini. at Dresden. 1843 Completes poem of 2nd Jan. First per- Schumann's Par- Tannhduser. formance of the Flying Dutchman at Dresden, The Love-Feast of the Apostles. adise and the Peri. Franz' first set of Songs. 1844 Fimeral Music At Weber's Grave. Greeting of the Faith- ful. Account of the bringing - home of Weber's re- mains from Lon- don to Dresden. Speech at Weber's grave. Verdi's Ernani. 184s Sketches poem of Lohengrin. 19th Oct. First per- formance of Tann- hauseraX Dresden under Wagner. 1846 Produces the 9th Account of the Mendelssohn's Symphony at performance of Elijah. Dresden. Beethoven's 9th Berlioz' Faust, Sept. 1846 to Mar. Symphony in 1847. Writes 3rd 1846. Act of Lohen- grin. XVI Synthetic Table Life. May to June. Writes ist Act of Lohengrin. June to August. Writes 2nd Act of Lohengrin. Writes poem of Siegfried' sDeath. Flees from Dres- den to Weimar, and thence to Ziirich. Later to Paris. Returns to Ziiricli. Writes poem of Young Siegfried. Writes poems of Valkyrie and Rheingold. Re- casts Young Sieg- fried and Sieg- frieds Death. Musical Works. 28th Aug. First formance q{ Lohen- grin at Weimar under Liszt. Prose and Poetical Works. The Wibelungen : World - history from the Saga (not published till 1850). The Nibelungen- myth as sketch of a drama. Siegfried's Death. Speech at the 300th Anniversary of the foundation of the Royal Musical Chapel in Dresden. Jesus von Nazareth. A Project for the Organisation of a German Na- tional Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony. 'Art andRevolution. pe!>.Th( of Art- Work the Future. WielandtheSmith, sketched as a drama. Art and Climate. Judaism arid Mu- sic (article in the Nfiue Zeit- schrift). — ■ Opera and Drama. A Communication to my Friends. On the Goethe- Foundation : A Letter to Franz Liszt. ATheatrein Ziirich. On Musical Criti- cism. Recollections of Spontini. Explanatory Pro- grammes : — 1. Beethoven's Eroica Sym- phony. 2. Overture to Coriolanus. Synchronous Events. Death of Mendels- sohn. Schumann's^aaj^. Schumann's Man- fred. Le Meyerbeer's Proph^te. Death of Chopin Schumann's Geno- veva. Schopenhauer's Parerga und Paralipomena. Verdi's Rigoletto. Death of Spontini. Synthetic Table XVll Year. 1852 i8S3 Life. Working at the Rheingold. 1854 1856 i8S7 I8S7-8 1858 1859 i860 1861 1862 January. Finishes Rheingold. May. Finishes the scoring. June. Begins mu- sic of the Val- kyrie. In London and Ziirich. Work- ing at the Val- kyrie. April. Finishes scoring of the Valkyrie. Working at Sieg- fried. Finishes ist and part of 2nd Act of Siegfried. March. Receives request for an opera for Rio de Janeiro. Engaged on Tris- tan. Musical Works. Album Sonata in E flat major. In Paris and Swit- zerland. August. Finishes Tristan. At Brussels and Paris. 13th March. The Tannhauserii^^ CO at Paris. Writes Meister- singer poem. Commences com- position of Meis- tersinger. Prose and Poetical Works. A Faust Overture (second version). On the Performing of Tannhduser. Remarks on Per- forming the Flying Dutchman. Explanatory Pro- grammes: — 3. Overture toi^/j)'- ing Dutchman. 4. Overture to Tannhduser. 5. Prelude to Lohengrin. Gluck's Overture to Iphigenia in Aulis: A Letter to the Editor of the Neue Zeit- schriftfUrMusik. Five songs'. — 1. The Angel. 2. Be Still. 3. In the Hot- house. 4. Grief. 5. Dreams. Albumblatt in A flat major. Synchronous Events. Verdi's // Trova- tore. On Franz Liszt's S ym phonic Poems. Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch- Schonen. Homage to Spohr and Fischer. Letter to Hector Berlioz. Account of the Production of Tannhduser in Paris. " Zukunftsmusik." Death of Schu- mann, Cornelius' Barbier von Bagdad, Gounod's Faust. XVlll Synthetic Table Year. Life. Musical Works. Prose and Poetical Works. Synchronous Events. 1863 At St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Mariafeld. The Vienna Court- Opera-House. Nibelungen Poem. 1864 King Ludwigsends Huldigungsmarsch. Poem : To the Death of Meyer- for him. Wagner Kingly Friend. / beer. at Munich. State and Religion (not printed for public circula- tion till 1873). / 1865 Dec. In Switzer- lothjune. First per- What is German? land. formance of Tris- tan at Munich under Von Biilow. (not published till 1878). Report to his Majesty King Ludwig II. of Bavaria upon a German Music- School to be founded in Munich. 1866 Death of Minna. 1867 Finishes Meister- Critiques : — Gounod's Romeo singer. 1. W. H. Riehl. 2. Ferdinand Hiller. German Art and German Policy (reprinted in 1868). and Juliet. 1868 2ist June. First per- Second Edition of Death of Rossini. formance of Meis- Opera and Brahms' German tersingeraX Munich Drama. Requiem. under Von Bulow. Recollections of Ludwig Schnorr of Carolsfeld. Critiques ; — 3. Recollections of Rossini. Boito's Mefistofele. 1869 Finishes Siegfried. 22nd Sept. First Critiques : — Death of Berlioz. Begins Gotierddm- performance of 4. Edward Dev- merung. Rheingold at Mun- rient. Siegfried Wagner ich under Wullner. 5. Appendix to born. Judaism in Music, accom- panying book- form edition. On Conducting. 1870 25th Aug. Marries 26th June. First 3 Poems : — Cosima von Bil- performance of Rheingold(iS68). low. Valkyrie at Mun- On the comple- Finishes ist and ich under Wiall- tion of Sieg- 2nd Acts of G'ot- ner. fried (1869). terddmmerung. Siegfried Idyll. 25th Aug. 1870. Beethoven. Synthetic Table XIX Year. Life. Musical Works. Prose and Poetical Works. Synchronous Events. 1871 June. Heckel forms first Wag- ner Society at Mannheim. Kaisermarsch. Poem : — To the German Army before Paris. Death of Auber. Finishes scoring A Capitulation (not Verdi's Aida. Siegfried. published until 1873-) Recollections of Auber. On the Destiny of Opera. Letter to an Italian Friend on the Production of Lohengrin at Bologna. 1872 22nd May. Beet- hoven - Festival at Bayreuth. Foundation- stone of new theatre laid. Actors and singers. To the Burgo- master of Bo- logna. Finishes 3rd Act / To Friedrich Nietz- of Gotierddm- sche. merung. On the name "Music-Dra- ma." Letter to an Actor. Epilogue to the King. 1873 Completes republi- cation of nine volumes of works. Aglance at the Ger- man Operatic Stage of to-day. The rendering of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Prologue to a reading of the G otter ddtnme- rung before a select audience at Berlin. Bayreuth ; — FinalReport,&c. The Festival Playhouse at Bayreuth. 1874 Nov. Finishes On Spohr's Jes- Death of Peter scoring of Got- sonda. Cornelius. terddmmerung. 1875 Albumblatt in E flat major. Bizet's Carmen. Rubenstein's De- mon. XX Synthetic Table Year. 1876 1877 1878 Life. Feb. Parsifal poem finished. Score begun in autumn. In London. " Bayreuther Blat- ter " founded. Musical Works. Aug. 13-17. First performance of the Ring at Bayreuth, ■uruier Richter. Grand" Festival March. 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 In Italy. Jan. Finishes /"ar- sifal. I 13th Feb. at Venice. Dies 26th July. First per- formance ol Parsi- fal at Bayreuth under Levi. Prose and Poetical Works. Synchronous Events. Poem of Parsifal published. What is German ? Modern. Public and Popu- larity. The Public in Time and Space. Retrospect of the Stage - Festivals of 1876. Shall v^e hope ? Open Letter to Herr E. von Weber. On Poetry and Composition. On Operatic Poetry and Composi- tion. On the Applica- tion of Music to the Drama. Religion and Art. ' ' What boots this knowledge?" "Know Thy- self." Introduction to a work of Count Gobineau. Hero-dom and ' Christendom. Parsifal at Bay- reuth. On the production of a youthful Symphony. On the Human- Womanly (pos- thumous frag- ment). Letter to H. von Stein. Brahms' ist Sym- phony. Saint-Saens Sam- son and Dalila. Massenet's Le Roi de Lahore. Saint-Saens' Henry the Eighth. Dvorak's Staiat Mater. The posthumous publications are not included in the above list. They will be found in the Entwiirfe, Gedanken, Fragmente, and the Nachgelassene Schriften und Dichtungen. The Jesus von Nazareth is also published separately from the Gesammelle Schriften. A STUDY OF WAGNER CHAPTER I A PSYCHOLOGICAL PRELIMINARY IT is usual for a Frenchman to begin a book on Wagner by exhorting his countrymen to forget and forgive the stupid squib in which the composer, in 1871,^ insulted the French nation in its hour of humili- ation and distress. We in England are happily under no such constraint. Nevertheless it may be profitable to commence a study of Wagner, as our neighbours do, with an historical retrospect — a retrospect, however, not of the follies of the master and an apology for them, but of the follies of those who most cordially and most sincerely detested his music ; and, if our magnanimity will run so far, with even an apology for these. Any attempt at scientific criticism must take account of the clash of human opinion about the great theories of life and art. It is not sufficient for us to be content with the victory, after half a century of struggle, of one or other of these rival theories ; there remains the task of investigating the causes of the former conflict, of dis- covering why many musicians and many aestheticians of high ability have failed to get from Wagner's music the pleasure which so many others have derived from it ; and the further task, it may be, of absolving the majority of these opponents from the charge of malevo- ' A Capitulation was written in 1870-71, though not published till 1873. A 2 A Study of Wagner lence or wilful bad faith — of seeing them also, in fact, with the comprehensive and impartial eye of science. With this object in view it is really worth any one's while, even in the year 1898, to look up some of the contemporary criticisms upon the works that have now a larger vogue than any other operatic music. We are all so used to the phenomenon of a great innovator being misunderstood in his own day, that we have even begun to philosophise quite cheerily upon it — our moralists bestowing posthumous consolation upon the sufferer, to the effect that he would not have been so contemned in his lifetime had he not been so great andoriginal a genius. Music, again, has the questionable distinction of having provided more martyrs than any of the, other arts, it being equalled in this respect only by the sciences that touch upon questions of religion and morals. Even with a knowledge, however, of the freaks of musical criticism in the past and present, a man may well lift his hands in astonishment as he reads some of the contemporary judgments passed on Wagner's work.^ Almost from first to last, the recognised musical critics of Europe denied Wagner's possession of either melodic, harmonic, orchestral, or dramatic gift, and prophesied his speedy extinction. Schliiter, Fetis, Hanslick, Hullah, Macfarren, Chorley, Hauptmann, Gumprecht, Kossmaly, Scudo, Gustav Engel, Otto Jahn, Joseph Bennett — these are the names of only a few of the better known men who have unconsciously enriched the humorous literature of music by their criticisms of Wagner. They were nothing if not comprehensive in their denuncia- tions. The Tannhduser overture was " only a common- place display of noise and extravagance," the pilgrims' chorus being " a poor choral, badly harmonised " ; the opera as a whole was distinguished by " an entire absence ' The reader will find an interesting collection of them in Mr. Finck's Wagner and his Works, and in M. Georges Servi^res' Richard Wagner juge en France. A Psychological Preliminary of musical construction and coherence " ; Lohengrin was described, with true Teutonic grace and lucidity, as " a frosty, sense-and-soul-congealing tone-whining," while the prelude consisted of " strange sounds, curious har- ! monies without any coherence, and leading to no defi-' nite idea" — ^there being, indeed, "from beginning to end, ; not a dozen bars of melody " ; the Meistersinger overture , was an " ugly rioting of dissonances " ; the score was " a boneless tone-mollusc," and the effect simply " hor- rible caterwauling " ; the Ring was " formless," " weari- some," and "painful," and the composer "the most remarkable charlatan who has ever appeared in art" ; Parsifal was " an endless desert of discouraging psalmo- dic recitatives," the music, indeed, reminding one weary gentleman of " piano-tuning with impediments," and another of the howls of a dog undergoing vivisection. It has to be borne in mind that these prodigies were performed not by the irresponsible gentlemen who " do " the musical criticism for the daily newspapers, but by critics and historians of European reputation. The explanation of the bovine opposition of men like these to Wagner's music seems to be this — that being, as they all were, musical theorists and pedants of the old school, hidebound in tradition, steeped in conventional formulas, Wagner's music was a product it was impossible for them to assimilate, by virtue of the fact, not that it was formless, but that its form was something entirely new, something for which thei peculiar musical training of the critics had given them no intellectual or emotional preparation. And in this connection, stress may be laid upon the point that the very composers whom the critics held up to Wagner as examples of how music with form ought to be written, were in their own day subjected to the same misunderstanding and the same objurgation. One German critic condemned Beethoven's third symphony, and exhorted him to return to the lucid symmetry of 4 A Study of Wagner the first, which was in the style of Mozart. To us the Eroica symphony is simplicity itself ; but to that critic it was evidently "formless," because its form and its ideas were somewhat more complex than anything he had been accustomed to. At a later time, Dionys Weber, the celebrated musical theorist, in the same way admired Beethoven's earlier symphonies, but, in a conversation with Wagner, frankly pronounced the ninth to be pure nonsense.^ And when one remembers how many un- kind things used to be said about the brutality of Wagner's orchestration, and how the critics used to hold up to him as an example his predecessor Gluck, it is refreshing to discover that Gluck's own contempo- raries blamed him also for the noisiness of his orches- tration. One might almost be listening to a modern critic of Wagner when one hears Gretry saying that " Gluck's music is fine, but it has the great fault of being frequently too loud for human voices " ; ^ or when we hear Marmontel calling attention to Gluck's exces- sive use of the brass, and the strain he puts upon the singers.^ Once more, when we meet with critics who find Wagner lacking in melody, and his harmony confused and obscure, it is pleasant to find the same things being said more than a century ago of musicians who then happened to be a little in advance of their times. Gluck, said one French critic of that day, " attempts to compensate for his lack of melody by his profound knowledge of harmony, and the effects which can be drawn from it." * Marmontel said he feared for the musical stage when the charms of melody were being banished from it ; ' and long even before that ^ Wagner, G. S. viii. 365. ^ See Eugene de Bricqueville, VOfira de I'Avenir dans le Passi, p. 37. ' " Personne n'a fait bruire les trompes, ronfler les cordes at mugir les voix commelui." — Essai sur les rivolutions de la musique, CEuvres, x. 416, ed. 18 19. ^ See Bricqueville, op. cit. p. 41. ' " L'Opera sera-t-il prive des charmes de la melodie ? " — CEuvres, a. 402^ ed. 1819, A Psychological Preliminary time the abbe Desfontaines had accused Rameau of "sacrificing the pleasures of the ear to vain harmonic speculations." ^ But it is the extreme of pleasure to find that Mozart, the very Mozart vsrho is always held up as a pattern of musical form and of pure musical delight, was in his own time and for many years after misunderstood almost as much as Wagner himself. It is recorded that upon one occasion, when Mozart had returned to his publisher in Florence the proofs of some quartettes, they were sent back to him with certain chords marked, and an inquiry whether he had not omitted to cor- rect these mistakes. The " mistakes " in question were simply novel and original harmonic combinations ; and the story throws an instructive light on some modern criticisms of Wagner as a harmonist. Even so late as 1 80 1 the finest orchestra in France declared, after ten rehearsals, that a symphony of Mozart was quite beyond its power, and far more complex than any music it had previously met with.^ These instances might be multiplied almost inde- finitely, but enough have been given to show the real significance of the fact that so many critics found fault with Wagner for being formless and obscure, and to show that the very music which was always contrasted with Wagner's as the perfection of form, was in its own day declared to be formless in comparison with the simpler music to which the theorists of that day had grown accustomed. But the true psychological state of the case may best be seen by taking one of the ablest and sincerest anti-Wagnerians we can find ; and we may select for this purpose the late Edmund Gurney, a man of all-round culture, of good philosophical train- ing, fine aesthetic feelings, and practised logical powers, ' Bricqueville, op. cit. p. 41. '^Journal des Dibats, 1801 ; quoted Mn Hippeau, Berlioz et son Temps, p. II. 6 A Study of Wagner who has done a great work on the psychology of music, and who is not known in England as much as he deserves to be. In examining Gurney's criticism of Wagner we have the satisfaction of knowing that we are dealing with an antagonist of the utmost honesty of purpose, perfectly accustomed to introspective analysis, and quite above any conscious form of prejudice. " Professing to cast off Beethoven's shackles," he writes, " i.e. the conditions of key and time by which alone successions of sound can be made organic, [Wagner] ' throws himself fearlessly into the sea of music ' ; and sinking, finds himself naturally in the variegated home of invertebrate strains, things with no shape to be squeezed out of, no rhythmic ribs to be broken, tossed hither and thither, as hard to grasp as jelly-fish, as nerveless as strings of seaweed." ^ Of Tristan he asks, "Is not the cloying quality at least as distinctive as the exciting, the sense of strain \and mannerism at least equal to that of achievement ? To the imelody, even at its finest, there clings a faint flavour of disease, isomething over-ripe in its lusciousness and febrile in its passion. And this effect is strangely cumulative. Steadily through the whole evening one feels a growing sense of being imprisoned in thefragranceof a musical hot-house, across which the memory of some great motive'of Handel's^TBeethoven's sweeps like a whiff from breezy pine- woods by the sea. Or take a more compact instance, where, even if there lurk a certain strain of coarseness, there is certainly no hint of disease, the familiar overture to Tannhduser — a piece of such superb popular qualities that, had music done nothing greater, she might well hold up her head among the arts. Only — when one thinks of the Leonora ? " ^ Here the explanation of Gurney's state of mind is comparatively easy, and throws a light at the same time upon much similar Wagner-criticism. Gurney obviously harked back to the Leonora overture because the sym- phonic form in which it is written assists the com- prehension of it, and saves the hearer a certain amount ' " Wagner and Wagnerism," in Tertium Quid, ii. 19. ' Ibid., ii. 25, 26. A Psychological Preliminary of mental effort by giving him ready-made, as it were, the forms under which he is to subsume his emotions. The overture to Tannhduser, being more of the nature of a summary of a number of dramatic scenes, puts a strain upon the intelligence of the hearer who comes to it with expectations of symphonic development, because the emotion is not made to run upon conventionalised external lines ; and the complaint as to the formless nature of much of Wagner's music is at bottom nothing more than the protest of sluggish or jaded minds against music that demands some active mental co-operation from the hearer. Thus Gurney's gibe that Wagner, being incapable of the concentration necessary to bind his music organically together like Beethoven's, preferred the easier course of letting it flow on in a formless, inorganic stream,^ is seen upon analysis to turn against Gurney himself. Once the e motiona l <;p.qiicnr.p of the music is grasped, whole acts from the Wagnerian operas are as coherent and continuous as a symphony ; and along with the sensuous pleasure of the music itself there may go an intellectual or formal pleasure derived from the consciousness that we have the key to the sequence — the very form of pleasure which Gurney and his kind found in Beethoven and Mozart, and the lack of which in Wagner made his music incoherent to them. Thus while the score of .Tristan is hopelessly obscure to many people, Von Biilow, who, when he was reducing the ^ Tertium Quid, ii. 17, 18, and elsewhere throughout the essay. It must be borne in mind, of course, that I do not allege the dramatic form of Wagner to be per se harder to comprehend than the symphonic form, say, of a Beethoven symphony. To appreciate a symphony thoroughly, a musical education is of course necessary. But my point is that to men who have had this education, the purely musical pleasure of the symphony is materially, though unconsciously, assisted by their knowledge of the form in which the music is put together ; and that being accustomed to receive this assistance from certain forms, the absence of them, and the constantly disappointed anticipation of them, would make even the purely musical sensation unorderly, and would perhaps cause the discontent to outbalance the pleasure. Hence men like Fetis and Hanslick and Gurney would call the prelude to Parsifal chaotic and formless. 8 A Study of Wagner orchestral score for the pianoforte, had ample occasion to observe the inner organic connection of the work, wrote to a friend in 1858 : — " What I know so far of this work is simply superb, remark- ably poetic, much finer in details than Lohengrin, and everywhere new, bold, original. At the same time a thematic elaboration as lucid as it is logical, such as no opera heretofore has shown." ^ Well may Mr. Finck say that this "hits the nail on the head. Here, for the first time, was a musical score to which the test could be applied, concerning ■which an English critic of literature has said : ' It is the perfec- tion of good English that page should cohere with page in such a manner that only here and there can a few paragraphs be removed without doing injustice to them.' That the German critics of thirty years ago should have, almost unanimously, pronounced this score 'formless,' is one of those extraordinary phenomena which will serve for the amazement and delectation of future generations. It was called 'formless' because it did not follow the slovenly custom of making a simple mosaic of in- dependent and unconnected arias, duos, choruses, and ballets, and calling it an opera ! The gigantic intellects of these critics could not comprehend the simple fact that a work of art, like an animal, to be ' organically ' formed, must be united in all its parts, and not, like the old-fashioned opera, a string of unconnected parts." 2 It is to be feared that the brilliaut, alert, and cul- tured Gurney was in this respect as much the victim of unconsidered formulas and catchwords as any of the English or French or German pedants. The point which Von Biilow was acute enough to see so far back as i860 — that there may be an emotional continuity and coherence in music different from that obtained by the use of the set symphonic forms — is the point which even Gurney, the psychologist of music, has ^ See Finck, "Wagner and his Works," ii. 147. ^ Ibid., ii. 148, 149. A Psychological Preliminary missed. Let any one, after reading the pages in which Gurney rails incessantly at Wagner for his formlessness, his chaos, his inferiority to Beethoven in the power to grasp all the threads of an emotion, and to make every- thing work harmoniously towards the final artistic purpose, set beside these pages the well-considered reflections of Von Biilow. " It is not possible," he wrote, " to compose with more perfect organic unity of form than Wagner has done in the Faust-Over- ture. Place any ' classical ' overture with an ' Introduction ' by its side, and see if Wagner's tone-poem does not throw it into the shade formally." And once more, "The new musical forms of Wagner escaped notice for the reason that they were new, and, as it were, too colossal. We allude here not so much to the finished art of the second finale of Tannhduser ... as rather, for example, to the first act of Lohengrin. Is not that a dramatic symphony cast in one mould, perfect in form? The poet here imposed upon the composer the necessity of erecting a tonal structure, to which, in regard to broadness of development and immensity of climax, no prototype existed. If you will conscien- tiously study this part in its main features, you will be unable to deny that Wagner has created here, specifically in regard to form, something absolutely new, an artistic whole, built up without any leaning on predecessors."^ And Saint-Saens could write, after hearing the whole of the Ring, that " from the elevation of the last act of the Gotterdammerung the entire work seems, in its -almost supernatural grandeur, like the chain of the Alps seen from the summit of Mont Blanc." ^ It is significant, again, that Gurney found the march in Tannhauser worthy of commendation,* while having nothing particular to say in praise of such superb passages as the chorus at the end of the 2nd ^ Ueber Richard Wagner's Faust- Overture ; quoted in Finck, i. 416-418. ' Harmonic et Melodic, p. 94. ' "The haunting delight of the march in Tannhauser" — Tertium Quid, ii. 26. lo A Study of Wagner Act, or the story of Tannhauser's pilgrimage. On the other hand, many Wagnerians of the present day would go as many miles to hear these passages as they would gomiles not to hear the somewhat commonplace march, the beauties of which are of rather too obvious an order. In the same way, while anti-Wagnerians complain that the Valkyrie is on the whole lacking in melody, and fasten upon the love-duet as a kind of oasis in the desert, a fervent and thorough-going Wagnerian like Mr. Finck finds the regular rhythmical flow of the opening passage of the duet too much in the un- dramatic style of the older opera — finds it, in fact, somewhat obvious and commonplace.i The psycho- logical upshot of it all is, that a man may pronounce Wagner to be chaotic, or formless, of obscure, or restless, either for the reason that he is comparatively new to the music, or for the reason that his mind is constructed on too simple lines to allow him to assimilate the complex beauty of the work — the first explanation holding good in some cases, the second in others. The trouble is that few have the common sense to revise their first impressions, or to see that the confusion ' The passage in question is that in f time— " WinterstUrme wichen dem Wonnemond." " There are also weak spots in the score," says Mr. Finck. " The weakest of these is the famous love-song of Siegmund in the scene just referred to. The poetic lines are beautiful, but the melody is trivial and shallow. I confess to a positive dislike for this brief love-song, which seems to me a cheap tune, as unworthy of Wagner's genius as the Lohengrin Wedding March. Its chopped-up, four-bar rhythm contrasts painfully with the flowing, continuous, uncadenced melody of the rest of the score." — Wagner and his Works, ii. 337. We may not altogether agree with Mr. Finck in this wholesale condemnation of the love-song, but jt illustrates, at least, the growing complexity of our sense of rhythm, and casts a side-light on the mental processes of some of the older critics who could only assimilate the more obvious rhythms of Wagner's work. As Mr. Finck puts it, in his lively Transatlantic manner, "At Bayreuth it was amusing to note how some of the critical babes, who had been crying for their toys (Paul Lindau was positively pathetic : ' I beg you, I beg you, dear little birds, for a tune'), rejoiced at Siegmund's love-song, because that was something they could whistle, give to the organ-grinders, and work up in the next carnival quadrille." A Psychological Preliminary ii into which the music throws them may possibly be their own fault and not Wagner's ; and fewer still have the candour to admit in later years that their first impressions were wrong. It is not every critic who has the self -detachment of M. Gabriel Monod, who, writing in a Paris paper in 1876 his impressions of the first Bayreuth festival, said that — " A priori, the Wagnerian system has always seemed to me false; the poems, when I have read them, have given me only moderate pleasure; at the performances, in spite of some long and wearisome scenes, I have always been deeply moved, and have carried away ineffaceable impressions with me; whence I concluded that it was my a priori reasonings that were false, and that probably I have taken for the absolute limits of musical art what were only the conventional forms in which it has till now been imprisoned. " ^ And fewer critics still have the honesty to admit, like M. Ernest Reyer, that their first judgment of a work was hasty and erroneous. M. Reyer, during his tour in Germany in 1864, heard Edouard Lassen play two acts of Tristan upon the piano, and has left us an amusing account of the perplexity into which he was thrown by the interminable " recitatives " of the work. " In the distance and all around me I could perceive nothing but horizons of sand ; the heat became over- powering, and there was no oasis in which to rest, nor the least trickle of water to quench our thirst." While expressing his willingness to give the Ring a fair hearing when he has the opportunity, he adds that his admira- tion of Wagner stops short at Lohengrin, many, to. his knowledge, not having even got so far as that." Twenty years after, however, when M. Lamoureux gave the first act of Tristan at one of his concerts in Paris, M. Reyer discovered that the work, though complicated, ' Quoted in Georges Servieres, Richard Wagner juge en France, p. 202. ' Notes de Musique, pp. 81, 85. 12 A Study of Wagner " is of real beauty " ; and he remarks, " What a meta- morphosis has been effected in my musical faculties in twenty years ! " ' This is indeed the proper attitude of criticism ; and one could wish that Berlioz had been able to follow the good example of M. Reyer. In i860, Berlioz, in criticising some Wagner-concerts in Paris, was capable of writing thus of the prelude to Tristan : — " I have read and re-read this strange page ; I have listened to it with the deepest attention and a lively desire to discover the sense of it ; well, I must confess that I have not as yet the slightest idea of what the composer has been aiming at."^ The tens of thousands of auditors who now delight in that profound and moving prelude can only read such a passage as this with the conviction that if Berlioz could go so far astray in his judgment of an alien art, it is not surprising that smaller men should utterly fail to comprehend it. The novelty of Wagner's forms and methods of pro- cedure is in fact sufficient to account for the inability of many musicians to assimilate his music. Thus Spohr wrote of the Flying Dutchman that it gave him " unheard- of trouble with its immense difficulties" ;^ the Dutchman, which to us is simplicity itself ! Robert Franz wondered how .the singers could remember the music of Lohengrin. Schumann, after a presumably hurried glance at the score of Tannhduser, laid it down that the music was " not a straw better than that of Rienzi, but rather weaker, more artificial " ; but a few weeks later he was compelled to admit that the opera " contains profound and original ideas, and is a hundred times better than his 1 Article in the Dibais, 22 Mars 1884; quoted in Servi^res, Richard Wagner juge en France, pp. 267, 268. ' Article in the Debats, 9 Fevrier i860 ; reprinted in A trovers chants, p. 311. ^ Finck, i. 139. A Psychological Preliminary 13 previous operas, though some of the music is trivial." In the same way the octogenarian Spohr, after remarking that though Tannhauser " contains much that is new and beautiful," it has also " several ugly attacks on one's ears," adds afterwards that " a good deal that I disliked at first I have got accustomed to on repeated hearing ; only the absence of definite rhythms and the frequent lack of rounded periods continue to disturb me." And to come down to our own times, Mr, W. S. Rockstro, who once declared that Senta's ballad in the Hollander would survive all Wagner's operas, lived to recognise in Tristan a drama that affects a modern mind as the Antigone may have affected the Greeks. The lesson is plain, that the accusation of formlessness means, in nine cases out of ten, nothing more than the critic's inability to view the work in its entirety ; while in the tenth case the hearer declares a later Wagnerian opera chaotic simply because his own nerves are not strong enough to bear the complex music, his own mental processes not rapid enough to keep pace with it. It is the old question again of the evolution of the artistic palate. The selections from Wagner now heard most frequently on the concert-platform, the overtures to the Dutchman, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, the Meistersinger, and Parsifal, the introduction and closing scene of Tristan, the Good Friday music from Parsifal, the Trauermarsch from the Gotterddmmerung, the introductions to the third acts oi Lohengrin and the Meistersinger — these, which are now the source of the highest plea- sure to tens of thousands of hearers, were at one time disliked and ridiculed by almost every theoretician of repute. On points like these the average intelligence has grown clearer and less prejudiced, less formalistic. And on the further points of the operas as a whole, a candid hearer goes through something of the same process as M. Reyer went through in relation to Tristan ; and he learns to see that whole acts of Wagner's music 14 A Study of Wagner are as shapely, as coherent, as organic, as intellectual, as a movement of Beethoven. One is finally compelled to say of most of the critics of the past either that they were extremely stupid pedants, or that if any of them were intelligent, their faculties of feeling and judgment had been so atrophied by being allowed to function in only one direction, that they were even less capable of treating a new art fairly than were the untutored public, who, if they had no rules to guide them, had also none to mislead them, "l Hence the truth of Wagner's saying that the generaf^public were more capable of appreciating him than were the theorists, and that while poets admired his music, musicians allowed that he could write poetry.^ It is for us to avoid, if we can, the errors of the past.^ We must not, as M. Monod says, fall into the error of regarding a form of art as the only form ; nor need we repeat the general error of laying it to a composer's charge that our nerves are not so fine and our brain not so com- plex as his ; just as we need not imitate Mr. Clement Scott in calling Ibsen a monster of immorality because Ibsen's ideas on morals are somewhat more advanced than those of Mr. Scott. It is the eternal problem of criticism over again — the problem of how to get rid of the personal or contemporary equation. And whatever difficulties may lie in the way of the final solution of that problem, there can be no doubt that such wildly temperamental criticism as, for example,^ Nietzsche's, and such obviously formalistic criticism as Hanslick's, exhibit it in its most primitive and most easily recognisable form. It is not by such criticisms as these that Wagner is to be set aside ; the great master of all the chords of human passion, the musician who for so many of 1 Most of the pioneer work for Wagner was, indeed, done in each country ty non-musical men. In France, for example, along with the names of Edmund Roche and A. de Gasperini, there are those of Gerard de Nerval, Theophile Gautier, Baudelaire, and Catullc Mendes. A Psychological Preliminary 15 us sums up all the anguish, the pathos, the delight of life, is not to be discredited by the application of a few alien formulas, or by the mere snapping of a bundle of overwrought nerves. The errors of so many critics in the past will make us careful in the application of our own standards ; and if, in the course of the present volume, objections will have to be urged against parts of Wagner's music, it is hoped that they are urged from a consistently rational standpoint, and are not merely the revolt of an outraged formula or the physiological reactidn of a jaded nervous system. The final object of criticism is, of course, the appeal to others to see things as we see them ; and such an appeal can only be effectively based upon premisses that will be disputed by none, and arguments that must be valid for all. The service done by the otherwise wasted efforts of so many anti-Wagnerian critics, is that they teach us to avoid the more primitive sources of error which were fatal to them ; and, it may be, their blunders will pre- pare us for an attitude of completer tolerance towards the next great development of music when it comes. Our men of genius have surely something better to do than waste the most precious years of their lives in con- flict with pedants who will be forgotten almost as soon as the grave closes over them. Wagner might have enriched the world with three more masterpieces, had not so much of his time and energy been frittered away in the bare effort to stand up against stupidity and malevolence. The many square leagues of arid Wagner- literature that have come down to us hardly compensate us for the fact that one of the most highly organised'\ brains in modern Europe passed away before there had i been full time to find expression for all the beauty that ^ lay within it. CHAPTER II RIENZI AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN EVERY musical reader is by this time well acquainted with the story of Wagner's early years, and the strange excursions he made into many fields be- fore he found his proper habitation. His brain was a medley of poetical and musical intuitions, and he was quite unable to make up his mind at that time whether to be a greater poet than Shakespeare or a greater musician than Beethoven. His poetical attempts, how- ever, were quite juvenile in character ; and after a little hesitation he drifted naturally into music as his proper medium of expression. The various instrumental com- positions which he turned out before he had reached his twentieth year were merely signs that he had for the moment missed his vocation ; while the two abor- tive attempts at opera-writing — The Fairies and The Novice of Palermo — were indications that he was coming to clearer self-consciousness, and to recognise that nature intended him for a dramatic, not a symphonic composer. Rienzi was of service to him, not only because it gave him this perception of where his own strength lay, but because it helped him to cast the slough of the current opera-formulas of the time. Not much, indeed, can be said for Rienzi at this time of day. The " poem," no doubt, deserves Meyerbeer's commendation, for it really stands above nine-tenths of the libretti of its epoch ; and though the music is young-man's music, it had all the qualities that could commend it to an operatic audience of 1842, which is precisely what makes it a weariness of the flesh to us, who have been educated Rienzi and the Flying Dutchman 17 by Wagner's later practice. There is very little in it of that anticipation of the future Wagner that makes the Dutchman so interesting to us in spite of its many faults. Rienzi is earnest in intention, but it is necessarily imitative of the operatic works of its own epoch ; Wagner had not yet had the opportunity to profit by the new spirit that was being breathed into musical Europe. Instrumental music seemed to have died in 1827 with Beethoven, noble and sincere operatic music with Weber in 1826; and not only in France, Italy, and England, but in Germany itself, Italian opera was master of the field. Marschner brought out his Vampyr in 1828, and Hans Heiling in 1833, striving, in his way, to follow in the footsteps of Weber ; but the vast majority of the works between 1828 and 1838 were Italian in form and spirit — some better than others, but all vitiated in some degree by the stupid conven- tions of the genre. William Tell, Fra Diavolo, Robert the Devil, Zampa, La Sonnambula, Norma, Lucrezia Borgia, Lucia di Lammermoor, The Huguenots — these were the typical works of the fourth decade of the century. The new spirit,, however, was already spreading its wings for flight. The year 1838, that saw Wagner meditating Rienzi, saw also Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini; and the completion of Rienzi in 1840 was synchronous with the publication of Schumann's beautiful songs, Myrthen, Frauenliebe, and Dichterliebe. In the same year Donizetti produced La Favorita; and there seems something almost ironic in the appearance of that belated ghost of the Italian opera in the rosy dawn of modern music. 1842 saw the death of Cherubini, the last link between the genuine eighteenth century and the nineteenth ; and the musical history of the next few years may be written round Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, and Verdi — the latter composer just entering at that time upon his second manner, as shown in Ernani and Rigoletto, So that between 1838 and 1840, when Wagner was B 1 8 A Study of Wagner engaged on Rienzi, the old regime was defunct and the new regime only in its cradle. The young Wagner had then to discover a new musical and dramatic faith for himself ; and if Rienzi exhibits almost all the con- ventions of the opera of the period, and is besides frequently futile in its attempts at truly dramatic ex- pression, we can plead in extenuation of Wagner's crime that no one at that epoch and at his age could have done more than he. The genuine Wagner, feeling his way towards unhampered self-expression, really only begins for us with the Dutchman in 1843 — the year, by the way, of Schumann's Paradise and the Peri, one of the works that in its own way was significant of the new possibilities that lay before dramatic music. We shall more than once have to remark, in the course of the present study, the intimate connection between Wagner's dramatic works and the circum- stances of his life. That connection is plainly evident in The Flying Dutchman. Just as The Ring of the Nibelung is the embodiment of certain of Wagner's revolutionary opinions on society and its moral and economic codes, I so the Dutchman is expressive of his own history as a weary wanderer in the years from 1839 to 1841. He also, like the mythical sailor, had been driven from place to place, had been tortured by unappeased long- ings, and had longed for redemption from the curse that seemed to be weighing on him. The misery of his own life made the story of the Flying Dutchman doubly appealing to him. Conceiving life, as he always did, in terms of deep and strongly marked emotions, the old legend immediately became for him a moral and social symbol, an epitome of half the evil of the world and its cure. It is very interesting to compare Heine's reading of the story ^ with that of Wagner — to note the sane cynicism of the one, that declines to take the old legend too seriously, and passes over the sentimentality ^ In his Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewofski. Rienzi and the Flying Dutchman 19 of the conclusion with a smile, and the serious Teutonic immersion of all the other's faculties in the ethical lessons of the story, his intense preoccupation with the moral aspects of Senta and the Dutchman, and his firm belief that in the conclusion of the opera he has told us something good and profitable for our souls to know. Here for the first time we light upon one of the most curious of Wagner's hallucinations — the idea that the musical stage can be the dispenser of profound philo- sophy, and that his own reading of the cosmos was a matter of universal interest. The seriousness with which he regarded the theatre as an ethical centre was of course only an old Teutonic failing, dating from at least three-quarters of a century before he began his work ; ^ while his own views on ethics were at all times too vaguely sentimental for them ever to be worth regarding as serious contributions to the subject. The Dutchman shows him at the beginning of his really Wagnerian career. It is the first work in which a moral problem is distinctly posed, the main characters being merely embodiments of the problem, and the conclusion designed to clinch the three-act argument like a Q.E.D. It goes without saying, of course, that in point of construction the Dutchman is the weakest of all Wagner's works .^ His artistic vision is not clear enough ; or — to express the same thing in another way — he sees his characters and his problem clearly enough, but has not yet the craftsmanship necessary to handle his material in such a way as to make it clear and convincing to others. There has always been a hopeless confusion in the minds of critics as to whether Senta has or has not plighted her love to Erik ; and it is quite evident that ^ See Carlyle's remarks on the German view of the theatre in his Life of Schiller, Part II.; also Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book III. ^ Rienzi does not count as a " Wagnerian " work. It is a German-Italian •opera. 20 A Study of Wagner the reading of her character and the interpretation of her motives in the last Act must be dependent upon how we answer this question. Uncertainty, again, exists as to why the Dutchman, in the 3rd Act, is setting sail without Senta ; while Erik is altogether too vague for psychological analysis, and Daland is an operatic father pure and simple. For my own part, too, I have never been able to understand how it is that while Senta, immediately on seeing the Dutchman, recognises him to be the original of the portrait in the house, the resemblance never seems to have struck her father — even though the Dutchman has told him at their first meeting of his unhappy doom, and of his desire to meet the woman who will love him. And finally, I have always thought I should like to know what becomes of the crew of the Dutchman's ship when Senta springs into the sea, and the ship sinks with all hands. According to Wagner's stage-directions, " In the glow of the rising sun, above the wreck of the ship are seen the glorified forms of Senta and the Dutch- man, held in each other's embrace, rising heavenwards out of the sea." Tkey, of course, are " redeemed " ; but what of the poor devils who have gone to the bottom of the ocean ? Is there no " redemption by woman's love " for any one under the rank of captain, or are the men, by being drowned and done for once for all, freed from the uncertainty that attends the heaven- ward journey of " the glorified forms of Senta and the Dutchman " ? Wagner, of course, was far too serious to trouble himself about these minor points. When you have a big business of redemption in hand you must not stick at trifles, and Wagner was very much in earnest about his own peculiar views of ethics. We shall see, when we come to discuss his later works, that in almost all of them he tried to put forward an ethical problem, the solution of which lies in somebody or other being Rienzi and the Flying Dutchman 21 " redeemed," which brought upon Wagner the famous gibe of his quondam admirer Nietzsche. It is in the Dutchman that Wagner the aesthetic moralist first comes to clear consciousness of himself, and it is typical of his mental constitution and its shortcomings that he should take so seriously the salvation of the Dutchman by the love of Senta — a thoroughly sentimental and somewhat Teutonic manner of looking at life, that appears again, in a modified form, at the conclusion of the Ring of the Nibelung. His view of women was, indeed, always sentimental in the extreme. In A Communication to my Friends, after relating how he came to be fascinated by the story of the Flying Dutchman, he remarks that the mariner, " like Ahasuerus, . . . yearns for his sufferings to be ended by death ; the Dutchman, however, may gain this redemption, denied to the undying Jew, at the hands of — a woman, who, of very love, shall sacrifice herself for him. The yearning for death thus spurs him on to seek this woman ; but she is no longer the home- tending Penelope of Ulysses, as courted in the days of old, but the quintessence of womankind ; and yet the still unmanifest, the longed-for, the dreamt-of, the infinitely womanly woman — let me out with it in one word : The Woman of the Future!' ^ That manner of sentimentalising over woman has now become somewhat antiquated. It is the Young Men's Mutual Improve- ment Society view of woman and the world, and we must decline to grow quite so perfervid over it as Wagner and his disciples have been wont to do. It will be argued, in the course of the following pages, that even if Wagner had been a man of clear and searching outlook upon life, the musical drama is by its very nature the least suitable medium for the display of profound philosophy. Here we need only note the first element in the diagnosis of Wagner's character — his intense seriousness, his burning desire to illustrate I G. S. iv. z66 ; Ellis, i. 308. 22 A Study of Wagner ethical and humanist problems in his work, and his inability to rise very far out of the rut of ordinary sentimentalism. His perpetual obsession by the ideas of redemption and salvation gives in itself a hint that he failed to see life objectively and clearly ; the facile solution of the problem of his first real work by the easy old sentimentalist view that woman " expresses her inmost nature" by sacrificing herself for man, is an indication of the misty cloudland in which his own intellectual life was being spent. There are, it is said, certain severe Wagnerians who decline to listen to anything of the master's earlier than Lohengrin, and extend even to that work only a bare tolerance — the real Wagner commencing, for them, with the Ring. Without committing ourselves quite so deeply as that, it must be admitted that the Dutchman sounds very queerly at times to the full-fledged Wagnerian. There is, of course, a noticeable advance on Rienzi in point of the poetical construction. The characters are few, and an attempt is made to treat them as subjects of a musical instead of a poetical drama, — or, as Wagner himself would put it, to make the action internal instead of external. " From here," he writes, " begins my career as poet, and my farewell to the mere concocter of opera-texts. And yet I took no sudden leap. In no wise was I influenced by reflection; for reflection comes only from the mental combination of existing models : whereas I nowhere found the specimens which might have served as beacons on my road. My course was new; it was bidden me by my inner mood, and forced upon me by the pressing need to impart this mood to others. In order to en- franchise myself from within outwards, i.e. to address myself to the understanding of like-feeling men, I was driven to strike out for myself, as artist, a path as yet not pointed me by any outward experience." ^ He was really feeling his way along the line that ^ G. S. iv. 266 ; Ellis, i. 308, 309. Rienzi and the Flying Dutchman 23 ultimately brought him to the way of writing the " books " of his operas in the style most suited for music. The culmination was reached in Tristan, the almost impeccable model of a dramatic poem intended for a musical setting. It was in the Dutchman that Wagner first perceived dimly those necessary rules of artistic procedure that he was destined to work out so painfully and so conscientiously in the years to come. He himself has told us that he really conceived the Dutchman as a dramatic ballad, and thought at first of having it performed in a single continuous act. That in itself showed that his musical imagination was beginning to take the lead in his artistic conceptions ; he was realising that such work as he was most fitted to do was on a different plane of thought from that of the spoken drama, and that therefore the dramatic unity and homogeneity of his works must come from the art of music rather than from that of poetry. There was, of course, to be not merely a bracing up of the opera-poem, but a total rupture with the conven- tional manner of libretto-writing. The poem was no longer to be a mere pot-pourri of disconnected materials, but a real dramatic action set forth in simple, direct, and — as far as might be — artistic language. But though Wagner is to a certain extent justified in calling this reform a re-entry of the poet into his proper place in opera — in the sense that he put a coherent and organic substance where only disconnected fragments had been before — he misled both himself and the disciples who have based their aesthetics on him, when he phrased it that by his reform the musician's wings were clipped and greater liberty given to the poet. The question will be fully treated in a later chapter ; here we need only anticipate the discussion so far as to say that by making the action "internal," as he expressed it, he was really limiting the range of psycho- logical treatment of the drama to just that point where 24 A Study of Wagner nothing should be said that was inconsistent with musical treatment. He was indeed casting aside the framework of the old opera-libretto ; but his own poem, no matter how coherent and organic he might make it, was from first to last a poem whose sole raison d'etre was that it was to be set to music. The Dutchman was necessarily only a tentative effort. Much as Wagner might desire to remould the form and the substance of the opera in accordance with the spirit of music, his artistic powers were not yet equal to the task. He was compelled to follow on the lines of the older opera in his frequent repetitions of the words of the text ; while, although it is true that he tried to avoid the conventional division of the opera into aria, recitative, and etisemble, his own work at times seems to fall too readily into these unconnected forms. As for the music itself, the most irritating feature in it is pro- bably the rhythmical monotony of the more declamatory portions. Ten years later, when he was revising the orchestral score of the work, he himself called Uhlig's attention to this point. " It is striking," he writes, " to see how embarrassed I then was by musical declama- tion ; and the operatic style of singing (for instance J__^fe J..«^) still weighed heavily on my imagination."^ Even in the more lyrical portions the melodic rhythm is painfully uniform in character, owing to the long succession of bars in common time, with a strongly accented note at the beginning of each, as for ex- ample : — ^-rb-F^ 4 % \ ^ r=t Schon sah' am U fer ich mein Haus, -^ ^ -f=^ ^ -h^i :&-^ Sen - ta, mein Kind, glaubt' ich schon zu um - arm - en &c. ' Letter 59 to Uhlig ; Eng. trans, p. 212. Rienzi and the Flying Dutchman 25 In many places, again, the music is obbligato recitative pure and simple, with all the shortcomings of that unfortunate genre — unimpressive stretches of unmusical declamation, broken at times by conventional orches- tral figures that may mean anything or nothing. One has only to compare with this method of padding the spaces between the lyrical moments of the opera the living flood that surges through almost all the body of the later works, to realise how enormously Wagner grew in consciousness of his own artistic aims, and in his power to embody them in organically coherent sound. What makes the Dutchman so interesting to the student is the comparison of its musical structure with that of the true Wagnerian works of later years, show- ing as it does the positively abnormal rate at which Wagner's artistic sense must have developed since his thirtieth year — an age, be it remembered, at which the musician's brain is generally complete in all its essential characteristics. Beethoven, of course, developed with each year of his life ; but even he shows nothing com- parable to the growth of Wagner. There is no such difference between the works of 1800 — when Beethoven was in his thirtieth year — and those of 1827, when he died, as there is between Rienzi in 1 840 and the Gdtier- dammerung \n 1870. In his musical conceptions, as in everything else, Wagner lived at a rate quite abnormal when compared with that of other men ; and whatever may have been the case with his theoretical work, his music shows a steady and continual development from his earliest to his latest years. It was only to be expected that the Dutchman, written as it was when Wagner had no more than the vaguest intentions of what the musical drama ought to be, should be merely experimental both on the musical and the poetical sides. The barest passages in the text are necessarily set to the crudest melodic declamation ; for Wagner had not yet learnt the art of dealing with the 26 A Study of Wagner non-lyrical portions of the drama. In later years he recognised that since these portions are necessary to the evolution of the action, they must be made musical in spite of their own non-musical quality ; and he accordingly sank them into a merely subordinate place, letting the orchestra carry on the stream of music, and the words merely float upon its surface. A passage like this from the Dutchman — ^^S ■tj* Ia» — a» ^ ^^ =P=F^=P- ■^-^ -^— 1»»— ^— 1> ^ Be still ! I think I see the Cap-tain there. is neither music nor an apology for music. It is simply a bald sentence, whose baldness is none the less appa- rent because the words are sung instead of spoken. In later years, Wagner, if he was compelled to have passages of this kind in his text, generally managed to lift them by the musical resources of the orchestra out of their dreadfully commonplace associations. Nor is there much more than a glimpse of the later Wagner revealed in the more lyrical portions of the music of the Dutchman. He was undoubtedly a skilled contrapuntist at this time ; yet he must have soon realised that the contrapuntal methods of instrumental music were foreign to the needs of the drama. This also was one of the matters in which he developed greatly in after years. Compare, for example, his evident difficulty in combining a voice part with an orchestral motive — as in the passage " Welch holder Klang im ndchtigen Gewiihl!" in the 2nd Act — with his later manner as shown in Tristan, the Meistersinger, or the Ring. There not only are the motives as plastic as clay in the hands of the potter, but the voice is in most cases organically one with them — different in form, but still part of the same living structure. Here it is obtrusively evident that the motive has been placed in the orchestra first, and the vocal part plastered un- Rienzt and the Flying Dutchman 27 skilfully and mechanically upon it. In speaking of the music of the Dutchman we have, of course, to remember that though it stands out more than honourably among the operatic works of its own day, the enormous advance denoted by Wagner's later practice has made his earlier work seem more primitive than it otherwise would. This needs to be borne in mind when, in the light of our knowledge of the maturer Wagner, we examine the musical texture of the Dutchman. Even the musical motives of that work are not conceived in the manner of the later dramas. Wagner's imagination seems to have spent itself in the mere conception of a motive, and is afterwards unable to shape it in accordance with dramatic needs ; the tissue through which he merges it into the next motive or into the body of the work is frequently not vital, not inevitable enough. It is musikmacherei pure and simple — the kind of unimagi- native note-spinning that he afterwards in his prose writings deprecated in so many other composers. The first part of the introduction to the 3rd Act, for example, is built up of two earlier themes, joined by a patchwork of quite unmeaning notes, Wagner being unable, as in his later works, to make the orchestral prelude a psychologically coherent picture of the coming dramatic action. At this time, indeed, he was only an operatic half-breed, showing about an equal number of traces of the old opera and the new music-drama. Consistency such as he subsequently attained in his use of the new musical forms could only come from a con- sistent musical-dramatic mood, in which every phrase was born of and shaped by a definite dramatic concep- tion ; and this rare control of new musical form could only come after long effort. As it is, the Dutchman is full of a kind of music that really has no place in the true music-drama. More especially in the accompani- ments at times are there figures that simply lie like useless embroidery about the vocal phrases, not helping 28 A Study of Wagner their expression in any way, and appealing only to what Wagner afterwards called the " absolute music " sense.^ He was not yet the consistently dramatic musician he subsequently became. His inner vision was not yet clear enough to conceive all the com- ponents of the vocal and orchestral music as integral parts of the one living body, each existing only in and for the others. We notice the transitional state of his art, again, in the timidity he shows in relation to rhythm and tonality. It has already been remarked that the rhythm is irritatingly monotonous at times ; and this arises partly from the fact that we feel its absolute regularity to be a contradiction of the dramatic purpose and a frustration of the dramatic effect. In the same way, his generally conventional handling of tonality seems hopelessly out of place in dramatic work. Later on he saw with singular clearness that absolute music, unsup- ported as it is by any verbal expression, and bound, therefore, by purely musical laws of psychology, is necessarily far more strictly conditioned in its formal structure than dramatic music, which appeals to a somewhat different faculty, and whose deviations from the line of music per se are justified and made intelli- gible by the words or the action. An extremely remote modulation, for example, may be highly expressive in dramatic and quite incomprehensible in absolute music.^ And not only is this boldness of musical form justified, but it is positively demanded, by the drama. A statu- esque formality of structure, associated as it generally is with music derived from mental moods that are not stimulated by concrete things, is felt to be incongruous with the more vivid and more rapidly changing emo- tions that accompany a dramatic action. An excellent ^ See, for example, in Daland's air in the 2nd Act, the passage beginning ' Sagt, hob' ich sie zu viel gepriesen ? " ' See, on this point, Chapter ix. of the present volume. Rienzi and the Flying Dutchman 29 illustration of this may be had in the music that accom- panies Senta's words in the 2nd Act — "Feel'st thou the grief, the profound woe, with which he looks on me ? Ah ! that which robbed him for ever of peace cuts through my own heart ! " where the set regularity of the vocal phrase seems to contradict the perturbed sense of the words. In the duet between Daland and the Dutchman, again, just after the latter has asked the Norwegian captain if he has a daughter, the depressing obviousness of the modulation is quite fatal to any dramatic effect. In later years, Wagner's tonality changed in obedience to every psychological change in the words, as a landscape takes on a new shade of colour with each hour of the day. His formalism and timidity in this respect in the Dutchman were due, as already noted, to the failure of his artistic vision, his inability to conceive character and action in terms of dramatic instead of absolute music. Consistently with this feature of his mind at that time, the most impressive portions of the Dutchman are, on the whole, the purely lyrical ones. In the great duet in the 2nd Act, for example, where he has simply the passion of the moment to express in beautiful sound, the music has a vigour, a certainty, a coherence, that are absent from the other parts. He once explained some of Mozart's dramatic failures by saying that even he could only write beautiful dramatic music when inspired by really dramatic words and situations. In his own Dutchman epoch it was evident that his muse thrilled only to the stimulus of the more purely lyrical parts of the drama ; in his later works he shows us how his vast imagination took within its grasp the whole complex dramatic action from first to last, conceived it all in terms of music, and made the non-lyrical as well as the lyrical moments essential parts of the one vital form. CHAPTER III TANNHAUSER and LOHENGRIN I /iFTER the completion of the Dutchman, Wagner, /A in his search for a new dramatic subject, was for a time divided between the claims of Tann- hauser and those of a story dealing with Manfred, the son of Friedrich II. of the Hohenstaufens.^ He saw very clearly, however, that the latter subject would have led him back to the old Grand-Opera style, with the regular five acts and all the usual conventionalities ; while the Tannhduser story was far more suitable to the musical drama as he was then beginning to conceive it. Once more the circumstances of his own life made him see in his new opera a kind of philosophical summary of one phase of modern life. The improvement in his worldly lot after taking up his residence in Dresden had come to seem merely ironic and delusory to him. Fame and fortune indeed awaited him, but could only be attained by a denial of the new faith that was coming to life in his brain. To write in the current opera- style was becoming more and more abhorrent to him ; while to develop his own new artistic intuitions to their true consummation was to court inevitable ridi- cule and misunderstanding. He was already beginning \o find materials for the sermon he was afterwards never tired of preaching, on the insufficiency of modern life to satisfy the aspirations of the artist. Thus the 1 The plot of the contemplated drama is given in the Communication to my Friends. Tannhduser and Lohengrin 31 story of Tannhduser was to him no mere literary subject, to be taken up and written about for the simple artistic pleasure of writing, but a direct personal expression of everything that lay nearest his heart at the time — an autobiographical revelation of his own secret sorrow and despair. He has told us how he worked at the opera " in a state of burning exaltation " ; how towards the end of his labours he dreaded lest he should die before they could be concluded. As the years went on, and he became ever more conscious of the great gulf fixed between himself and the artistic world, the increasing sadness of his thoughts brought with it a more passionate yearning for the ideal con- ditions in which alone, it seemed, his art could live. The sense of his loneliness in the world after the production of Tannhduser sickened him with "the frivolous present." Like his own hero, fleeing in revolt and disgust from the crude sensuality of life, he was impelled towards the solitary mountain-peaks, where the purer and serener air brought vigour again to his wasted senses. But the mood in which he looked down from those heights was not one of merely philosophical detachment from earth and its surging life, but one of fresh yearning for association with all that was best and purest on earth. This symbolises itself in the form of that " Ever- Womanly " to which he was always driven for strength and consolation — the woman who had redeemed the Flying Dutchman, and had "showed to Tannhauser the way that led from the hot passion of the Venusberg to heaven." She now took shape as Elsa, while Wagner himself is evident in the conception of Lohengrin. He has left us his own analysis of the characters of the new opera. Lohengrin seeks "the woman who would not call for explanations or defence, but who should love him with an unconditioned love." He cannot help carrying about with him the evidences of his high origin ; but he 32 A Study of Wagner desires to cloak these, as far as may be, so that he may win Elsa's love for his own sake. He desires, as Wagner says, to be loved, not to be worshipped ; and the tragedy of the drama arises from his ultimate recognition that Elsa cannot give him trustful, un- questioning love, but can only worship him, and desire to know the secret of his divinity. No one, surely, will allege that this is either a pro- found conception of life and love, or a particularly promising subject for a drama. Hence it is in the highest degree significant that Wagner should have attributed to it the importance he did ; and it has not been sufficiently recognised how here, as elsewhere, he was merely expressing himself where he thought he was expressing the universe. Here, for the first time, we get something like the key to the real Wagner. It will be argued, in the course of the subsequent chapters, that he was of an intensely impressionable artistic temperament, but of only minor intellectual powers. His own mental and emotional life was so opulent and so vivid that he saw nothing clearly beyond its borders ; his own personal desires, his own personal struggles, became in his mind epitomes of the desires and the struggles of the whole modern world. No estimate of Wagner, it seems to me, can be complete that does not recognise this ; it is of the first importance in a diag- nosis of the man as he really was. It is possible for a great artist to dramatise his personal experiences ; but the peculiarity of Wagner's mind was this tendency to see profound mystic significances in stories that are quite commonplace to other people. He had, that is, the true mystic's constitution. Though no man ever talked more of the necessity of the art-work appealing to our objective, physical senses, it is quite evident that to the objective aspects of most of his dramas, as other men see them, he was utterly blind.* He treated the 1 See Chapter vi. Tannhduser and Lohengrin 33 story simply as the material in which to embody an abstract thought. Hence the necessity of looking beyond the external features of each of his dramas to the circumstances of his own life at the time he was writing it. In the epoch from which Tannhauser and Lohengrin date, the peculiar cast of his thought may be traced to two main elements. In the first place he was beginning to experience those reactions from the sensuous that are inevitable in a nature like his, wherein the very intensity of the physical life at one moment brings with it, in the next, a loathing of the world of sense and an aspiration towards the mystical and the ideal. We can see this current very plainly in Tannhauser and Lohengrin, the latter play being only the logical outcome of that mood of disgust with the sensuous life that first found expression in Tannhauser} This current, however, was crossed and complicated by another. Wagner's general reaction against the world was assisted by the sense of his isolation among artists, and the sad conviction, after witnessing the reception of Tannhauser, that although many were impressed by the work, they were not impressed pre- cisely in the way he desired. Like Lohengrin, he was worshipped but not understood. ' Wagner protested against the critics reading into Tannhauser " a specifi- cally Christian and impotently pietistic drift " (A Communication to my Friends; G. S. iv. 279 ; Ellis, i. 323). He may have been right in this respect ; but there can be no doubt that the Tannhauser and Lohengrin epoch was one of physiological reaction against sensuality. I may point out, too, that Wagner is the most unreliable of guides as to the moods that prompted his works. Having no habits of calm, objective thought, his interpretation of the philo- sophy of his plays varied with the particular philosophical phase in which he happened to be living at the moment. In the present case, we see him deny- ing strenuously the pessimism that had been read into Tannhauser ; this was in the optimistic years. Later on, when he was convinced that pessimism was the only true reading of the world, he discovered that the Dutchman, Tann- hauser, and Lohengrin were pessimistic in essence. (See his letter to Roeckel of 23rd August 1856 ; and, on the general point, M. Lichtenberger's Wagner, Poite et Penseur, pp. 109-116.) C 34 A Study of Wagner " Not wounded vanity," he says, describing his sensations after the production of Tannhduser, " but the shock of an utter dis- illusionment, chilled my very marrow. It became clear to me that my Tannhduser had appealed to a handful of intimate friends alone, and not to the heart of a pubhc to whom, nevertheless, I had instinctively turned in the production of this my work." It was in this mood that he turned to the figure of Lohengrin, as the supreme embodiment of this tragedy of his own life ; and the next step, as usual with him, was to regard the drama as the expression of the tragedy of universal life. Hence he was doomed to further misunderstanding, further disillusionment. Men who had not the autobiographical key to the play, who saw it merely from the outside and judged it by the stan- dards they would apply to any other drama, were bound to exhibit only a languid interest in Lohengrin and Elsa and their " problem." The characters are not always real ; they do not strike us as being figures of flesh and blood ; while the conception of the man who comes from supernal heights, loves a maiden, and then leaves her because she asks him his name, seemed a mere aberration of dramatic psychology.-^ Wagner, of course, never looked at the matter in this way ; for him the story only existed as the means whereby to preach a philosophy that was then all-important to him. " The character and situation of this Lohengrin," he wrote, " I now recognise, with clearest sureness, as the type of the only absolute tragedy, in fine, of the tragic element of modern life ; and 1 Wagner sees in this story of tiie love of the godlike man and the earthly maiden another form of the old myth of Zeus and Semele, and, of course, fathers his own sentimental philosophy upon "the Folk" who created the myth. As a matter of fact, the Lohengrin story had its birth in the savage superstition that regards the name as part of the being of a man. A savage will not tell his name to a stranger because he thinks the possession of the name will give the stranger power for evil over him. (See Andrew Lang, Custom and Myth, p. 74 ; Clodd, Myths and X)reams, pp. 104, 105 ; Hart- land, Science of Fairy Tales, p. 309.) Mr. Hartland gives a number of savage myths that illustrate the power of this taboo upon the primitive mind. Tannhduser and Lohengrin 35 that of just as great significance for the Present, as was the Antigone, though in another relation, for the Ufe of the Hellenic state." This is the beginning of the real Wagner— the Wagner who elevated all his own personal desires into desires for the whole world ; who thought his own tragedy the type of " the only absolute tragedy." It was inevitable that a man like this should be misunderstood. If he could not see the world as it lay before the eyes of other men, it was natural that they should be unable to find the key to his peculiar psychology. And as, in the later case of the Ring, criticism of his drama from any other standpoint than his own made absolutely no impression on him, so now he quite failed to see why other men could not regard Lohengrin as he did. " It seemed then to me," he wrote in A Communication to my Friends, "and still it seems, most hard to comprehend how the deep tragedy of this subject and this character should have stayed unfelt; and how the story should have been so misunderstood that Lohengrin was looked on as a cold, forbidding figure, more prone to rouse dislike than sympathy. This reproach was first made to me by an intimate friend, whose knowledge and whose intellectual gifts I highly prize." The criticism passed upon the play by this friend was, we may assume, simply that of every plain man who knows nothing of the mystic meanings Wagner read into it, and who judges Lohengrin as he sees him. But the strain of self-centred idealism in Wagner that made him attach so much importance to his own dramatic " problems," made him at the same time impervious to criticism from minds of a different type. " In this case, however," he continues, " I reaped an experi- ence which has since been verified by repetition, namely, that upon the first direct acquaintance with my poem the impression produced is thoroughly affecting, and that this reproach only 36 A Study of Wagner enters when the impression of the art-work itself has faded, and given place to cold, reflective criticism. Thus this reproach was not an instinctive act of the immediate-feeling heart, but a pur- posed act of mediate reflection. In this occurrence I therefore found the tragedy of Lohengrin's character and situation con- firmed, as one deep-rooted in our modern life ; it was reproduced upon the art-work and its author, just in the same way as it had borne down upon the hero of the poem."^ That is an easy way of disposing of criticism ; and one might be tempted to characterise it in rather cynical language, were it not that Wagner's abnorma- lity of constitution is so palpable as almost to disarm criticism. One sees at a glance that such a mind as this was congenitally unfit for sane thinking ; that how- ever it might develop on the musical side, in all that concerned purely intellectual matters it was doomed to arrested development, fated to eke out its existence with a few innate preconceptions that took the place of in- dependently obtained ideas, and that no reasoning, no criticism could ever eradicate from the brain. Such was Wagner as his after life showed him to be. On the intellectual side he scarcely grew at all ; as he neared his seventieth year he was retailing practically the- same primitive fallacies that occupied him in his thirtieth. He lived a mental life that was wholly self- centred ; and he grew not by assimilation of other matter, not by the enriching of his own mental sub- stance with the best thoughts of other men, but simply by unfolding, by expansion of what he was at the moment of his birth. He laid stress, with perfect justice, upon the fact that his musical-dramatic system was not the product of reflection, of calculation, but of intuition. That is precisely what gave it its strength. He built up his drama as seemed best to his purely artistic sense, untrammelled by any thoughts of abstract theory. In the same way, he poured forth page after ' A Communication to my Friends, G. S. iv. 296, 297 ; i. 342. Tannhduser and Lohengrin 37 page of prose-work, also the product of intuition rather than of reflection — the mere strenuous self-expression of a man to whom self-expression is an imperative need. But on the musical side of his brain he was a heaven- born genius, while in matters of pure thought his intelligence was no more than ordinary. He had only to obey his musical intuitions to put together the most WpjiderfuLdra matic mus icthat ever has or ever will be sBeirpbis-bFaiH-i^aTr-spahtaneously to tTTeTc OTiCKp ti on" of dramatic character in terms of music, and when once he had come to maturity, almost everything he did was right by the grace of God. But there was no such saving grace in his intellectual work. He was framed to take his own peculiar view of things, a view no external influences could ever alter. No man was ever born so wise that the rude impact of other men's opinions against his own was not good for him ; and a mind of Wagner's type, that is quite incapable of pro- fiting by criticism, that brushes it aside with the remark that his critic had only to abjure reason and surrender himself to " feeling," and he would immediately see eye to eye with Wagner, is not one that can contribute much of value to the thought of the world. His intel- lectual life necessarily lost in breadth what it gained in intensity ; it evolved only the most ordinary and primi- tive conceptions, yet took them with a seriousness that is almost inexplicable to us. Read, for example, his own analysis of Lohengrin and Elsa. " Elsa is the Unconscious, the Undeliberate, into which Lohen- grin's conscious, deliberate being yearns to be redeemed; but this yearning, again, is itself the unconscious, undeliberate neces- sity in Lohengrin, whereby he feels himself akin to Elsa's being. Through the capability of this ' unconscious consciousness,' such as I myself now felt alike with Lohengrin, the nature of woman also . . . came to ever clearer understanding in my inner mind. . . . This woman, who with clear foreknowledge rushes on her doom, for sake of Love's imperative behest — who, amid the 38 A Study of Wagner ecstasy of adoration, wills yet to lose her all, if so be she cannot all-embrace her loved one ; this woman, who in her contact with this Lohengrin, of all men, must founder, and in doing so must shipwreck her beloved too ; this woman, who can love but thus and not otherwise, who, by the very outburst of her jealousy, wakes first from out the thrill of worship into the full reality of Love, and by her wreck reveals its essence to him who had not fathomed it as yet ; this glorious woman, before whom Lohengrin must vanish, for reason that his own specific nature could not understand her — I had found her now: and the random shaft that I had shot towards the treasure dreamt but hitherto un- known, was my own Lohengrin, whom now I must give up as lost ; to track more certainly the footsteps of that true Woman- hood, which should one day bring to me and all the world re- demption, after manhood's egoism, even in its noblest form, had shivered into self-crushed dust before her — Elsa, the woman — woman hitherto un-understood by me, and understood at last — that most positive expression of the purest instinct of the senses — made me a revolutionary at one blow. She was the Spirit of the Folk, for whose redeeming hand I too, as artist-man, was longing." 1 Well, who, in the name of heaven, takes Lohengrin and Elsa quite so seriously as that ? It would be pretty tall talk even over the two greatest dramatic concep- tions that brain of man had ever given birth to ; but over a pair of operatic puppets it strikes the qxiiet reader as being precisely what it is — a mere outburst of raw artistic hysteria. No one disputes for a moment that Wagner saw all this in his opera ; but it is quite certain that no one else can, unassisted, see it there, and that in this, as in later cases, not one of his partisans would have drawn Wagner's own philosophy from the drama itself, without the clues given in the prose-works. In any case, the philosophy of Lohengrin, even as analysed by Wagner himself, is of no import- ance and of no more than average interest. All this ' G. S. iv. 301, 302 ; Ellis, i. 346, 347. Tannhduser and Lohengrin 39 hysterical rhapsodising about Woman, and Love, and the Spirit of the Folk, and Redemption by Womanhood, may have seemed to Wagner the wisdom of all the ages, but it is terribly thin and innutritious to others. He was abnormal in his needs and in his manner of satisfying those needs, and one finally sweeps aside his semi-philosophical lucubrations as we do those of all other mystics, because their plane of thought is too remote from ours for us to have any interests in common. We admit, of course, that original genius is gifted with intuitions that are denied to ordinary mortals. But we draw a line of distinction — not, perhaps, a very clear line, but sufficient for all ordinary purposes — between originality and abnormality ; and unless a man's thought bears some rational relation to that of mankind in general, we class him not among the soaring thinkers, but among the victims of con- genital aberration. Wagner's panegyrists have been in error in taking his nebulous intuitions for profound thoughts, and in seeing supernal wisdom in the psycho- logical scheme of such an opera as Lohengrin ; they have only done so, in fact, because they hold, like Wagner himself, the crudest of views on the drama. A great drama is a study of complex human character under the stress of complex circumstance ; not a mere posing of personified abstractions like Elsa and Lohen- grin and Ortrud.^ It is not sufficient, as the Wagnerians 1 "The ensuing duet [between Frederick and Ortrud, in the 2nd Act] is," writes Dr. Hueffer, "musically founded on a new motive, intended to represent the evil principle of heathenish hatred and revenge, as opposed to the heavenly purity of the ' Graal-motive.' For Ortrud now discloses herself as the representative of old Friesian paganism, who by her falsehood and witchcraft has led her husband to the accusation of the innocent Chris- tian maiden " (Richard Wagner, pp. 31, 32). At the risk of offending my Wagnerian friends, I am impelled to say that to oppose personified abstrac- tions in this manner is not to write a drama ; and none but those whose dramatic sense is in the most primitive stage of culture could fail to perceive this. Even a Wagnerian like Dr. Hueffer has to admit that "the introduc- tion in a by-the-way manner of the two great religious principles appears not particularly happy, and it cannot be denied that the character of Ortrud, 40 A Study of Wagner Ihink, to merely state a philosophical or social problem in dramatic form ; the production only becomes a drama -when we feel that some artistic purpose has been served by choosing this particular mode of presentation in preference to all others. Shelley pointed out that " nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse " ; and it is necessary to urge against merely partisan admiration of the Lohengrin style of drama, that the dramatic form is only an irritating encumbrance upon the philosophical problem if it is incapable of justifying its own existence. Wagner may intend Lohengrin or Elsa to personify anything he likes ; but unless we can become interested in his Lohengrin and Elsa as vitalised presentations of human character, we can take no interest in the philo- sophical abstractions they are supposed to personify. And to the question whether Wagner has made his •characters sufficiently human in themselves to warrant our bothering about their esoteric significance, the answer must surely be in the negative. Lohengrin is not profoundly interesting to sane men and women ; Elsa is interesting so long as we can trace her psycho- logy along human and not quasi-philosophical lines ; while Ortrud and Telramund are for the most part mere figures of melodrama. The case of Ortrud, indeed, may well be used as an illustration of Wagner's failure to realise his philosophical intentions because he cannot make his character humanly interesting. " Ortrud," he wrote to Liszt, " is a woman who does not know love. . . . Politics are her essence. The political man is repulsive ; the political woman is horrible, and it is this horror I had to represent. There is a kind of love in this woman, the though grand in its dramatic conception, has slightly suffered through this unnecessary complication of motives." Other people feel that Lohengrin and Elsa are also, in a great degree, abstractions rather than human characters. The stage of dramatic conception represented by Lohengrin is really very primitive. Tannhduser and Lohengrin 41 love of the past, of dead generations, the terribly insane love of ancestral pride, which finds its expression in the hatred of every- thing living, actually existing." ^ I appeal to the Wagnerians to say whether this is not simply the self-delusion of the sincere but uncritical artist ; whether they really see in the melodramatic Ortrud the type of the woman the foundation of whose being is politics. The plain truth is that she does not strike us in the first place as dramatically real, and that therefore we remain deaf and blind to the philosophical lessons she is supposed to inculcate. In the same way, we say of the opera as a whole that since the characters are not real, the beautiful moral lesson which Wagner had in view simply bores us. It may or may not be true that, as M. Kufferath says, the fundamental idea of the Lohengrin and similar legends is that happiness can live " only as long as illusion lives ; that desire alone sees beauty in things ; that all curiosity is vain and deceptive ; that the ideal — our most absolute need — falls into dust under the finger that touches it." ^ All this, I repeat, may or may not be true ; but if Wagner has no more to say to us than this, he might have said it in the same form and in the same number of lines as M. Kufferath. The very essence of the numerous old legends — Indian, Greek, Mediaeval — in which this theme is set forth, is that the story is made interesting in the telling ; we read it not for philosophical fortifica- tion but for aesthetic pleasure. In the case of Wagner's drama, the characters themselves are so unconvincingly drawn that we either take no artistic interest in them as human beings, or else the didactic purpose shows so clearly through the quasi-dramatic form that we resent its intrusion upon our artistic mood — as when Ortrud shrieks about the gods of paganism. Altogether, ' Letters to Liszt, 30th January 1852, Eng. trans, i. 192, 193. ^ Maurice Kufferath, Le Thi&tre de Richard Wagner: Lohengrin, p. 67. 42 A Study of Wagner the study of Lohengrin makes us certain of two points of importance in any study of Wagner: (i) that he saw in his operatic characters a whole world of abstract and didactic significances that no one else would have seen there had he left no prose works behind him ; and (2) that this unconsciousness that he was presenting only personified abstractions instead of dramatic characters, indicates a serious flaw in his artistic nature. II On the artistic side, Tannhduser and Lohengrin are interesting not only for their great musical beauty but as stages in what I have called Wagner's progress to self-consciousness. Taking Tristan and Isolde as the most perfect specimen both of Wagner's musical dramas and our nearest approach to what a musical drama ought to be, it is readily seen how far Wagner is in Tannhauser and Lohengrin from this standard, and on the other hand how great is the advance from Rienzi and the Dutchman. There is still much superfluous, matter that merely lengthens the dramatic action with- out elucidating or intensifying it — choruses, for example, being inserted with an eye rather to purely musical effect than to the conduct of the drama ; the leading characters are not yet as musical in conception as they should be — that is, their mental world is frequently incongruous with musical expression, and tends to obscurity under the limitations this mode of expression imposes on it ; and Wagner is not yet able to construct a musical as distinct from a poetical drama — that is, he is compelled to piece together his story with long passages that are quite unfitted for any sort of musical treatment. The writing of Tannhauser and Lohengrin must have been an invaluable lesson to him in the art of text-construction, for he could not fail to be impressed with the fact that though it is easy to set notes to any- Tannhduser and Lohengrin 43 thing, music only springs spontaneously from words whose content is not quite incongruous with musical expression.^ We smile when we read that the old Meistersingers, when they set music to a scriptural text, included in their setting such exordiums as " the twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis records," or, " Moses, the eleventh, reports."^ But if Wagner will write, as he does in Tannhauser, such words as "When I look around upon this noble assembly, what a fine spectacle causes my heart to glow ! So many heroes, brave and wise ! . . ." * or again, as in Lohengrin, " One day Elsa took the boy out for a pleasant walk in the wood, but returned without him ; in simulated anguish she asked for news of him, pretending that she had accidentally strayed from him . . ." * and will try to set these words to music, he commits an absurdity almost as great as that of the serious German singers of old. To revert to the distinction already made above, we cannot write music, but only notes, to passages of this kind. Look, as an illustration, at Wagner's setting of the last-quoted words : — BE ^^^I^^^^^EF^ ; ^3^ Lust wandelnd fuhrte El sa den Knaben einst zum Bl -F 1 I must refer the reader to Chapter v. for a fuller discussion of this question. ^ See Mr. Krehbiel's charming article in his Studies in the Wagnerian Drama. ' Vocal Score (NoTello's edition), p. 128. * Ibid., p. 8. 44 A Study of Wagner 3^fi3: .^^,... :tap • •^__-^_ Wald, doch oh - ne ihn kehrte sie zuriick ; mit falscher Sorge ^^ I© -— iS>- t,e- J^?; EiE: -©- ai: 'JSJ^l is^M^^^^^^mm^m^i frug sie nach dem Bruder, da sie von unge - fahr von ihm ver - lL%EEg=5=5EE^i -?^-?--l-^- ifl^i ^m irrt, bald seine Spur, so sprach sie, ^icht mehr fand. BE This is not music ; one could get as good an effect by putting a number of crotchets, quavers, and semi- quavers in a pepper-box, and shaking them out pro- miscuously over a stave. The essence of a musical phrase is that there is some reason for the notes going Tannhduser and Lahengrin 45 this way rather than that — we feel an intellectual in- evitableness in the sequence ; but there is no raison d'etre for the notes Wagner has written here. A thou- sand men could sit down and throw notes upon the paper in a thousand different ways, each having as much — or as little — real reference to the words as the notes of Wagner. The truth is, that words of this kind, since they contain nothing of the nature of music, ask for no musical setting, and have no place in musical drama ; just as "The words of this anthem are taken from the tenth and eleventh verses of the third chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans," has no place in the music of the anthem itself. It is unfortunate for the operatic writer that this should be so ; for he is reduced to the dilemma of having to put unemotional passages into his opera in order to tell a connected story, and yet is constrained to seek for these passages an emotional form of expression. Wagner himself has said that the unique form of music being melody, music and melody are inseparable — it being impossible, in- deed, to conceive the one without the other ; and that, consequently, if a piece of music is without melody, it means that the musician has been unable to create a vital form to match the sentiment — he simply writes quasi-musical phrases that leave the ear indifferent.^ That may serve as a precise characterisation of this and similar passages in Tannhduser and Lohengrin. Wagner's failure, of course, is due not to any deficiency of musical power, but to the restrictions imposed upon his musical imagination by the unimaginative quality of the words. Purely instrumental music exists in and by and for itself, being under no constraint of compli- ance with any mental picture outside itself ; while vocal music is, broadly speaking, intended to present the verbal sense in another and more intensive form ; its function is to rethink the speech-utterance in music. ' See the " Zukunftsmusik." 46 A Study of Wagner It is evident that this is impossible where the words, having no emotional content — being, in fact, a purely intellectual utterance — are incapable of having their meaning expressed in any other but verbal terms. All dramatic recitative is a compromise between the musi- cian's impulse to sheer musical expression for its own sake and his desire to follow the lead of the poet ; and while sheer musical expression is — on a less emotional plane than that of pure music — out of the question in connection with merely banal words, there is also nothing in the words to stimulate the composer to even a modified exercise of the musical imagination. The average opera-composer skipped blandly over this diffi- culty ; he candidly confessed that he only desired you to listen to him as a musician in his arias and concerted pieces, and that the recitatives were inserted between these merely because a story had to be told somehow or other. For Wagner the solution of the main prob- lem of opera was not so easy. To the end of his days he cannot be said to have fully recognised that musical drama cannot be homogeneous throughout, precisely because of this necessary intrusion of merely ordinary matter upon the lyrical excitement of the higher moments of the drama ; though he strove more and more to exclude from his operas whatever was not in some degree congruous with the spirit of music, and once, in Tristan, achieved a libretto that is still our nearest approach to the ideal drama for music. In a sense, then, his partisans are right in saying that the progressive excellence of his work was due to his growth as the poet, not the musician, of his material — though, as we shall see later, his improvement as a poet was really only a by-product of his improvement as a musician, in that the increasing clearness of his musical conceptions, and his desire to realise them in drama, led him intuitively to put only such matter into his poems as would lend itself to musical treat- Tannhduser and Lohengrin 47 ment. Upon the purely musical side his art was, of course, developing by leaps and bounds. The great faculty necessary to the dramatic musician — that of transmuting the verbal sense spontaneously into an equivalent musical speech — which no musician has ever possessed in like degree, was now coming to full maturity in Wagner. One has only to look at the recitative with which Tannhauser opens the opera in order to realise this ; there is nothing in the Dutchman to place beside this and a score of similar passages for their combination of musical beauty and dramatic significance. Wherever the musician has a free hand, indeed, Wagner can now compel what shapes he likes of beauty ; they rise as obediently to his call as spirits io the incantations of a magician. He is beginning to think his characters in music ; he is learning how to conceive them plastically, and to symbolise them in suggestive phrases. In this respect the advance from the Dutchman even to Tannhduser is very obvious. The Dutchman himself is statuesquely portrayed ; one be- lieves in his existence more even than in that of Senta ; but the other characters of the opera do not really live. In Tannhduser, not only are the spiritual forces of the drama — such as the pilgrim-music — conceived with a positiveness to which there is no parallel in the earlier work, but the characters themselves are made to stand out plastic and concrete and individual by the peculiar definiteness of the music that is given to them. Characters like Venus and Ortrud are rather abstractions than human beings, yet even they have a certain musical distinctness of form ; while such characters as Tannhauser, Elizabeth, Wolfram,^ the Landgrave, Lohengrin, Elsa, and the King are musi- cally differentiated with the utmost clearness. This is ' Although Wolfram is really only a minor character in Tannhduser, his nobility of nature is clearly defined immediately upon his entrance ; see the vocal score, p. 59. 48 A Study of Wagner an effect achieved as much by Wagner's orchestration as by any other musical factor. In Tannhduser he had shown how a skilful change of orchestral colouring could induce a profound imaginative sympathy with the changes of the dramatic picture — as in the 3rd Act, where the tones of the wood -wind, becoming ever more ethereal, more virginal, towards the end of Elizabeth's prayer, gradually merge into the deeper colour of tuba and trombone as the more sombre grief of Wolfram comes to the forefront of the action. In Lohengrin this clarity of perception of the pic- torial and suggestive power of the orchestra leads to the most wonderful results. No one can ever forget those exquisite harmonies in the violins that set before us the ethereal nature of Lohengrin as no words and no painting could do ; or the maidenly suggestiveness of the wood-wind that accompanies the entry of Elsa, and her dreamy song upon the balcony ; or the solemn, heroic chords of brass in the accompaniment to the King's prayer. In all that concerns the musical repre- sentation of character, Lohengrin is almost as much in advance of Tannhduser as Tannhduser is in advance of the Dutchman; and it is only the still greater develop- ment shown in Wagner's later works that hinders us from appreciating Lohengrin at its proper value. Had Wagner died in 1850, Lohengrin would now appear to us as a most astonishing achievement in musical characterisation . As a dramatic musician, of course, he had not yet attained his full development. The monotonous regularity of rhythm we noticed in the Dutchman appears now and again in Tannhduser and Lohengrin; and besides the difficulty, already pointed out, of finding interesting music for uninteresting words, Wagner is seen to be face to face with the eternal problem of the compromise between the lyrist and the dramatist. In the Dutchman, as I have said, we are sometimes disturbed by the Tannhduser and Lohengrin 49 incongruity between the regular sequences of tonality in a musical phrase and the shifting colour of the dramatic emotion which it is intended to portray. In Lohengrin we find Wagner, in his anxiety to be dramatic rather than "absolute-musical," sometimes falling into the opposite error, wilfully disturbing the natural cadence of a phrase in order, as it were, to clinch an argument, and giving us a strange sense of being thrown violently from the musical into another world .^ Wagner had in fact developed, as was only to be expected, far more rapidly as a lyrist than as a dramatist. While there is nothing in Rienzi, for example, one-tenth as beautiful as the lyric music of Tannhauser or Lohengrin, much of the dramatic music of the two later works is hardly above the level of that of Rienzi. Failing to conceive the less emotional passages of his poem as definitely as the more emotional ones, he is forced into mere unmusi- cal declamation, or into purely conventional figures of melody and harmony. Hence those frequent upward runs in the violins, terminating in a chord of the seventh or the ninth — a device that fails ultimately to make any impression whatever upon us ; hence also the numerous attempts to get a strenuous dramatic effect by a mere succession of diminished sevenths and their inversions. These are evident signs of an inability to rethink the poem in music, to find a true and sponta- neous musical equivalent for the words or the situation. We see the same difficulty, on a larger scale, in such scenes as the first of the 2nd Act of Lohengrin. The seasoned Wagnerian does not altogether agree with the non-Wagnerian verdict that this is the dullest music in the opera ; on the contrary, it shows in some respects, ^ See, for example, the passage in which Lohengrin tells the King of his determination to abandon the proposed campaign (vocal score, p. 235). The conclusion of the phrase leads us to expect a modulation into the key of A ; but instead of descending from E to A, the last note rises unexpectedly to F, with the tonic harmony of that note. D so A Study of Wagner particularly in that of dramatic orchestration, Wagner •on his way to the later marvellous triumphs of expres- sion. But there can be no dispute that to a certain ■extent the popular judgment is right ; a great deal of the scene between Frederick and Ortrud is not music, but rhetoric that just falls short of being music. Even here, however, the advance on all the earlier works is again obvious. However Wagner may fail at times in the vocal portions, the orchestra has become more potent, more significant than it had ever been before ; the expressive phrase that writhes in and out among the general texture of this scene is so dramatically illuminative of the passions of the protagonists that we are often unconscious of the defects of the vocal phrases. Plainly, so far as Wagner fails in Tannhciuser and Lohen- £rin it is not so much because of any shortcomings as a musician, but because he had unknowingly set him- self the stupendous task of uniting music with the base and the ugly. It is noticeable that while, as I have said, he puts notes into the mouths of Frederick and Ortrud that are really not music at all, the music of the Herald is always a delight to hear — although the Herald is not in any way a dramatic figure, and Frederick and Ortrud are, at least in intention, strenuously dramatic. The reason is that these are characters fitted more for poetical than for musical treatment. A poet can show us all the vileness of a character, its baseness and its villainy, while the verbal medium in which he works, being apprehended less in its sensuous than its intel- lectual qualities, cannot lead to any sense of incongruity between what is conveyed and the manner of convey- ing it. With music the case is different. It is a truism to say that music must be beautiful in order to be music ; and a difficulty immediately rises when an attempt is made to link it with unbeautiful things. If it is sensuously pleasing, the mind cannot realise the ugli- ness of the character with whom it is supposed to be Tannhduser and Lohengrin 51 associated ; ^ while if the ugHness of the character be stressed so much as to make the tonal phrases un- pleasing, the mind takes no interest either in the actor or his utterance. There is only one escape from the difficulty, as Wagner partly realised in later years. Vocal music can hardly be descriptive ; for a singer who produces sounds that are not beautiful in them- selves will not be listened to. The dramatic composer, then, must make use of the orchestra to suggest all those things that are strictly non-beautiful in themselves, but yet are necessary to his drama. Wagner may write page upon page of recitative in Lohengrin, accompanied simply by a tremolo in the strings, without either giving us musical pleasure or portraying a dramatic character. But he has only to suggest ugliness in his orchestra, without attempting to make the ugliness beautiful in the singer's phrases, and he has achieved his purpose. One realises the brute strength of Hunding, or Alberich's sunless hate of life, far more vividly by the orchestral colouring associated with them, than would be possible from any amount of pseudo-descriptive recitative. This, then, is the direction in which the dramatic composer ought to work, if he wishes to represent the unbeautiful and non-lyrical in the medium of the most beautiful and most lyrical of all the arts. Even in Lohengrin, Wagner has partly become conscious of this truth ; the tortuous theme that winds its way through the first scene of the 2nd Act is really more expressive than the bulk of the music actually put into the mouths of Frederick and Ortrud.^ The point to which Wagner has attained in Tann- hauser and Lohengrin, then, may be defined as one at ^ See the remarks on Verdi's Otello in Chapter v. ^ The psychological difference between a purely symbolical or suggestive theme like this, and a vocal theme that must appeal to quite a different musical sense, may be seen from p. 218 of the score, where the phrase that has been so expressive in the bassoons becomes curiously inexpressive and uninteresting •when sung by Elsa. 52 A Study of Wagner which his lyrical faculties have developed beyond the dramatic, the failures in the purely dramatic portions of these works being due partly to inexperience, partly to a bad constitution of the poem. For the rest, we see the later Wagner most clearly in the prelude to Lohengrin. There for the first time he writes a purely orchestral piece that is not a pot-pourri, like the over- tures to the Dutchman and Tannhauser, of the main themes- of the opera, but an attempt to represent in sound the whole psychology and philosophy of a drama. Thus the prelude to Lohengrin stands much nearer to his later preludes than do those to Tannhauser and the Dutchman, where the construction is more formal, the sequence less logical, the total picture less homogeneous. Liszt has pointed out that, although the Tannhauser overture is built up of themes drawn from the opera, it is really something distinct from the opera itself, comprehensible and admirable to those who know nothing of the drama ; whereas the prelude to Lohen- grin cannot be properly understood except as the formula into which the whole subsequent drama is compressed.i ' Liszt, Lohengrin et Tannhauser de Richard Warier (1851), pp. 47, 48. CHAPTER IV ART AND LIFE 10HENGRIN, though not performed until 1850, _y was completed in the summer of 1847. From that year until 1853, when he commenced the Rheingold, Wagner entirely ceased from musical com- position, and devoted himself to thinking out the prin- ciples of art and life and drama which were implicit in the best of his creative work up to Lohengrin, and more consciously incorporated in the later works. It is at this period that his literary activity may really be said to commence, for with the exception of the Auto- biographical Sketch, written in 1842, the sketches and articles already published by him were hardly of more than passing interest.^ During the early years of his exile Wagner not only thought out several subjects for dramatic treatment, but published a goodly number of treatises dealing with his own ideals of poetry and music and the drama, and the relations of art and politics in modern times. A reference to the Synthetic Table at the commencement of this volume will show that the most important of these writings all fall within a period of about three years — Art and Revolution appear- ing in 1849, The Art-Work of the Future, Art and Climate, and Judaism in Music in 1850, Opera and Drama and A Communication to my Friends in 1851.* Opera and ' An exception may perhaps be made in favour of A Pilgrimage to Beet- hoven, which contains some characteristic Wagnerisnis on music and the drama. 2 He writes to Liszt (Dec. 14, 1851) that "the three operatic poems, with a Communication to my Friends, will appear at the end of this month," On Jan, I, 1852, he tells Uhlig, "Yesterday I received the book." 53 54 A Study of Wagner Drama will be considered subsequently ; here it will be well to discuss simply the general tenor of Wagner's opinions upon life and art and politics. One must do him the justice, at the outset, to say that with politics in the ordinary sense of the word Wagner concerned himself but little. The fact that in 1849 he had to flee from Dresden, a warrant being issued for his arrest, and the fact that he is known to have taken some part in the revolution, have given colour to the theory that he really aimed at political revolution for its own sake ; and his speech at the Vaterlandsverein has been looked upon as the expression of a practical communism in social life, and a practical desire for a republic rather than a monarchy in Saxony. Hence when he came, in later years, to acclaim the young Ludwig of Bavaria as the possible Messiah of German culture, and to expatiate at great length on the necessity of the Kingship,^ he was regarded as having been guilty of at any rate a little apostasy. Without having the slightest sympathy with his later idealist and sentimen- talist views on the function of the monarchy, one must do him the justice to say that the charge of renegadism is quite ill-founded. There is nothing in the Vaterlands- verein speech '^ to bear out the imputation of commun- istic or republican ideas ; and as to Wagner's political theories as a whole, one need have no hesitation in accepting his own statement that he meddled with politics not for their own sake, but simply as a means of bringing about the artistic conditions which, he thought, were essential for civilisation, but which could not be attained under the existing regime.^ As he him- self wrote in 1872 : — 1 Set State and Religion (iZ6\). ^ It is given in the fourth volume of Mr. Ellis's translation of the prose works. It is plain, too, from the speech, that Wagner was only half a republican. ' ^ "... It was just this earnestness '' [of his artistic aims] " that once constrained me to enter realms apparently so distant as State and Religion. Art and Life 55- "I believed in the Revolution, and in its unrestrainable necessity, with certainly no greater immoderation than Carlyle : only I also felt that I was called to point out to it the way of rescue. Far though it was from my intent to define the new, which should grow from the ruins of a sham-filled world, as a fresh political ordering : I felt the rather animated to draw the outlines of the Art- Work which should rise from the ruins of a sham-bred Art." ^ All that we know of Wagner, indeed, is quite in- congruous with the assumption that he ever cared seriously for politics for its own sake, or that during the stormy days of 1848 and 1849 he was actuated by any other desire than that of placing art upon a surer footing. That he was in an exceedingly febrile condi- tion at the time is plainly apparent from the glowing fervour and mad idealism of the views he propounds, as well as from the ill-ordered enthusiasm of the writing.^ The object of Art and Revolution is to discover the relations between art and the modern state. The What there I sought was really never aught beyond my art — that art which I took so earnestly, that I asked for it a basis and a sanction in Life, in State, and lastly in Religion. That these I could not find in modern life, impelled me to search out the cause in my own fashion ; I had to try to make plain to myself the tendence of the State, in order to account for the disdain with which I found my earnest art-ideal regarded everywhere in public life. But it certainly was characteristic of my inquiry, that it never led me down into the arena oi politics proper ; that is to say, the politics of the day remained as entirely untouched by me, as, despite the commotion of those times, they never truly touched myself. That this or that form of government, the juris- diction of this or that party, this or that alteration in the mechanism of our State affairs, could furnish my art-ideal with any veritable furtherance, I never fancied. . . ." State and Religion, in G. S. viii. 3, 4 ; Ellis, iv. 5, 6. On the whole question see Praeger, Wagner as I knew him, and Mr. Ellis's j84g: A Vindication, ^ Introdtation to Art and Revolution, G. S. iii. 2 ; Ellis, i. 24. 2 He himself, when writing the Introduction to the third and fourth volumes of the Prose Works, in 1872, acknowledged " the fervid enthusiasm which pervaded my style, and gave to my remarks more of a poetic than a scientific character," and the "impassioned tangle of ideas" that came from his im- perfect assimilation of the philosophy of Feuerbach. 56 A Study of Wagner Greek drama, Wagner thinks, was so great because it was the expression of the whole community at its best and noblest, the expression of a free people un- tainted by egoism. When the Athenian State declined. Tragedy fell along with it, the community being now rent into innumerable warring units ; and the two thousand years between the Athenians and us belong not to Art but to Philosophy. In the Roman world, the only bond of union was the universal slavery and misery under which the community lived. From a condition such as this no art could come, for art is " pleasure in itself, in existence, in community " ; whereas the Roman system bred only disgust and weariness of life. The product of it was Christianity, which is neither art itself, nor capable of evok- ing art. Whereas the free Greek lived openly, in full enjoyment of himself and of the world, the Christian retired into his cloister, and, despising the world of sense, could receive no artistic impulse therefrom. There was in Christian Europe, in fact, a feud between the " instinct of life " and the " force of conscience," which was fatal to art. The Renaissance only came when the Church openly showed herself in her real light as a mere temporal power ; and even the Renais- sance had root in the art of Greece. In the days of Louis XIV., worldly dominion took art under its own protection ; in our own day art is sold, body and soul, to another master — Commerce. The true essence of our art is Industry ; " its ethical aim, the gaining of gold ; its aesthetic purpose, the entertainment of those whose time hangs heavily on their hands." The modern stage does indeed reflect our modern life, as the Greek stage mirrored the life of Athens ; but the world represented in our art is one of hollowness and corruption. The Drama is no longer the supreme picture of man's essential life. Its impotence is shown in the fact of its division into two contrasted orders, Art and Life 57 the spoken play and the opera ; a division whereby the drama is prevented from rising to its true height of passion, and the opera becomes a mere mechanical mixture of a number of scenic, vocal, and instrumental effects, without any informing dramatic aim. Thus on the one hand we have the shallow audience, fatigued with its day's ignoble labour, coming to the theatre solely for an evening's relaxation ; on the other hand, the artist willing to sell himself and his art for gold and fame. The Greek tragedy was the expression of the deepest and noblest consciousness of the people ; our deepest and noblest consciousness finds expression, not in the stage, but in denunciation of it. What to the Greek was art, has to us become mere handicraft. The Greek, however, was enabled to live so free and elevated a life by reason of his manual labour being done for him by slaves ; and we can see now that " Beauty and Strength, as attributes of public life, can then alone prove lasting blessings, when they are the common gifts of all mankind." Unfortunately, the last two thousand years have seen not the slave raised to the level of the free man, but the free man dragged down to the level of the slave. Gold is the only means by which a man can now become relatively free ; and after gold all strive, even the artist. Among the Greeks, art lived in the public con- science ; among us it lives only in the private conscience. Thus Greek art, being the expression of the communal conscience, was in its essence conservative ; our art, being opposed in spirit to the main forces of the com- munity, is of necessity revolutionary. Only revolution can reunite the dissevered arts that sprang from the disintegration of the Greek drama ; only revolution can give us the real art-work of the modern world. We must be born again as free men. Culture has destroyed civilisation, and must in her turn be overthrown by Nature ; this will constitute Revolution. In the free 58 A Study of Wagner world of mankind, the ignoble cares of life being less dominant than now, the best energies of men will be revealed as pure artistic impulse. Mankind will no longer find all its strength wasted in the mere effort to maintain life ; industry will be so developed that only a relatively small amount will assure comfortable exist- ence, thus leaving men more leisure and more desire for artistic work. The culture of physical beauty will raise the pulse of joy in life, until ultimately the healthy activities of men will make each of them, in some field or other, an artist — all individual artistic impulses, how- ever, being focussed in the one great art-work, the Drama. Every art, in fact, suffers from the present reign of industrialism — the Drama most of all ; and the prime requisite for its salvation is the freeing of the Theatre from the curse of mere commercial speculation. It must be conducted on none but artistic lines, and for none but artistic purposes, the public having the right of free admission. Art and Revolution was published in the autumn of 1849. On 1 6th September Wagner writes to Uhlig : — " Wigand is already publishing a pamphlet of mine, Art and Revolution. . . . Get this little work as soon as it appears : it will be only a precursor — as soon as I get to work again I shall follow it up by one of greater detail, The Art- Work of the Future ; to which, afterwards a third, The Artists of the Future, will form the conclusion. ... It is most essential that I should accom- plish this work and send it into the world before going on with my immediate artistic productions. I must come myself, and those who are interested in my artistic being must come with me, to a clear understanding ; else shall we forever grope about in hateful twilight, which is worse than absolute darkness in which one sees nothing and only religiously clutches hold of the old-accustomed balustrade." ^ He felt, in fact, the need of some clarification of his ■^ Letter 2 to Uhlig, Eng. trans, p. 7. Art and Life 59 ideas before proceeding to further creative work ; as he himself goes on to say in the letter just quoted from — " If I accomplish this to my satisfaction, I shall then set to work at the music of my Siegfried; for that is what I yearn after, with all my soul's sincerity." But there was a further reason for his giving utterance to himself in prose at this time. His flight to Switzerland had brought before him in the most pressing manner the problem of daily maintenance. He could expect very little remuneration from his operas, and was, in fact, to a large extent dependent during the whole of his exile upon the support of noble-minded and generous friends. We may accept his own assurance, made more than once in after years, that he cared nothing for wealth except as a means to the furthering of art ; and that he wanted nothing more than a bare competence, something that would preserve him from the necessity of wasting his finest energies in fruitless and ignoble toil, and leave him free to give the world the best that was in him. There may be a touch of weakness and of egoism in the wish ; for other men than he have had to work as best they could for truth and beauty, carrying withal burdens in- finitely heavier and more grievous than his — and have wrought with noble patience and dignity and without complaint. But human nature is a complex thing, and if we are to call Wagner's lamentation egoistic, we must do so in a spirit of sympathy rather than of censure, recognising him to be the peculiar organism he was. No man ever took his art more seriously ; few have made such sacrifices for their ideal ; and if we are -compelled to see some slight touch of weakness in his constant reliance upon the pecuniary support of others, the magnitude of the cause for which he was fighting preserves the weakness from any taint of the ignoble.^ Without passing, as it is so easy to do, exaggerated * See the last chapter of the present volume. 6o A Study of Wagner moral censure upon him, we may be content to look objectively at the phenomenon of this egoism in its relation to his art and his theories. From the rough outline already given of Art and Revolution, it can readily be seen how insistent Wagner was upon the importance of art to social well-being. In this at all events he was perfectly sincere ; but the pressure of pecuniary need upon himself, at a time when his feverish brain was filled with thoughts and visions of new things to be done in music, was undoubtedly at the bottom of his thesis that the artist was out of touch with the modern world, and that art ought to be the most important factor in the lives of men. The leap from the purely individual case to the universal pro- position was of course unconscious, instinctive ; but, as we have already seen in connection with Tannhauser and Lohengrin, a quite Wagnerian procedure. In this same letter to Uhlig, dated i6th September 1849, he writes : — "You see, dear friend, it is such trifles as conventional fame- seeking and anxiety for daily bread which threaten to exert — and in a decisive manner — their august modern sovereignty over the true, free sphere of man's art. But can there be a choice here ? Certainly not, not even if persons like you begin to be prudent and practical. I will be happy, and a man can only be that if he is free ; but that man only is free who is what he can and there- fore must be. Whoever, therefore, satisfies the inner necessity of his being, is free ; because he feels himself at one with himself, because everything which he does answers to his nature, to his true needs. Whoever follows a necessity, not from within but from without, is subject to compulsion ; he is not free, but an unfortunate slave. The free man laughs at oppression from with- out, if only inner necessity be not sacrificed to it. ... I don't care what happens to me, if only I become what, according to my nature, I ought to become. So shall I be right, even if no idler take notice of me. Apropos! If you know any persons who would give me as much per year as would satisfy my wants, in exchange for all that I may do during my life, in the way of Art and Life 6i writing poetry and music, please give them my address. With- out this help I can do nothing." It was the unconscious egoism that ran all through Wagner's work that made him assume that because he wished to be supported by other men in order that he might write as he desired, therefore all the world should join in placing art and the artist on the topmost pinnacle^ and in reshaping society to this end. No sooner had he completed Art and Revolution, however, than he seems to have felt the necessity of giving further and ampler expression to his views.. Almost before the pamphlet is published he writes to Uhlig that he has been " seized with a furious desire to prodvice a new literary composition. The Art-Work of the Future " ; and later on he writes that " this will be my last literary work " — a promise which he lamentably failed to keep. Feeling that Art and Revolution had not made his position quite clear enough, he designs The Art-Work of the Future to show in detail what in the former work had only been broadly sketched out. " The genetic origin of our mutilated modern art from collec- tive Grecian art," he says in one of his letters, "could only be made clear by showing in a precise manner the important moment when this art passed from direct representation into indirect re- presentation ; from Tragedy into the so-called plastic art. . . . But if I wish to show that plastic art, being artificial — only an art abstracted from true art — must cease entirely in the future, if to this plastic art — painting and sculpture — claiming nowa- days to be principal art, I deny a life in the future,^ you will ^ Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose intimate knowledge of all Wagner's works is beyond question, strangely remarks in one place that " it is not true, as has been asserted again and again by malicious and ignorant people, that Wagner denied the right of any art to exist singly" {Richard Wagner, pp. 201-202). If the words quoted above do not mean this, it is difficult to say what they do mean ; and if his remarks on instrumental music are not quite so definite, they express the same point of view (see Letter 55 62 A Study of Wagner allow that this should not and could not be done with two strokes of the pen." i This, then, is the thesis of The Art-Work of the Future. It begins with some not very illuminative remarks on Man having sprmig from Nature, and Nature first coming to consciousness in Man.^ As Man stands to Nature, says Wagner, so stands Art to Man. " Man will never be that which he can and should be, until his life is a true mirror of Nature, a conscious following of the •only real necessity, the inner natural necessity, and is no longer held in subjugation to an outer artificial counterfeit — which is thus no necessary, but an arbitrary power. Then first will Man to Uhlig, Eng. trans, p. 190). In his treatise On Musical Criticism, again, he distinctly says that " we have nothing in the least to do with our music of io-day, excepting in that we wage war to the death against it as an absolute separate art" (G. S. v. 61 ; Ellis, iii. 69). The instances which Mr. Cham- berlain cites to the contrary are quite futile, and do not apply in any way. The 14th letter to Uhlig, I may say in passing, does not quite bear the inter- pretation Mr. Chamberlain tries to put upon it. And he simply stultifies himself when he remarks that so far from Wagner denying the right of each art to exist separately, he maintained that " in the drama, illuminated by music, the people will find itself and every art ennobled and beautified. True, none of the single arts will appear alone in the drama ; here the rays of different ■colour and refrangibility are united again to the original, pure white light of the sun. But from this source of all true inspiration each single art will draw fresh strength and undying life." I confess my inability to see any distinction between saying that the separate arts can find true life only in their union in the drama, and denying the right of any single art to exist separately. When Wagner, for example, talks of "the release of plastic art taking place when the stone is resolved into the flesh and blood of men, when the rigid monument of the past becomes the moving life of the present, and the soul of the sculptor passes into the body of the dancer," and of plastic art being " changed from stone into the flesh and blood of men," one can only say that he takes from it everything that makes it plastic art. His argument, indeed, if one really must use plain language, is perilously like arrant nonsense— in the capacity for which, at times, he has been surpassed only by some of his fanatical disciples. ^ Letter 6 to Uhlig, Eng. trans, pp. 25, 26. ^ Wagner is, unfortunately, given to a form of empty verbiage that one has to recognise as typically Teutonic. Such aphorisms as "All that subsists depends on the conditions by which it subsists " are not very remarkable for either lucidity or force. Art and Life 63 become a living man; whereas till now he carries on a mere existence, dictated by the maxims of this or that Religion, Nationality, or State. In like manner will Art not be the thing she can and should be, until she is or can be the true, conscious image and exponent of the real Man, and of man's genuine nature-bidden life; until she therefore need no longer borrow the conditions of her being from the errors, perversities, and unnatural distortions of our modern life." The vital force which alone acts from necessity, and from which alone redeeming art can come, is the Folk — the Folk being defined as "the epitome of all those men who feel a common and collective want." The enemies of the Folk feel only an artificial need, the satisfaction of which is Luxury. All life and all thought depend in the first and last instance on physical perception. Abstract thought, that tries to shape the world from itself, and Fashion, which is mere arbitrary need, are the ruling elements of the modern world, and are altogether antagonistic to art, which must spring from actual life. The artist's thought " can only gain redemption in a physically-present art- work." His ideal is unattainable under existing condi- tions ; the great united art-work, employing each separate art as a means to the great end — "the unconditioned, absolute portrayal of perfected human nature " — can be the product only of the united Manhood of the Future. Hellenic art was so great because it came from the activity of the whole race working in community ; we in our turn must make our art the expression of universal human nature. The outer man expresses himself to the eye, the inner man to the ear. When he comes to the limit of his utterance by external movement and gesture, there comes to his aid the expression of vocal tone, which springs directly from the emotion within the breast. 64 A Study of Wagner Speech, again, comes to the aid of vocal tone, making clear and definite and unmistakable what was formerly vague and general. " Speech is the condensation of the element of Voice, and the Word is the crystallised measure of tone. In Speech, feeling conveys itself by ear to feeling, but to that likewise to be con- densed and crystallised feeling to which it seeks to bring itself in sure and unmistakable understanding.^ It is thus the organ of that special feeling which reasons with itself and yearns for others' understanding — the Intellect. For the more vague and general feeling the immediate attributes of Tone sufficed." As the understanding and its needs have developed, the language of the understanding has grown until it no longer makes any use of the emotional elements afforded it by Tone. It is only in moments of deep feeling, when the particular fades away and man stands face to face with the universal, that he is impelled to seek once more the assistance of Tone and Movement — " borrowing from the emotional man the physical tones of feeling, from the corporeal man the physical gestures of the body." Wishing to express the whole man, he must make use of the organs of expression of the whole man, not relying upon either the under- standing singly, or the emotions, or physical gesture. Thus the transition is made from the particular to the universal, from the unit to humanity, from the art- variety to Art. Each sense having its limits, the art that springs from each sense must also be limited ; thus only Art — the harmonious co-operation of all the senses and all the faculties in the one art-work — is really free, the mere single art, or art-variety, being bound by the limitations of the particular sense to which it appeals. Dance, Tone, and Poetry — each of ^ " In ihr theilt sich das Gefuhl durch das Gehor an das Gefiihl mit, aber an das ebenfalls zu verdichtende, zu gefestigende Gefuhl, dera es sich zum sicheren, unfehlbaren Verstandnisse bringen will." Art and Life 65 these can express but a fraction of man and nature ; only from their union in the art-work comes the ex- pression of the universal instead of the individual. The failure of the single art-variety may be seen from the history and from the analytic psychology of each art. Dance only becomes art when mere spasmodic gesture is controlled by rhythm ; but rhythm is the essence of the art of Tone. " This other branch of art into which Dance yearns instinctively to pass, therein to find again and know her own true nature, is the art of Tone ; which, in its turn, receives the solid scaffold of its vertebration from Dance's rhythm." Tone, again, finds its highest range of definition in speech ; and so the one emotion, expressible first by physical movement, passes over from this into Tone, and from this again into Poetry. It is in the Drama that this union of the means of expression takes place — Dance there becoming refined to its noblest form. Mimicry. " What Speech endeavours to convey, the whole wide range of feelings and emotions, ideas and thoughts, which mount from softest tenderness to indomitable energy, and finally proclaim themselves as naked Will — all this becomes an unconditionally intelligible, unquestioned truth through Mimic Art alone; nay, Speech itself cannot become a true and quite convincing physical utterance without the immediate aid of Mimicry. From this, the Drama's pinnacle, Dance broadens gradually down again to her original domain : where Speech now only hints and pictures ; where Tone, as Rhythm's soul, restricts herself to homage of her sister; and where the beauty of the body and its movements alone can give direct and needful utterance to an all-dominating, all-rejoicing feeling." The history of absolute music has been the history of its endeavour to achieve redemption by the power of the Word ; this it attained in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. On the other hand. Poetry, having broken loose from its union with Dance and Tone, has become E 66 A Study of Wagner mere literary Poetry, making no appeal to the actual eye in a stage setting. The Opera of the past was no real union of the arts, but simply an egoistic and con- strained association — Dance, Tone, and Word merely stipulating each for its own part in the performance. Only in the dramatic art-work of the future can the three humanistic arts meet in reciprocal self-assertion and surrender — the arts of architecture, sculpture, and / painting further co-operating in their own way. But this art-work can only be an associate work, called forth by an associate demand. The true Artist of the Future must be the Folk. Such, in rough outline, are the theories put forward in Art and Revolution and The Art-Work of the Future. So far as these two works deal with the nature and possi- bilities of music, poetry, and the drama, the discussion of them may best be postponed until this subject is dealt with a propos of Opera and Drama} Here it is only necessary to point out such characteristics of the two works now under consideration, as throw light on the peculiarities of Wagner's psychology. That his schemes for a state of society in which art shall hold the foremost place, and be the joint work of associated artists, are wholly visionary, need hardly be insisted upon. He himself seems to have recognised this, though he curiously failed to see the effect of such an admission upon other of his theories. Nothing could more clearly prove Wagner's fundamental incompet- ence to deal with any but purely musical questions, than the blithe self-confidence with which he under- ,takes not only to settle some of the most obscure prob- lems of the past, but to shape afresh the vast and complex body of our modern civilisation. A disposition to deal in this jaunty way with huge, vexed problems ^ See Chapter v. Art and Life 67 comes only from inability to appreciate the difficulty of them ; and, as might be expected, Wagner's treatment of them is hopelessly a priori from start to finish. He cannot write the history of the development of Greek civilisation and art in any other viray than as a series of "moments" designed to support his assumptions and preconceptions. He seems to know nothing of the actual causes that led to so wonderful an efflorescence as was seen in the art and philosophy and drama of Athens in her prime ; nothing of the vast, obscure forces that made against art in the Dark Ages ; and even in his own day he cannot see how deeply rooted are all the evils against which he contends, and how impossible it is to eradicate them by the mere rhetoric of sentiment. It is characteristic of a mind of his order never to look facts squarely in the face, never to try to explain, to feel the need of explaining, any phenomenon in terms of the forces that have brought it into being. A few pseudo-generalisations, a few bogus formulas, an outburst of rhetoric, and all is done. One may sympathise with the artist fighting against the imbecility, the ignorance, the brutishness, the apathy of the world towards all that is beautiful and noble ; but social diseases of this kind are no more to be cured by vaporous rhetoric than the epidemics of the Dark Ages were to be cured by the tolling of church-bells. The revolt against the evil is something, but it is merely the beginning of the long fight. One who is not steeped in prepossessions, in absurd rhetorical formulas, recog- nises that the problems of social regeneration are too vast to be solved by anything but infinite patience and steadfast will and tireless thought. To adopt Wag- ner's plan of cursing the present, and sketching crude Utopias for the future on the lines of a hopeless misunderstanding of the past, is only to add to the evil of the situation, only to make still deeper and more despairing our sense of the insolubility of prob- 68 A Study of Wagner lems so vast as those we are now confronted with. Above all, to hold up to our admiration the Athenians of one brief period, and to sigh for a future community in which art shall be to us what it once was to them, is only to show one's failure to realise the difficulty of our problem. The artistic life of a small town, with a few thousand people, living upon slave-labour, devoting a great deal of their time to questions of art and politics and philosophy, can never be reproduced in our modern Europe, with its teeming millions strug- gling for a bare subsistence, and its art mainly de- pendent upon the patronage of the wealthy. To say that all this should not be is as useless as it is inexpen- sive ; and Wagner's fulmination against the dependence of modern art on the luxury of the rich is empty and futile. It is not for the prophets who wander about shrieking in the mist to change the constitution of things ; and he who imagines mere vain rhetoric to be any contribution towards the solution of a huge prob- lem does little more than show his own incompetence. Hence Wagner's polemic misses the mark, as it always does. And not only is he grievously unillumi- native on the side of practical sociology, but he is, if anything, even less a counsel of perfection on the side of art. Leaving for a future chapter the consideration of the main question as to the nature and limits of the musical drama, it is sufficient to point out here a fact which will frequently have to be insisted on at a later stage — that Wagner was almost insusceptible to plea- sure from any art but music, and that he was quite ignorant of everything that made the other arts what they are. To me it is the surest sign of the paralysis with which he seems to have smitten the critical faculties of his admirers, that his perfectly grotesque reading of poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture should so long have been received in solemn silence and adoration. Wagner, as I hope to show in detail, Art and Life 69 .wasJu-iausician and nothinigjbut a musicianj and he unconsciously Ibo£'e3~at every arf from That standpoint. His doctrine of the union of all the arts in the musical- dramatic art-work was not in any sense a reasoned one. His disciples have, one and all, been assiduous in point- ing out that he did not first think out a scheme of music-drama, and then proceed to work upon its lines. They are right ; Wagner's theoretical writings were indeed, as they insist, but the bringing into the light of day of principles of procedure that were already im- plicit in his artistic nature. But they do not see that on these terms his aesthetic doctrine is already shorn of half its value. It immediately sinks into its proper place as the work not of a cool and impartial thinker, guarding against prepossessions, checking himself at every turn by an appeal to history and to fact, always on the watch for the snare of the personal equation — but of a musician born with a certain peculiar mental constitution, filled through and through with certain emotions that inevitably led to certain methods of pro- cedure, blindly laying it down that the scheme that was imperative for him was imperative for all the world.^ Nothing stands out more clearly from his prose works than the fact that he was before everything else a musician, though his mind was of a slightly more concrete nature than that of most musicians, and his ^ Mr. George Bernard Shaw has pointed out, in his Quintessence of Ibsenism, that both Wagner and Ibsen were guided by their artistic in- tuitions to results they could not have attained to at that time by reason. That is quite true, and one recognises the value of Wagner's intuitions in his musical and dramatic practice. He makes an error, however, in stepping out of this purely imaginative world into the world of facts and realities. The very fact that Wagner cTiooses an argumentative instead of an artistic mode of expression shows that he is appealing to the reason of men ; and it is because our reason is outraged by his arguments that we reject them. No one denies that Wagner's prose works are merely the expression of the in- tuitions that made him so great an artist. The difficulty is that these intui- tions, though they led him to the most suitable medium of expression for his peculiar genius, have no objective truth for us, whose ideas and sensations are different in essence from his. 70 A Study of Wagner inspiration came from less abstract sources than gener- ally set the musical intelligence to work. Even a glance at some of the leading motives of his music will suffice to show that the musical current was generally confined within the banks of a concrete idea. This, indeed, is one of his chief glories ; it is precisely what makes him inimitable, unapproachable, distinct from all other writers for the musical stage. The man who could imagine, for example, that wonderful Hunding motive in the Valkyrie, with its expressive scoring for the tubas, must have had a brain unique among musicians — a brain that imaged to itself the whole essence of the nature of a character, but saw it in terms of sound instead of in terms of form and colour. This faculty, and all that grew out of it, is what lifts Wagner above all other dramatic composers. But it is still a musical faculty ; in the admission that he had this unique power of conceiving a character musically, just as a painter would conceive it pictorially, there is involved the further admission that such a faculty would make him insensitive to all other modes of conceiving life. Proof will, in the course of the present volume, be forthcom- ing that Wagner was not only primarily a musician, but a musician of a most peculiar constitution. Granted that fact, one can readily see how, looking at the world through such a glass, everything must have been sub- dued to its colour. From the psychological fact that he could conceive human character most completely in terms of music, there necessarily followed the further fact that he was blind to all other modes of its concep- tion. For him the primitive emotional play of speech and gesture upon the musical stage, helped out as it was by the enormously suggestive power of his own art, was sufficient to express all he knew or wished to know of life, sufficient to give him every artistic emotion of which he was capable. Hence his contempt for the aesthetic emotions afforded to other men by other arts. Art and Life 71 To say that sculpture must pass over into the person of the actor — thus being " redeemed " from stone into living flesh ; that when man learns to portray himself vitally upon the musical stage, painting will' begin to disappear ; that architecture can have no nobler func- tion than that of designing theatres for the "purely- human " drama ; and that the landscape-painter, instead of painting small canvases for the private house, can employ his powers to the finest purpose by painting scenes for the theatre ; all this is to exhibit the most ludicrous ignorance of what these arts can do, and of the undying elements in human nature to which they appeal. The man who could write thus must have been lacking in most of the artistic nerves with which other men are equipped. No doubt it is to this, to the concentration of all the gigantic nervous energy of his frame upon the one order of impressions and the one faculty of utterance, that we owe the grandeur and the beauty of his work. None the less have we to protest against the foolish attempts of his uncritical admirers to make out these sesthetic perversities to be the flower of aesthetic wisdom. If Wagner was only partially right in his view of the union of poetry, music, and dance in the Greek drama, he was altogether wrong in his account of the development of the single arts, and hopelessly blind to the beauties of each of them as they exist for the modern man.-"^ To tell us that we will get them all in the united art-work of the future is the merest trifling. On the face of his own argument it is evident that what we will get, even in the most favoured cases — those of poetry and music — is a limitation of the full power of each ' Liszt thought Wagner was "equally sensible to the charms of all the arts" {Lohengrin et Tannhduser, p. 38). The error of this will be shown in greater detail in the next chapter. On the Wagnerian fallacy that his or any other "Art- work" can compensate us for the loss of the individual arts, or is in any way a combination of all the arts just at the point where each feels its own powers failing, see Chapters viii. and ix. 72 A Study of Wagner art in favour of the other. Owing to the pecuHarly dominating nature of music, this may not mean a very great deprivation upon that side; but the lover of poetry can at the best get only the husks of the art. And to tell the devotees of sculpture and painting, the men whose nerves thrill with delight at a thousand subtle delicacies of effect that can be had only from ihese arts — to tell them that they must be content with iheatrical scene-painting and the gestures of a singer, is really too grotesque for serious criticism. Finally, as for the notion that the world will ever again unite in its appreciation of the one art, after the fashion of the Athenians listening on certain days to their drama, one wonders how any man, even in the pre-evolutionary days, could be so ignorant of the great forces that are incessantly making for differentiation in art as in every- thing else. The notion that fifty million people can •ever be brought back to the social and artistic conditions that once held good for a few thousand Athenians, is too much dignified even by the compassionate epithet of a dream. Some small sense of the reality of things may reasonably be demanded even of a musician. One is forced to conclude, from a perusal of the prose works and letters of this epoch, that Wagner was, on the whole, unfortunate in his friends. Devotion they certainly gave him ; but what he needed even more than this was the uncompromising criticism of some one of entirely different opinions. This alone could have opened his eyes to the absurdity of some of his theses. Such opposition as he had from enemies served only to confirm him in his most illogical theories ; for he regarded absolute sympathy with his work and his ideals as the indispensable prerequisite of a critic. But one friend whose sympathy he could rely on, who would have opposed him strenuously from first to last, making him revise every impression, scrutinise every assumption, and test each link in the chain of his argu- Art and Life 73 ment, would have been able to do him incalculable service. Such a friend he never seems to have met. Neither Liszt nor Uhlig appears to have been able to withstand the torrential fallacies of his writings ; and Roeckel, who seems to have been a man of stronger and more independent mind, less inclined to bow the submissive knee to the dictator, probably lacked some vibration of sympathy, some charm of manner, in his intercourse with Wagner. It is perhaps in this way that we can account for the fact that though Roeckel was a much abler man than either Liszt or Uhlig, and had known Wagner intimately before either of them, he never seems to have had much influence upon the composer's thought. Mr. Cham- berlain, in his preface to the English edition of the Letters to August Roeckel, somewhat strangely puts it that " Uhlig's cleverness showed itself in nothing more than in the sagacity with which he gauged the immense superiority of Wagner's mind over his own " (pp. 15, 16). From Roeckel, on the other hand, "Wagner looked for contradiction and discussion . . . nor was he dis- appointed. Moreover, in the hard school of adversity, during the dreary years of imprisonment, Roeckel's mind seems to have acquired a considerable inflexibility, not to say stubbornness. Wagner pushed on boldly ; once he had admitted the premisses, he followed them out to their ultimate conclusions. Roeckel refused to follow him" (p. 17). It was no doubt a quality of Wagner's peculiar brain that he was indocile to intel- lectual opposition ; certainly all that Roeckel's criticism did was to call forth justificatory expositions of some of the composer's theories. In no case do the theories themselves seem to have undergone any modification.^ 1 He seems, indeed, oply to have sought the society of people who agreed with him. " In Berlin," he writes in the Communicatiim to my Friends, " where for the rest I was entirely unknown, I received from two persons — a gentleman and a lady, previously total strangers to me, whom the impressions produced 74 A Study of Wagner It was certainly unfortunate that a mind so prone to confident assumption and paralogism as Wagner's should have had no regular fire of criticism from friends at once sympathetic and intelligent. The ordinary critics of the German press made, of course, no effect whatever on him. They did indeed call forth replies from him, but never succeeded in inducing him to modify his opinions. He sighs that he is constantly misunderstood — which as a rule means nothing more than that the critic does not agree with his peculiar views on life and art. " Only a true artist," he wrote on one occasion to Uhlig, after the publication of The Art- Work of the Future — "and he must- be a man as well as artist, can understand the matter under dis- cussion ; but no other, not even if he have the best will thereto. Who, for instance, amid our artificial-egoistic handicraft copyings, can possibly grasp the natural attitude of plastic art to direct, pure, human art ? I entirely set aside what a statue-sculptor, or a history-painter, would say to this ; ^ but that even a writer on the aesthetics of art, in other respects well-disposed — who is not working for his daily bread, like the one in the DeutscJie Monats- schrift — should display such absolute want of thought; that on this subject he should fall into such nonsensical babbling about art as he has done, that is sad. Well, I read the notice of my by the Flying Dutchman had made my instant friends — the first definite ex- pression of satisfaction at the new path which I had struck out, and the first exhortation to continue thereon. From that time forward I lost more and more the so-called ' Public ' from my view : the judgment of definite individual human beings usurped, for me, the place of the never to be accurately gauged opinion of the mass, which hitherto — without my own full consciousness — had floated before me in vague outlines, as the object to which I should address myself as poet. The understanding of my aim became each day more clearly the chief thing to be striven for, and, to ensure myself this understanding,, involuntarily I turned no longer to the stranger Mass, but to the individual persons whose moods and ways of thought were familiar to me " (G. S. iv. 282, 283 : Ellis, i. 326, 327). Plainly, he wanted friends who would simply see eye to eye with him in all his theories — about the worst kind of friend any artist or literary man could have. ^ He would, of course, have objected to a sculptor "setting aside" his^ nonsensical views on their respected arts. Art and Life 75 last work. Then I went home with K.,i read clearly to him and to myself the section relating to the arts of sculpture and of painting; and, although thoroughly disposed to question (sic), we both found the turning-point of all human history and art so clearly expressed, and intentionally developed at length, with special emphasis in the section dealing with sculpture, that we were compelled to decide that these critics — who had not even noticed this important argument, but only seemed to assume that I, through ignorance, and because I wished to say something about these other kinds of art, had fallen into vagueness and uncertainty — that these critics had misunderstood the whole book, since they looked upon the chief point, insisted on with energy — the downfall of the egoistic-monumenta/ in favour of the communistic- present with all its movements — only as a secondary aberration. At such moments one's hands fall, and one becomes convinced that all talking and writing on the matter is vain and unprofitable." ^ 'Twas ever thus. It never seems to have occurred to Wagner that men could differ from him and still be right ; opposition was simply " misunderstanding." * One critic in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of 15th January 1850 took exception to Wagner's attempt to employ the ancient Hellenes as social and artistic examples for modern Europe, since the climatic con- ditions were so different. " Whence," he wrote, " beneath our northern skies, shall we derive that rapt intoxication of the sense of beauty, which even upon the Ionic horizon did not loom so pure as we are wont to conceive when we sum up the aesthetic life of olden times in the principle of Hellenism ? . . . These wailings are fantastic, unfruit- ful, and can be answered by no kind of Revolution, excepting by that of the whole earth-rind, and a new cycle of the world." * 1 ue. Karl Ritter, one of his Zurich friends, son of the Madame Julie Ritter who so generously helped the composer from iSjl to 1856. 2 Letter 14 to Uhlig; Eng. trans, pp. 50, 51. 3 See the remarks already made on his attitude to the critics of Lohengrin, and (in Chapter vi. of the present volume) his method of meeting Roeckel's criticism of the JRing. * Quoted by Mr. Ellis, in the preface to Art and Climate {Prose Works, i. 250). 76 A Study of Wagner Beyond laying down the very obvious dictum that it is not climatic conditions alone that make great art, and that it was not in the hot climates of Asia and Africa, but " on the naked, sea-plashed rocks of Hellas, upon the stony soil and beneath the scanty shadows of the olive-trees of Attica," that the cradle of civilisation was laid — beyond this, Wagner's verbose reply does not throw much fresh light on the question. He does nothing more than repeat the fallacies that seemed fundamental to him — as when he makes his favourite distinction between Nature and Civilisation : — " The first thing that strikes us, in glancing at the evolution of our modern nations, is this : that it has not only most condition- ally been governed by the influence of nature, but quite uncon- ditionally by the confounding and distorting operation of an alien Civilisation ; that, as a matter of fact, our Culture and Civilisation have not sprung upwards from the nether soil of Nature, but have been poured down upon us from above, from the Heaven of the priests and the Corpus Juris of Justinian." "... our whole art is good for nothing because it has had no origin in our actual being, nor in any harmonic supplementing of the ' climatic ' Nature which surrounds us." " No, the glory of [our present degeneration] belongs to our clergy-ridden Pandect-civilisation, with all its fine results ; among which, beside our Industry, our worthless heart-and-soul-con- founding art fills out its seat of honour. For the whole posse must be set down to this Civilisation, in its entire variance with our nature, and not to any Nature-born necessity. Wherefore, not from that Civilisation, but from the future true and generic Culture, which shall bear a right relation to our climatic Nature, will one day also bloom that art-work which is now denied both breath and air to breathe in, and as to whose peculiar properties we shall never be able to form a notion until we Men, the creators of that art-work, can conceive ourselves as developed to a rational concord with this Nature.^' All this is the merest juvenility. The notions that " civilisation " is the antithesis of " nature," and that Art and Life 77 "national" development ought to take place without fertilisation from other nations, are the crudest blunders of the amateur sociologist ^ — almost too gross to be worth arguing against at this time of day. Even Wagner himself, further on, partly sees that modern life and art are not to be parcelled out into a number of self-existent products. " But to men," he writes, " who know themselves united in one all-capable species, the natural character of this or that particular climate can no longer set up cramping bounds : to them, as a species at one with itself, the total like-united Nature of this Earth alone can form a confine." Quite so ; but he does no more than hit upon this point in opposition to the objections of his critic in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. He fails to see the corre- lative fact that as civilisation develops, " nationalism " in art, in politics, in social life, becomes a factor of diminishing importance ; and that the essence of civili- sation is the stimulation of one " national mind " by another. Had he been able to perceive this, we might have been spared a great deal of the absurd heroics, both from himself and from some of his followers, which at a later time were sounded on the topic of the virtues of the " German mind " and the " German nature." 1 It is of clumsy paralogisms of this kind that Mr. Benjamin Kidd's Social Mvoltttion is made up. CHAPTER V WAGNER'S THEORY OF MUSIC, POETRY, AND MUSIC-DRAMA I THIS is probably the most convenient point for entering upon the discussion of Wagner's theo- retical ideas upon poetry and music and their combination in music-drama. Towards the end of 1849, during his exile in Switzerland, he seems to have conceived the idea of putting into connected exposition his reflections upon the arts. Various schemes and titles seem to have suggested themselves to him, and finally in a letter to Uhlig, dated 9th October 1850, we read : — " My would-be article on opera is becoming rather a volumi- nous piece of writing, and will perhaps be not much less in size than the Kunstwerk der Zukunft. I have decided to offer this writing under the title Das Wesen der Oper to J. J. Weber. ... I have only finished the first half; unfortunately I am now quite hindered from continuing the work." ^ Two months later he writes again to Uhlig : — " You would not believe what trouble I give myself with this object, to call forth full understanding from all those who only half understand ; yes, even to make myself intelligible to my enemies who do not or will not understand me ; and ' lastly, I rejoice merely because I am always myself coming to a better understanding. My book, which now is to be called Oper und Drama, is not yet ready; it will be at least twice as big as the Kunstwerk der Zukunft. I have still the whole of December to devote to the conclusion, and then certainly the whole of ■^ Letter 17 to Uhlig ; Eng. trans, p. 74. 78 Wagner's Theory of Music 79 January for copying and revising. In advance I can only give you the outline, (i) Exposition of the nature of the opera up to our timCj with the conclusion, 'Music is a reproductive organism' (Beethoven has used it, as it were, to give birth to melody) — 'therefore a female one.' (2) Exposition of the nature of the drama from Shakespeare up to the present day ; conclusion — ' the poetical sense is a procreative organism, and the poetical purpose the fertilising seed which only comes with the ardour of love, and is the stimulus to the fructification of the female organism which must beget the seed received in love.' (3) (Here only I begin.) 'Exposition of the act of reproducing the poetical purpose by means of perfected tone-speech.' ... I will still add a diagram ; I am not so sure whether I shall put it into my booL''^ Word-Speech. Literature. History. Understanding. Feeling. Tone-Speech. Lyric Myth. Intelligence. Word-Tone-Speech. Completed Drama. Dramatic Myth. Humanity. The book was completed about January 1851. As Wagner mentions- in his letter to Uhlig, Oper 1 Letter 19 to Uhlig ; Eng. trans, pp. 84, 85. 8o A Study of Wagner und Drama is divided into three parts — " Opera and the Nature of Music," "The Play and the Nature of Dramatic Poetry," and " Poetry and Music in the Drama of the Future " ; and as it is a tolerably safe surmise that few even of the musical admirers of the musician have read the book, and few of those who have read it have quite understood it, it may be as well to give a short summary of its long argument in a style somewhat less Teutonic than Wagner's own. I. Until the present time, men have indeed felt that the opera was a monument of the corruption of artistic taste, but criticism has not fully fathomed the matter ; and it therefore becomes the task of the creative artist to practise criticism, in order at once to "crush error and root up criticism." The writer of an article on modern opera in Brockhaus' Gegenwart has pointed out the defects of this form of art, showing its artificialities and conventions ; but when he comes to the practical problem, " How is all this to be remedied ? " he can only regret that Mendelssohn's too early death " should have hindered the solution of the riddle." But this is still proceeding on the wrong track. Had Mendelssohn any musical gift which Mozart, for example, did not possess ? Could anything, from the standpoint of music, be more perfect than each individual number of Don Giovanni? Plainly the critic cannot wish for better music than this. It is evident, then, that what he wants in opera is the power and force of drama. But he is blind enough still to expect this from the musician; that is, wanting a house built for him, he applies not to the architect but to the upholsterer. And by the very failure of the critic's effort to solve the problem in this way, there is driven home the con- clusion that this way the problem is really insoluble. Yet the true solution, so far from being difficult of Wagner's Theory of Music attainment, simply stares one in the face ; and the formula for it is that — " The error in the art-genre of Opera consists herein : — that a Means of Expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of Expression {the Drama) has been made a means." The truth of this formula can be attested by an appeal to the history of the opera. It arose not from the folk-plays of the Middle Ages, in which there were the rudiments of a natural co-operation of music and drama, but at the luxurious courts of Italy, where the aristocrats engaged singers to entertain them with arias, that is, with "folk-tunes stripped of their naivete and truth," embroidered on a story whose only raison d'etre was the occasional advent of these arias. Music, in fact, was the all-in-all of opera, as is clearly shown by the old-time domination of the singer ; while all the poet had to do was to stand as little as possible in the way of the musician. The great merit of Metastasio, according to the standard of the practice of his own day, was that he almost effaced his own art in favour of music — "never gave the musician the slightest harass, never advanced an unwonted claim from the purely dramatic standpoint." Nor has the situation changed, in its main features, down even to the present day. It still is held to be necessary for the poet to shape his material according to the necessities of the musician from first to last. The whole aim of the opera is simply music, the dramatic story being only utilised to serve music as a means for its own display. The anomaly has finally become so fundamental a part of men's lives that they no longer realise that it is an anomaly ; and accordingly they still have hopes of erecting the genuine drama on the basis of absolute music — that is, of achieving the impossible. The object of Opera and Drama is to prove that great artistic results can follow from the collaboration of music with F 82 A Study of Wagner dramatic poetry, while from the unnatural position which music bears towards opera in our present system nothing but sterility can result. Let us, then, in the first place, consider " Opera and the Nature of Music." Music has been betrayed into a position where she has lost sight of her own limitations ; although in her- self she is simply an " organ of expression," she has fallen into " the error of desiring to plainly outline the thing to be expressed." The musical basis of the opera was the aria, that is, the folk-song deprived of its own original words, and adapted at once to the vanity of the singer and the luxurious tastes of the world of rank. Aria and dance-tune, with an admixture of recitative, made up an opera, into the musical domain of which the poet was only allowed to enter in order to supply a little narrative cohesion. The significance of the so-called reformation of Gluck has been greatly exaggerated. All he did was to curtail the arrogant pretensions of the singer, while leaving the texture and plan of opera un- touched. His was a revolt of the composer fighting merely for his own hand, not for the ends of drama; and every means by which he increased the power of music in opera was necessarily a further shackle on the limbs of the poet. Mehul, Cherubini, and Spontini in their turn broadened the old musical forms of opera, and made the musical expression more consonant with that of the words, but did nothing for opera except from the standpoint of music. The poet may have had to provide a slightly better and firmer groundwork for the musician, but it was to the musician, and to him alone, that he still owed his existence in opera. People failed to see tha!t the source of regenerative power could be nowhere but in the drama ; and the trouble was that music tried by itself to perform the functions of drama, to be a " content " instead of mere " expression." Mozart, again, was so entirely a musician that his Wagner's Theory of Music 83 work throws the clearest Hght on the relations of musician and poet ; and we find him unable to write at his best where the poem was flat and meaningless. He could not write music for Tito like that of Don Giovanni, or for Cost fan tutte like that of Figaro. He, the most absolute of all musicians, would long ago have solved the operatic problem had he met the proper poet. This poet he was never fortunate enough to meet ; all his " poets " did was to give him a medley of arias, duets, and ensembles to set to music. But the flood of beauty and expression which Mozart poured into opera was too great for that narrow bed ; the stream overflowed into wider and freer channels, until it became a mighty sea in the symphonies of Beethoven. The aria was a degeneration of the folk-song, in which poetry and music had been spontaneously one. The operatic aria was the music of the folk-song, arbi- trarily wrested from the words, and made to serve the indolent pleasure of the man of luxury. In course of time people forgot that a word-stave should by rights go with the melody. It was Rossini who took this artificial flower, drenched it with manufactured perfume, and gave it the semblance of life. Rossini saw that the life-blood of ordinary opera was melody^ — " naked, ear- tickling, absolute-melodic melody." Spontini erred in imagining the " dramatic tendency " to be the essence of opera ; the real essence, as Rossini showed, and as the future history of opera proves, was simply absolute melody. Earnest composers, however, while by no means negating the claims of melody, held that Rossini's melody was cheap and superficial, and endeavoured to derive it more directly from the fountains of expression of the Folk. This was the course taken by Weber, who gave opera-aria the deep and genuine feeling of the folk-song ; though the flower, thus torn from its 84 A Study of Wagner native meadow, could not thrive in the salons of modern luxury and artificiality. And Weber, no less than Rossini, made his melody the main factor of opera, though of course it was far worthier and more honest than the melody of the Itahan composer. Weber repressed and controlled the poet of Der Freischutz as much as Rossini did the poet of Tancredi. And Weber's failure proves afresh the assertion that instead of the drama being taken up into the being of music, music must be taken up into the drama. Weber's success in harking back to the Folk was envied by the composers of other nationalities, and a number of operas were produced which tried to pro- ceed on similar lines — such as Masaniello and William Tell. The Folk, in fact, was exploited, but its real inspiration could not, from the very nature of the case, be embodied in opera. In the epic and the drama the Folk celebrated the deeds of the Hero, and in true drama the action and the character are recognised as necessary ; but under the influence of the modern State, dramatic characters lose their personality and become mere masks. This was particularly the case in opera,, where the folk-song has degenerated into the aria, and the Folk- itself has become the Mass, the Chorus. " Historic " opera became the fashion, and even Re- ligion was dragged upon the stage, as in the operas of Meyerbeer. But the outlandishness thus imported into opera in its turn led to worse and worse degeneration ; and the " historic " mania became " hysteric " mania — in other words, Neo-romanticism. Up to this time, every influence that had shaped the course of opera had come from the domain of absolute music alone. After Rossini, operatic melody was varied by the introduction of instrumental melody. People had not perceived that instrumental music was also unfruitful, by reason of its not expressing the purely- human in the form of definite, individual feelings. Wagner's Theory of Music 85 "That the expression of an altogether definite, a clearly- understandable individual Content, was in truth impossible in this language that had only fitted itself for conveying the general character of an emotion— A^zj could not be laid bare, before the arrival of that instrumental composer with whom the longing to speak out such a content first became the consuming impulse of all his artistic fashioning." It was the function of Beethoven to show what music can do if it confines itself to its true sphere, that of expression. In his later works, Beethoven, having his mind filled with a definite content, burst the bounds of many of the old absolute forms, and stammered through tentative new ones. Future symphonists followed him from this point, without seeing what it was in Beethoven that made him act in this way ; they consequently mis- applied his forms, copying the externals only. Hence the vogue of programme-music, of which the great re- presentative was Berlioz. Then there came an influx of the wealth of instrumental music (developed inde- pendently of vocal music) into operatic melody. This is modern characteristique, of which Meyerbeer, the cos- mopolitan Jew, is the great example, and which differs from that of Gluck and Mozart in that the poet is infinitely more degraded, and absolute melody more exalted. This held good even in Paris, where the poet had always hitherto had some rights ; but now Meyer- beer forced Scribe, his librettist, to run wherever he chose to drive him. The secret of his music is " Effect." Yet even Meyerbeer wrote fine music where he allowed the poet to guide him — as in parts of the great love- scene in the fourth act of Les Huguenots. To sum up, then. Music has tried to be the drama, and the attempt has ended in impotence. The only salvation for it lies in sensible co-operation with the poet. This may be seen by a glance at the nature of our present music. The most perfect expression of the inner being of music is melody ; it is to harmony 86 A Study of Wagner and rhythm what the external side of the organism is to the internal. Now the Folk's melodies were a revelation of the nature of things. Christianity, how- ever, with its anxiety to lay bare the soul, found itself face to face not with life but death ; and the Folksong, the indivorcible union of poetry and music, almost died out. In the ages of human mechanism the longing of things was to produce the real man, which man " was really none other than Melody, i.e. the moment of most definite, most convincing utterance of [Music's] actual, living organism." The struggle of Beethoven's great works is the struggle of mechanism to become a man, an organism, uttering itself in melody. Thus while other composers merely took melody, ready- made, from the mouth of the Folk, and applied it to their own purposes, Beethoven's melody was the spontaneous effort of Music's inner organism to find expression. But it was only in the verbal outburst of the Ninth Symphony that Beethoven brings melody to true life ; music was sterile until fertilised by the poet. The error had always been that operatic melody, coming as it did from the Folksong, ran on certain rhythmical and structural lines, out of which the musician could not stray ; so that melody had no chance to be born spontaneously out of poetry, for the poet had simply to adapt his words to the invariable musical scaffolding. '^ Every musical organism is by its nature a womanly; it is merely a bearing, and not a begetting factor ; the begetting force lies clean outside it, and without fecundation by this force it positively cannot bear." In the Choral Symphony Beethoven had to call in the poet to fertilise absolute music ; and the folly of the latter is seen in its attempts not only to bear but also to beget. "Music is a woman," whose nature is to surrender in love. Who now is to be the Man to whom this surrender is to be made ? Let us look at the Poet. Wagner's Theory of Music 87 2. When Lessing tries to mark out the boundaries of poetry and painting in the LaocOon, he has in his eye descriptive, Hterary poetry, not "the dramatic Art-work directly brought before the senses by physical perform- ance." Now the literary poem is an artificial art, appealing to the imagination instead of to the senses. All the egoistically severed arts, indeed, appeal only to the force of imagination. They "merely suggest; an actual representation would to them be possible only could they parley with the universality of man's artis tic receptivity, could they address his entire sentient {sinnlichen) organism, and not his force of imagination ; for the true Art-work can only be engendered by an advance from imagination into actuality, i.e. physicality {sinnlichkeii^y There should be no arts, there should be one veritable Art. It is an error to look upon Drama as merely a branch of literature ; although it is true that our drama is no more true Drama than a single musical instrument is an orchestra. The modern drama has a twofold origin — in Romance, and in the Greek drama ; the flower of the former being Shakespeare — of the latter, Racine. Our dramatic literature hovers undecidedly between these two extremes. The romance was not the portrayal of the complete man ; this only became possible in drama, which actualised life, presented it visibly to the senses. Shakespeare " condensed the narrative romance into the drama " — made it, that is, suitable for stage repre- sentation. The great characteristic of his art was that human actions did not come before us merely in descriptive poetry, but by the actors addressing them- selves directly to the actual eye ; and the poet had to narrow down the diversity of the old Folk-stage to suit the scenic and other demands of the theatre. The action and the characters had to be made more definite, more individual, more circumstantial, in order to give the spectators the impression of an artistic whole. The 88 A Study of Wagner appeal, in short, was no longer to Phantasy but to Sense, the only domain left to phantasy being the imagining the scene itself- — for the stage-craft of those days fell short of actually representing reality. This mixture of phantasy and sense in the drama was the source of endless future confusion in dramatic art ; the giving-up to phantasy of the representation of the scene left an open door in drama through which' romance and history might pass in and out at pleasure. In the French drama, outward unity of scene de- termined the whole structure of the play, diminishing the part played by action, and increasing the function of " mere deHvery of speeches." For the same reason, the French dramatists could not choose for representa- tion the romance, with its bewildering multiplicity of incident ; they had to fall back on the already con- densed plots which they found in Greek mythology. Instead of dealing with his own people's life, then, as Shakespeare had tried to do, the French tragedian merely imitated the finished Greek drama. This un- natural, artificial world was reproduced in French opera, and most saliently in the French opera of Gluck. " Opera was thus the premature bloom on an unripe fruit grown from an unnatural, artificial soil. With what the Italian and French Drama began, to wit the outer form, to that must the newer drama first attain by organic evolution from within, upon the path of Shakespeare's Drama ; then first will ripen, also, the natural fruit of Musical Drama." German dramatic art found itself between the Shakespearian play on the one side and the scenic Southern opera on the other — between the appeal to hearing, aided slightly by phantasy in the representation of the scene, and the appeal to the eye alone. There were two final courses open : either, as Tieck suggested, to act Shakespeare with no more scenery than was employed in Shakespeare's own theatre, or to represent Wagner's Theory of Music 89 each change of scene in the plays — that is, employ the gigantic apparatus of scenic opera. The i-esult to the modern poet was perplexity and disillusion. The play was neither literature — as it was when men merely read it, allowing their phantasy to represent the scene — nor actual, visualised drama. Hence he either wrote plays simply to be read, not to be acted, or, if he wrote for the stage, he employed the reflective type of drama, whose modern origin we have traced to the pseudo- antique drama, constructed according to Aristotle's rules of unity. These results and tendencies are exhibited in Goethe and Schiller. Goethe, after various experiments, found expression in Faust, which makes no pretence of stage-representation, and which is therefore really neither romance nor drama. Faust is "the watershed between the mediaeval romance . . . and the real dramatic matter of the future." Schiller was always perplexed by the contradiction between history and drama. The whole dilemma is this. On the one side are romance and history, with all their multiplicity of character and action ; on the other is the ideal dramatic form, pre- senting a simple, definite action, and real, moving characters, visibly to the eye ; and a compromise has to be effected between these two. The plain truth is " that we have no Drama, and can have no Drama ; that our Literary-drama is every whit as far removed from the genuine Drama, as the pianoforte from the symphonic song of human voices ; that in the Modern Drama we can arrive at the production of poetry only by the most elaborate devices of literary mechanism, just as on the pianoforte we only arrive at the produc- tion of music through the most complicated devices of technical mechanism — in either case, however, a soul- less poetry, a toneless music." With this drama true music can have nothing to do. Man, conceiving the external world, is impelled to reproduce his conceptions in art, in a mode that shall 90 A Study of Wagner be intelligible to others. This has only been thoroughly done once — in the expression of the Greek world- view in the Greek Drama. The material of this drama was the myth — the Folk's mode of condensation of the pheno- mena of life — " the poem of a life-view in common." The Christian myth was concerned with death where the Greek had been concerned with life. It could therefore be painted or described, but not represented in drama. The Germanic myth was like the Greek, in its essence a religious intuition, a life-view in common ; but Christianity laid hold of it and dispersed it into fragments of fable and legend — the Romance of the Middle Ages. What the artist had to do was to find Man under all this debris. Now whereas the drama selects an action from a mass of actions, and limits the surroundings to just so much as will illuminate and justify this action, the romance has to enter circumstan- tially and at great length into the surrounding circum- stances, in order to make the action and the character artistically convincing. The drama goes from within outwards, the romance from without inwards ; the drama lays bare the organism of mankind, the romance shows us merely the mechanism of history ; the art- procedure in drama is organic, in romance merely mechanical ; the drama gives us the man, the romance the citizen ; the drama exhibits the fulness of human nature, the romance the penury of the State. In the evolution that has gone on since the Middle Ages, Burgher-society has come uppermost ; but it offers nothing to romance but unloveliness. Everything in life is being disintegrated past the capacity of art to reunite it ; the poet's art has turned to politics, and until we have no more politics the poet cannot come to light again. As Napoleon said, the role of Fate in the ancient world is filled in the modern by politics ; and this is what we shall have to comprehend before we can discover the true content and form of drama. Wagner's Theory of Music 91 Now the myth is true for all time, and its content forever inexhaustible. Understanding it well, we see in it " an intelligible picture of the whole history of man- kind, from the beginnings of society to the inevitable downfall of the State." The political State lives on the vices of society ; salvation and art are only to be found in the free, purely-human individual. The essence of the State is caprice, of the free individual, necessity. It is then essential for us to annul the State and create afresh the free individual. The poet who tried to por- tray this individual found that he was face to face with him only as he had been shaped by the State; he could not then portray him, but only imagine him ; could only re- present him to thought, not to feeling. Our drama, in consequence, has been forced to make its appeal to the understanding, instead of \he feeling. Out of the mass of man's modern surroundings the poet has to reconstruct the individual, and present him to feeling, to sense, instead of to understanding. But this the poet cannot do ; he can only address the understanding, and that through the organ of understanding, " abstract and conditioned word-speech." "The return from under- standing to feeling will be the march of the drama of the future, in so far as we shall advance from the thought-out individuality to the genuine one." By the annihilation of the State, society will realise its purely- human essence, and determine the free individual. And it is only in the most perfect art-work, the drama, that the poet's insight into life can find complete expression, because this drama will address not the understanding, but the feeling, through the senses. It will present the poet's view of life physically to the eye ; it will be a true emotionalising of the intellect. It must present things to us in such a manner that we cannot help realising their necessity. This can only be done by avoiding the by-paths of the intellect, and by appealing directly to the feeling. The action, then, must be so chosen as to 92 A Study of Wagner make this appeal instinctively. Now an historic action, or one " which can only be vindicated from the stand- point of the State," is only representable to the under- standing, not to the feeling ; that is, by its very multiplicity and lack of warmth it cannot be seized definitely and quickly by the senses, but needs the com- bining function of thought. The true dramatic " action " must be seen at once to be the essential centre of the periphery of circumstance. Man and nature, as cog- nised by the understanding, are split up into fragments; it is the feeling that grasps the organic unity of things ; and it is from this point outwards that the true drama must work. In other words, it must be generated from the myth. Up to a certain point the intellect can work in the selection of material, and express itself through its own organ, word-speech ; but for the full realisation of the action and the motives to the feeling, the organ of feeling — tone-speech — has to be called in. "Tone- speech is the beginning and end of Word-speech ; as the feeling is beginning and end of the understanding, as mythos is beginning and end of history, the lyric beginning and end of poetry." The lyric " holds within itself each germ of the intrinsic art of poetry, which necessarily can but end with speaking out the vindica- tion of the lyric ; and this work of vindication is pre- cisely the highest human art-work, the Entire Dramas The primal organ of utterance of the inner man is tone-speech, the fundamental nature of which may be seen by removing the consonants from our word-speech. The latter came by the addition of prefixes and suffixes to the open sound, as distinguishing and delimiting signs of objects. In this way speech-roots were formed from the primal melody of tone-speech. In alliteration, or stabreim, speech, by combining these roots according to similarity and kinship, "made plain to the feeling both the impression of the object and its answering Wagner's Theory of Music 93 expression, in equal measure, through an increased, strengthening of that expression," ; showed, that is, the unity in multipUcity of the object. By stabreim fn poetry the similarity of sound to the ear brings a col- lective image to the feeling. The stabreim and the word-verse were fundamentally conditioned by that melody which is the expression of primal human feel- ing, because the breathing-conditions of man's organism determined the duration and segmentation of the utter- ance. When poetry developed along the line of the understanding instead of that of the feeling, word-speech became dissociated from its sister, tone-speech ; and having lost the instinctive sense of this bofid, tried to find " another bond of union with the melodic breathing- snatches." This was done in the end-rhyme, which was the sign of forgetfulness of the natural bond of tone- speech and word-speech in the stabreim. This line of degeneration ended in " the grey morass of prose " ; and the separation from the feeling was complete. We go now upon convention instead of upon conviction .^ We cannot properly express our emotions in this lan- guage, for in it we can only speak to the understanding, not to the feeling ; which is why the feeling " ha& sought a refuge from absolute intellectual-speech by fleeing to absolute tone-speech — our music of to-day." The poet, then, cannot realise his aim in modern speech, because he cannot speak directly to the feeling. Yet he must not simply work out his drama on the lines of the understanding, and then try to add expres- sion to it by means of music. This was the error of opera. The emotional expression itself must also be governed by the poetical aim. " A tone-speech to be struck-into from the outset is therefore the organ of ex- pression proper for the poet who would make himself intelligible by turning from the understanding to the feeling, and who for that purpose has to take his stand upon- a soil on which alone he can have any commerce 94 A Study of Wagner with feeling." We must go back, in fact, to the ur- melodic faculty, to which is given the expression of the purely-human ; the drama must utter itself in a form that shall be the marriage of understanding and feeling, •of word-speech and tone-speech. 3. Until now the poet has tried in two ways to attune the organ of the understanding — word-speech — to an emotional expression which would find its way to ithe feeling ; through rhythm and through melody. It was a mistake to try to import the rhythms of Greek verse into modern poetry, for these rhythms were con- ditioned by the gestures of the dance, and the disloca- tion of the speaking-accents was atoned for by melody. Our modern languages not being adapted to this ruling into longs and shorts, Greek prosody is impossible for us. Our iambic verse, for example, hobbles along mechanically, " doing grievous violence to the live accent of speech for the sake of this monotonous rhythm." " Longs " become " shorts " and " shorts " become " longs," simply to get the requisite number of feet into the line. On the other hand, where, as among the Romanic peoples, this kind of rhythm is not in vogue, the end-rhyme has been imported into poetry, and has become indispensable. The whole line is built up with reference to this end-rhyme, as the up-stroke to the down-stroke. The result is that the attention of the ear is only momentarily won, and the poet does not reach ihe feeling, for all he does is to make understand- ing speak to understanding. We have seen that word-speech and melody have gone along divergent lines of development, and now neither can be properly applied to the other. Even where, as in Gluck's music, the composer tries to find a bond of union in the speaking-accent of the word- .speech, his selection of this mere rhetorical accent .leads to a disintegration of the rest of the line as poetry; Wagner's Theory of Music 95 it becomes dissolved into prose, and the melody itself becomes merely musical prose. The usual course is for the melody to do what it likes with the verse ; to dislocate its rhythm, ignore its accents, and drown its end-rhyme, according to its own pleasure. The poet ought really to " so employ the speaking accent as the only measure-giving ' moment ' for his verse, that in its symmetrical return it should establish a wholesome rhythmos, as necessary to the verse itself as to the melody." Instead of this, we find on the one hand that many of Goethe's verses are declared too beautiful to be set to music, while on the other hand Mendelssohn writes Songs without Words. We shall have to deal with speech as we dealt with action and the content of the drama. Just as we took away from the action all that was extraneous and acci- dental ; just as we took away from the content all that savoured of the State or of history, in order to reach simply the purely-human ; so we must " cut away from the verbal expression all that springs from . . . these disfigurements of the purely-human and feeling-bidden," so that only the purely-human core shall remain. Thus we shall arrive " at the natural basis of rhythm, in the spoken verse, as displayed in the liftings and lowerings of the accent," which in turn can only find full expres- sion when intensified into musical rhythm. The strong and weak accents must correspond to the " good " and " bad " halves of the musical bar. We must reach back through the understanding and its organ to " the sensuous substance of our roots of speech " ; we must breathe the breath of life into the defunct organism of speech. This breath is music. The roots of words were brought into being by the Folk's primal emotional stress ; the essence of these roots is the open sound, which finds fullest sensuous uplifting in music ; while the function of the consonants is to determine the general expression to a particular one. The stabreitn 96 A Study of Wagner indicates to the feeling the unity of sensation underlying the roots — shows their emotional kinship. It appeals, as it were, to the " eye " of hearing, while the vowel is addressed to the " ear " of hearing. And as a man only reveals himself fully to us by addressing both eye and ear, so " the message-bearer of the inner man cannot completely convince our hearing, until it addresses itself with equal persuasiveness to both ' eye and ear ' of this hearing. But this happens only through word-tone- speech, and poet and musician have hitherto addressed but half the man apiece : the poet turned towards this hearing's eye alone, the musician only to its ear." The musician will take the vowel-sounds of the poet, and display their fundamental kinship by giving them their full emotional value by means of musical tone. Here then the word-poet ends, and the tone-poet begins. The melody of the musician is " the redemption of the poet's endlessly - conditioned thought into a deep - felt consciousness of emotion's highest freedom." This was the melody that rose from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to the light of day. When Beethoven wrote the simple melody with which he accompanies the "Freude, schoner Gotterfunken," he was writing as an absolute musician. This melody " did not arise from out the poem of Schiller but rather was invented outside the word-verse and merely spread above it." But in the " Seid umschlungen Millionen," and the "Ahnest du den Schopfer, Welt?" he obeys the dic- tates of the poetic aim, and the broadening of the key- kinship leads the feeling back to the purely-human. The kinship of feeling which the poet can only approximately express by the stabreim, the musician can bring to full expression by key-modulation. Take, for example, the line "Liebe giebt Lust zum Leben." The one emotion being expressed throughout, the musician would keep in one key. When setting " Die Liebe bringt Lust und Leid," however, the change of feeling at the Wagner's Theory of Music 97 end of the line would be expressed by a modulation ; while if this line were followed by "Dock in ihr Weh auch webt sie Wonnen," at the webt a modulation would be effected back into the original key. It is from this poetico-musical "period" that the true art- work, the perfected drama, must take its rise. Melody is the horizontal surface of harmony ; and in harmony "the ear . . . obtains an entire fulfilling — and thus a satisfying — of its sensory faculty, and thereafter it can devote itself with the necessary com- posure to [an appreciation of] the melody's apt emo- tional expression," But harmony in absolute music has existed solely for and in itself ; whereas the melody ought to be conditioned by the speaking-verse, and the concurrent harmony be used for making this obvious to the feeling. In the drama of the future there must be no char- acters whose only function is to swell the harmonic volume of sound ; there must only be such characters as are essential in themselves to the plot. The chorus, then, "as hitherto employed in opera, . . . will have to be banished from our drama." Neither the chorus nor the main characters " are to be used by the poet as a symphonic body of musical tones for bringing to light the harmonic stipulations of the melody." The musician, however, possesses an organ which can make plain the harmony and characterise the melody in a far superior way to that of the vocal-mass. This organ is the orches- tra, which is an immense aid in the realisation of the poetic aim. Until now the error has consisted in writ- ing absolute melody in opera — melody, that is, which was conditioned by the orchestra itself, not by the word-verse, and which was therefore only "vocal" melody in the sense that it was given to the voice. It ought really to come from " an announcement of the purely emotional content of the verse, through a dis- solution of the vowel into the musical tone " ; the verse G 98 A Study of Wagner melody in this way becoming the mediator and bond of union between word-speech and tone-speech, the off- spring of the marriage of poetry and music. The great value of the orchestra is its power of uttering the unspeakable, i.e. that which is unutterable through the organ of the understanding. It may do this in three ways — by its organic alliance with Gesture, by bringing up the remembrance of an emotion, when the singer is not giving voice to it, and by giving z. fore- boding of moods as yet unspoken. All the constituents of the drama have now been enumerated. It only remains to consider how they are to be knit together into a single form corre- sponding to the single substance. Just as the poet obtained his action by compressing all the motives into an easily comprehended content, so, for the realisation of this action, must he proceed with the composition on the same principles. The expression, like the action, must be free from the accidental, the contingent, the superfluous. We approach the drama in a mood of expectancy, that is ministered to by the orchestra in its quality of a producer of foreboding — although this preliminary utterance of the orchestra must by no means be inter- preted to mean the ordinary overture. This expectancy is afterwards satisfied by the word-speech of the per- former, lifted into the higher emotional sphere of tone- speech. The unity of content in the drama must be made evident in a unity of artistic expression ; that is, the expression " must convey to the feeling a wide- reaching aim of the poetic understanding." Wherever the word-speech approaches the language of ordinary life — the organ of the understanding — the orchestra must keep the expression still on the higher plane, by means of its faculty of conveying foreboding or remem- brance. Yet it must assume this function not through the mere caprice of the musician, but in obedience only Wagner's Theory of Music 99 to the poet's aim. Unity of content and unity of expres- sion must go hand in hand. These melodic moments of the orchestra will take their rise only from the weightiest motives of the drama, which are the pillars of the edifice. In this way a binding principle of musical form may be obtained which springs directly from the poetic aim, and far surpasses the arbitrary, merely musical form of the old opera, which was loose, uncentralised, and inorganic. Finally let us ask, " Has the poet to restrict himself in presence of the musician, and the musician in pre- sence of the poet ? " The answer is that they ought not to restrict each other, but raise each other to higher potency, in order thus to generate the true drama. If both the poet's aim and the musician's expression are visible, the necessary inspiration of each by each has not been effected. We must not be reminded of either aim or expression, "but the content must instinctively engross us as a human action vindicated ' necessarily ' before our feeling." In every moment of the musician's expression the poetic aim must be contained ; and this poetic aim must always find complete realisation in the musician's expression. Whereas Voltaire said, " When a thing is too silly to be said, one sings it," we now may say, "What is not worth being sung is not worth the poet's pains of telling." There is no need to assume that poet and musician must necessarily be one person. Only in the present egoistic relations of these two — who are types of the egoism of the modern State — does it seem necessary for one man to become the unit of creation. Three nations — the Italians, French, and Germans — ^have contributed to the evolution of opera ; but the German language alone " still hangs directly and con- spicuously together with its roots," and hence is alone adapted for the new art-work. But the practice of singing operas with German words merely translated from the French or Italian, and therefore not coincid- loo A Study of Wagner ing in meaning and accent with the music, has mis- educated and demoralised German singers. In our drama, the melody is always conditioned by the word- verse, and singers must learn to render it intelligently, bringing out not merely the melody but the verbal sense of the melody. And gesture must be employed with intelligent understanding, in order to make the orches- tral moments of foreboding and remembrance ^ in their turn intelligible. But the primary condition for this new drama is a new public, that shall look at it seriously, as at an organism ; that wants an artwork and not a mere evening's distraction. We are less fortu- nate than the older artists, whose audience, whatever its social faults may have been, had at least delicacy and high breeding ; whereas we are ruled by the vulgar and ignorant Philistine, the characteristic product of our com- mercial civilisation. Yet even under the debris of modern life the artist can see the primal source of things, can reach to the human being, to whom the future belongs. II Now it seems necessary at the outset to point out one main fallacy in Wagner's treatise, which seems to have been overlooked by most of his admirers, but which is fatal to a good half of his argument. The dictum on which he bases the first part of his book is that " The error in the Art-genre of opera lies herein, that a means of expression {Music) has been made the end, while the end of expression {the Drama) has been made a means" And he proceeds to lay down the, in the main, indisputable fact, that in the opera of the past the poet existed solely for the musician. " Has this relation of the poet to the musician," he continues, "altered in the slightest even to the present day? . . . The ^ That is, in modern phrase, the "leading-motives." Wagner's Theory of Music loi chief characteristic of the situation, ... is to-day what it was a hundred and fifty years ago ; that' the poet must receive his in- spiration from the musician, that he shall Usten to the whims of music, accommodate himself to the disposition of the musician, choose his material according to the latter's taste, mould his characters by the different kinds of voices expedient for merely musical combinations, provide dramatic bases for certain set musical forms, in which the musician may wander as he chooses — in short, that in his subordination to the musician he shall construct his drama with a single eye to the specifically musical intentions of the composer. . . . The aim of opera has thus ever been, and still is to-day, confined to music. Merely so as' to afford music with a colourable pretext for her own excursions {Ausbrei- tung) is the purpose of Drama dragged on — naturally, not to curtail the ends of music, but rather to serve her simply as a means." ^ In his polemic against the place of undue import- ance which music usually took in the opera, Wagner is of course right. Even in the eighteenth century sensible men were revolted at the imbecility of the stories of operas, the weakness of the libretti, and the extraordinary liberties which composers and singers allowed themselves. But the recognition of this is by no means equivalent to accepting Wagner's great for- mula, that " a means of expression (music) has been made the end, while the end of expression (the drama) has been made a means." The whole fallacy lies in the use of the word " drama," which does not and cannot mean, in relation to music, what it always has meant in relation to poetry; that is, the word drama has always meant a spoken play, involving certain intellectual pro- cesses, and designed to produce a certain psychological effect,^ whereas in any combination of words and music 1 G. S. iii. 232, 233 ; Ellis, ii. 19. ^ We need not pause to consider how much in the Greek drama was spoken, and how much sung, or what was the precise relation of the musical mood to the poetical. We are not living in ancient Greece but in modem Europe, and as Wagner's use of the word "music" implies not ancient but modern music, so when he speaks of drama it is to the drama of modern Europe that he must be held to refer. I02 A Study of Wagner there is a change from the spoken drama both in the character of the words employed, the extent to which they can appeal to us, and the aesthetic nature of the final effect. It is evident at once, in a word, thafif Wagner is going to use the term drama as equivalent to musical drama, so much of his argument as depends upon this confusion of terms is flawed at the very foundations. Palpable as this fallacy seems to be, however, I cannot recall the name of a single Wagnerian who has noticed it. All have followed him uncritically in accept- ing his formula,^ and arguing upon it, as Wagner him- self has done, by means of thoroughly false analogies. Thus one French admirer writes — " We shall see in the course of this study that Wagner's reform bears not on the musical side but on the whole economy of the opera. ... By intuition he has re-established the lyrical drama on a rational basis by making the poet dominant there, just as the architect is dominant in the erection of a house. And herein he was perfectly logical, since the poet, like the architect, ought to control and resume in himself all those who concur in putting the material into shape." ^ Surely it is evident that on the face of the case the proper analogy to an architect planning the form of a house is the poet planning the scheme of a drama, or the musician planning the schema of a symphony ; and that in a combination of two arts like poetry and music, equally powerful in their respective spheres, it is folly to speak of the poet as being "dominant." Wagner and his disciples have, in fact, in their revolt against the domination of the musician, fallen into precisely the opposite error.^ A musical drama in which, as M, ' See, for example, besides the names and works cited in the text, Edmond Hippeau, Parsifal et V Opira WagnSrien, p. 25. "^ J. G. Freson, D Esthltique de Richard Wagner, i. 12, 13. * Theoretically, that is, for I hope to show that Wagner's practice does not always conform to his theory. Further, as will appear later on, the critics Wagner's Theory of Music 103 Freson has it, the poet should be master, or in which, according to Wagner, the drama should be the end, would be as inartistic a monstrosity as the older opera in which the musician was dominant (in the worst sense), and music an end instead of a means. An abler critic than M, Freson, indeed, has fallen into the same error. M. Georges Noufflard, in his exceedingly thoughtful study of Berlioz, has pointed out with great clearness the difference between the art of the ancien regime and modern art — the former having " its distinctive character in the search for an interest- ing form that should be ornamental in itself," the latter tending to substitute for a form agreeable in itself, but more or less conventional, the forms of things them- selves ; the difference being clearly marked, for example, in the transition from the symphony and oratorio of Haydn to the opera of Wagner and his more intellec- tual contemporaries. The period of transition, he remarks, " Is necessarily longer and more laborious in music than in any other art, for besides the difficulties of a general order which all have to contend with, music has to meet certain difficulties which are peculiar to it. I have already said that music is an ornamen- tal art like architecture. Its expression, so superior to any other in intensity, has not sufficient clearness to be able to command its own forms. The different parts of a composition would not hold together if they were not united by the bond afforded by the balancing of tonalities and the symmetrical repetition of the figures. Thus, then, in order to constitute an artistic unity with its own resources, music is obliged to dispose itself in an orna- mental fashion. Singular art 1 By its inner nature it is an expression more lively and more subtle than speech; by the forms in which it has to clothe itself in order to exist, it is only an ornamental art like arabesque — nothing more. It resembles who think they are expounding Wagner's ideas in passages like that quoted above from M. Freson, are really mistaking the psychological significance of some of his theories. I04 A Study of Wagner the human soul, which seems to be made for a more immaterial life than that permitted it by the body in which it is imprisoned, but without which it cannot live. To free itself from it, our soul must find in another world the conditions of a new life. In the same way, in order that music may rid itself of its architectural envelope and abandon itself entirely to the need of expression with which it is possessed, it is indispensable that it should seek in another world the organs necessary to a new existence ; it must incarnate itself in poetry, which, being alone capable of deter- mining its expression, becomes its necessary form as soon as, in order to obey the sentiment entirely, music ceases to have a form of its own." 1 Most of this, of course, no one will dispute. But M. Noufflard, under the influence of the Wagnerian theory, goes on to argue that when two arts are associ- ated, it suffices if one of them has a definite form. " Music paints the sentiments and speech defines them. The first place must then be given to music or to poetry, according as the sentiment in itself or the circumstances which direct it are of the greater importance. That is to say, lyric poetry ought to be dominated by music, while dramatic music ought to be dominated by poetry." 2, I venture to suggest that only the influence of the Wagnerian fallacy could have led M. Noufflard into such a fallacy as this. Is there, in the first place, any such division between drama and lyric as he appears to allege ? Do not, that is to say, many lyrics that have been set to music partake of the dramatic form and expression, and are there not in any musical drama many passages that can only be called lyrical ? What is the distinction ? Where does lyrism, in relation to music, end, and drama begin ? What are the signs by which we can distinguish one from another ? M. Nouff- lard has, in fact, fallen into the trap of Wagner. He ^ Noufflard, Hector Berlioz et le Mouvement de PArt coKtemporain, pp. 14, IS- ' Ibid., p. 17. Wagner's Theory of Music 105 has used the words poetry and drama without noticing that these terms do not and cannot mean, in relation to music, precisely what they mean in their ordinary con- notation. That this is so is evident from the contra- diction in which M. NoufHard is landed only a page further on. He has laid it down, like Wagner, that in the drama music should be controlled and directed, and its form determined, by poetry. Yet he goes on to say that — " It is necessary that the dramatic action should be motived and constantly determined; the first place then ought here to belong to the words. Doubtless the poet ought to penetrate himself with the sentiment of the music sufficiently to write nothing that is not congruous with the intervention of music; but finally, as Gluck has said (without, as a matter of fact, always putting it into practice), it is for poetry to trace the outline which the musician has only to colour." 1 Self-contradiction surely could not further go. How in the name of consistency can poetry be said to domi- nate music in opera, to determine the form which music must assume, if its own form has to be modified in order to suit the music ; and if the poet thus draws his outline to suit the colour of the musician, how can it be argued that all the musician has to do is to colour the outline afforded by the poet ? The reference to Gluck is doubly vain. Gluck, as I have attempted elsewhere to show in detail, laid such stress upon the function of poetry simply because he belonged to an age when poetry was relatively more developed than dramatic music ;^ and further, nothing could be more contradictory than Gluck's theory and practice, except, perhaps, the theory and practice of Wagner. Even Gluck's theory was not consistent with itself. In the ^ NoufiBard, Hector Berlioz et le Mouvement de VArt contemporain, pp. 17. 18. * See Gluck and the Opera, Part II. Chapters iii. and iv. io6 A Study of Wagner preface to Alceste he laid down the oft-quoted dictum that " I sought to reduce music to its true function, that of supporting the poetry, in order to strengthen the expression of the sentiments and the interest of the situations, without interrupting the action or disfiguring it with superfluous ornament. I imagined that the music should be to the poetry just what the vivacity of colour and the happy combination of light and shade are to a correct and well-composed design, serving to animate the figures without altering their contours." Here music is undeniably made the servitor of poetry ; yet in his letter to the Journal de Paris (12th October 1777) ^^ argued that the two arts should stand on a footing of equality, that all the parts "should strive after one end — expression — and the agreement between the words and the song should be such that neither the poem should seem to be made for the music nor the music for the poem." ^ It is useless to argue that these two statements are not contradictory. Gluck's opinions varied from time to time, and the relations of poetry and music presented themselves to him now under one form, now under another. But it is most significant to note how Gluck himself illustrates the contention that for Wagner and his disciples to speak of the drama controlling the music is quite erroneous, in face of the fact that, as we have seen even M. Noufflard admitting, the drama has to be modified in accordance with the demands of the musician. Any one who will read Gluck's letter to Guillard, the author of the libretto of Iphigenia in Tauris, concerning the construction of that opera, will see the rigorous way in which he dictates his own terms, and makes farcical his own contention that all the musician had to do was to paint the outline afforded him by the poet. The key to the apparent paradox is given in the concluding lines of the letter : " I explain myself rather confusedly, for my head is * See Cluci and the Opera, Part II. Chapters iii. and iv. p. 172. Wagner's Theory of Music 107 excited with the music." ^ This once for all disposes of the theory that Gluck or any other dramatic composer simply waited for the poet's " lead " ; and proves that, so far from music being merely the handmaid of poetry, the musical imagination, equally with the poetical, is capable of conceiving a dramatic situation under its own forms and in its own colour — that there is, in fact, what an able French writer has recently designated la pense'e musicale? ' It may be noted, in passing, that even among those who accept Wagner's statement of his own theory there is considerable variation of opinion with regard to the relation of the theory and practice of Gluck to the theory and practice of Wagner. In Opera and Drama, Wagner remarked that "the so famous revolution of Gluck, which has come to the ears of many ignoramuses as a complete reversal of the views previously current as to Opera's essence, in truth merely consisted of this : that the musical composer revolted against the wilfulness of the singer " (G. S. iii. 237 j Ellis, ii. 26). This, and all that follows, is extremely unfair to Gluck, as will be seen from the present chapter. It is curious to note, however, that while many ardent Wagnerians follow Wagner upon this point, others hold Gluck to have been a real pre- cursor of Wagner. Mr. Dannreuther, for example, echoes the opinions of Wagner upon Gluck (Richard Wagner: his Tendencies and Theories, pp. 26-28) ; while A. de Gasperini, one of the earliest of Wagner's French adherents, regards the modern master as the logical outcome of the older composer. "The true master of Wagner, his direct ancestor, is Gluck. It is easy to demonstrate this ; easy to show, in the works of the old German master or in the fragments of his letters, the germ of all the ideas which Wagner at a later date put forward and developed with such power. Wagner . . . has never been just to Gluck." Gasperini proceeds to prove the in- justice of limiting Gluck's reform to a mere revolt against the tyranny of the singers, and to show, point by point, the absolute similarity of the theories of the two German composers (La nouvelle Allemagne musicale: Richard Wagner ; [1866], pp. 1 18-120). See also Edouard Schur^, Le Drame musical, i. 258-273 ; and Eugene de Bricqueville, VOpira de FAvenir dans le Passi, pp. 64-82. A. B. Marx long ^o referred to Gluck as the reformer of the drama in opera, recognising at the same time that ' ' in the German opera, the purely dramatic element has never been able to attain full ascendancy ; the musical element, or the expression of individual sensations, has always been predominant" (The Music of the igth Century [Eng. trans.; 1855], p. 60.) But Marx gave the true reasons for this, pointing out how the form of the musical drama had been determined both by the peculiarity of music and the social conditions of the last century. Liszt, again, writing in 1850, declared that "Wagner would certainly have written the preface to Alceste, had Gluck not already done so " (Lohengrin et Tannhduser de R. Wagner, p. 103). ^ See Jules Combarieu, Les Rapports de la Musique et de la Poisie, considerles au point de vae de V expression. io8 A Study of Wagner The confusion that has been introduced into musi- cal aesthetic by Wagner's uncritical use of his terms may be further illustrated by a letter which the late Dr. Hueffer addressed to the Daily News, in reply to some strictures upon the Wagnerian theory : — " I claimed for Wagner," he wrote, " the honour or dishonour (whichever it may be) of having urged theoretically, and shown by his creative productions, the necessity of a poetical basis of music. The meaning of the word ' poetical ' in such combination differs essentially from the sense in which the word is generally used, and this nuance, perhaps not sufficiently explained by me, has, I think, given rise to some misapprehension in your article. By ' poetical ' I mean only the original passionate impulse, which every artist must feel, and which he tries to embody in his work, be it by means of articulate words, sounds, or colours. In this sense every artist must be first a poet ; and without such a fundamental conception, poetry proper will de- generate into mere rhyming, painting into the worst kind of meaningless genre, and music into a shallow display of sound, or Musikmacherei as the Germans appropriately call it. Of this original impulse music had lost hold for a long time, chiefly owing to the destructive influence of the Italian operatic stage of the last century. Even in great composers like Mozart or Haydn, the poetical idea was encumbered by the strict forms of absolute music. My meaning is, to be quite explicit, that they would conceive a melody, perhaps full of sentiment, and certainly full of beauty of sound, and develop it exclusively with a view to dis- playing such beauties. It was Beethoven who first distinctly felt, and Wagner who first expressed in words, the necessity of a previous ' poetical ' impulse to which the forms of music proper would have to yield. The unimpaired vitality of pure instru- mental music, on these -grounds, is of course obvious, it being altogether a secondary consideration whether the ' poetical basis ' be expressed in words or not. Much less is the possibility of poetry as a separate art denied by the above theory. Still it is equally true that where a thorough blending of words and music is effected, and most of all in the drama, the very essence of which is passionate impulse, the common effort of both arts will be of a higher kind than is ever attainable by either in its individual Wagner's Theory of Music 109 sphere. Both have to resign some of their peculiarities, but both gain new strength and beauty in their supreme surrender. They are not, to adopt the equestrian simile of your contributor, 'two riders on the same horse, where one or the other must ride behind,' but rather like two noble steeds drawing with double force and swiftness the fiery chariot of divine pathos." i The question as to whether poetry and music in combination can or cannot exist on the terms of ami- cable equality indicated by Dr. Hueffer will be discussed later in the present chapter. Here it is sufficient to note that it is an error to employ the term " poetical " as signifying the fundamental impulse of all art, and that nothing but confusion can result from employing it in such a manner. Used as Dr. Hueffer uses it, it simply means that a composer must take his art seri- ously, earnestly, and intelligently ; and from this stand- point there is no real justification for saying that the pre-Beethovenian composers did not look at their art in this way. Conventions there must be in every art ; that is, certain artificial modes of procedure must be adopted, their artificiality being lost sight of in the superior aesthetic pleasure that is given by their employ- ment. In this sense there are as many conventions in poetry and painting as there are in " absolute music." Princes of Denmark, for example, do not usually carry on their conversations in blank verse ; and if Shake- speare's Hamlet does so it is because the departure from plain external truth in this respect is more than compensated for by the artistic delight which blank verse gives us. In this respect all the arts except archi- tecture stand upon the same footing ; and " absolute music," with its strict forms, was simply doing what every other art does — seeking the best means within its power of obtaining the maximum of expression, and employing certain necessary conventions to that end. All that one can complain of is the employment of these ' Hueffer, Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future, pp. 105, 106. no A Study of Wagner conventions where they are no longer required, with the result that instead of increasing the artistic pleasure they diminish it by their incongruity. The object of the symphonic conventions was to make absolute music self-supporting and self-sufficing in the absence of words. As soon as words were combined with the music, the necessity for most of these conventions disappeared, and their continuance was felt as an anomaly and an element of detraction from the total aesthetic pleasure. This was all that was involved in the transition from absolute music to poetic music ; and to phrase it that it was necessary for the musician to have a " poetical basis " for his music is to obscure the whole ^esthetic problem. There is bound to be fallacy all along by the use of the term " poetry " when something else than poetry, something less than poetry always means for us, is implied. If, as Dr. Hueffer admits, when poetry and music combine, each has to surrender some of its peculiarities, where is the justice of using the term " poetry " as if its meaning were unchanged ; and where is the justice of designating their union " drama," when the word in this sense cannot possibly mean what drama has always meant for us ? The bearing of all this upon Wagner's dictum — "that a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means " — is, it is hoped, quite evident. The point I am urging is that the drama is noi the end of expression in a combination of music and poetry, for the reasons that (i) everything which goes to make a drama is so modified by the introduction of music that the term, with its former connotations, is no longer applicable, and (2) the use of music has introduced quite a new factor, a new and very important element of aesthetic pleasure of a quite different kind, which cannot be looked upon as subordinate to the " poetical idea." This second point will be enlarged upon at a Wagner's Theory of Music in further stage of the argument; meanwhile we may follow up the first point to its logical conclusions. I have contended that Wagner's use of the terms " poetry " and " drama " is quite misleading. His complaint is that— "Music, which, as an art of expression, can in its utmost wealth of such expression be nothing more than true, has con- formably therewith to concern itself alone with what it should express : in opera this is unmistakably the Feeling of the charac- ters conversing on the stage, and a music which fulfils this task with the most convincing effect is all that it ever can be. A music, however, which would fain be more than this, which should not connect itself with any object to be expressed, but desire to fill its place, i.e. to be alike that object : such a music is no longer any kind of music, but a fantastic, hybrid emanation from Poetry and Music, which in truth can only materialise itself as caricature. With all its perverse efforts, Music, the in any way effective music, has actually remained naught other than Expres- sion. But from those efforts to make it in itself a Content — and that, forsooth, the Content of a Drama — has issued That which we have to recognise as the consequential downfall of Opera, and therewith as an open demonstration of the radical un-nature of that genre of Art." ^ Here, it seems to me, Wagner makes the mistake of supposing that music is merely an art of "expression"; that is, that music cannot of itself be satisfying, cannot do more than "illustrate" or strengthen a poetical idea. This will perhaps be more clearly seen from one of the opening sentences of Opera and Drama, in which he says that — "Music was therefore destined to credit herself with possi- bilities which, in very truth, were doomed to stay for her /wpossi- bilities ; herself a sheer organ of expression, she must rush into the error of desiring to plainly outline the thing to be expressed ; she must venture on the boastful attempt to issue orders and ' G. S. iii. 243, 844 ; Ellis, ii. 33, 34. 112 A Study of Wagner speak out aims there, where in truth she can only have to subor- dinate herself to an aim her essence cannot ever formulate {fassen), but to whose realising she gives, by this her subordination, its only true enablement." ^ Here the origin of his confusion is plainly evident. He cannot mean ^ that music per se is incapable of " plainly outlining the thing to be expressed " ; for in the symphony the "thing to be expressed," though not susceptible of statement in words, is " expressed " with quite sufficient decision and clearness and completeness to satisfy the organs to which it is addressed. To argue upon this point would be superfluous ; for no one would go the length of maintaining that the utterance of a piece of symphonic music left in the mind a craving for a " poetical basis," or left a sense that the web of sound was merely the " expression " of some other " thing to be expressed." ^ Wagner, and the partisans who have unthinkingly adopted his aesthetics, have missed the psychological fact that the delight we take in absolute music is a thing sui generis, the satisfaction of a certain set of faculties, not to be discredited by individual attempts to discover a poetical basis.* What he is really thinking of when he complains that music has tried to do what it is essentially incapable of doing, is the im- position of the forms of absolute music upon the opera ; and this he confuses with music encroaching upon the ^ G. S. iii. 234 ; Ellis, ii. 23. * Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the majority of musicians would not contend for this. I hope to show in the sequel that Wagner's mind was in many ways unique, and that, probably from reasons of cerebral construction, he could not look at music apart from poetry in the way other men do. » No one, that is, but Wagner. See the previous note, and a passage in Letter 5 to Uhlig — " Our cursed writing of abstract poetry and music is the very devil to get on with " (Eng. trans., p. 23). The use of the condemnatory phrase " abstract music " shows that music apart from words had little mean- ing, little satisfaction for Wagner — that it did not impress him as it impresses most men. ■• Compare the remarks in his Beethoven (G. S. ix. 103 ; Ellis, v. 103). Wagner's Theory of Music 113 field of poetry.^ Thus in discussing the development from Gluck he writes : — "The traditional divisions of the Aria, though still substantially preserved, were given a wider play of motive ; modulations and connecting phrases {Uebergange und Verbindungsglieder) were themselves drawn into the sphere of expression ; the Recitative joined on to the Aria more smoothly and less waywardly, and, as a necessary mode of expression, it stepped into that Aria itself. Another notable expansion was given to the Aria, in that — obediently to the dramatic need — more than one person now shared in its delivery, and thus the essential Monody of earlier opera was beneficially lost. Pieces such as Duets and Terzets were indeed known long before; but the fact of two or three people singing in one piece had not made the slightest essential difference in the character of the Aria : this had remained exactly the same in melodic plan and insistence on the tonality once started {Behauptung des einmal angeschlagenen themaiischen Tones) — which bore no reference to any individual expression, but solely to a general, specifically-musical mood — and not a jot of it was really altered, no matter whether delivered as a monologue or duet, excepting at the utmost quite materialistic details, namely, in that its musical phrases were either sung alternately by different voices, or in concert through the sheer harmonic device of com- bining two, three, or more voices at once. . . . The essential musical substance of this Ensemble was still, indeed, composed of Aria, Recitative, and Dance-tune. . . ."^ Now music, in order to be music at all, has to em- ploy certain devices like any other art ; and, as has already been pointed out, the most that one can object to is the employment of these devices where they have ceased to be necessary, and where, consequently, instead of adding to the aesthetic pleasure they diminish it by their incongruity. Thus in a purely instrumental piece of music, certain forms of repetition and certain key- sequences assist the mind to grasp the music as a coherent whole ; but these same forms may be quite 1 See again G. S. ix. iii, 112 ; Ellis, v. 112. ' G. S. iil 239 ; Ellis, ii. 29. H 114 A Study of Wagner superfluous in a piece of vocal music, where the thought receives sufficient support and sufficient coherence from the words ; and the employment of the symphonic devices is here felt as the imposition of altogether alien conditions.^ And if Wagner admits, as he does, that composers were trying to make their expression more dramatic, to make the sentiment of the music con- form more closely to the sentiment of the words, all he really has to complain of is that the forms of absolute music were imported into opera, where of course they were quite superfluous. But this is a very different thing from saying that music, " herself a sheer organ of expression," had rushed "into the error of desiring to plainly outline the thing to be expressed." It had done nothing of the sort. It had always, in the hands of serious musicians, tried to move in emotional concord with the verse ; ^ its only error consisted in the mistaken notion that musical forms which were so efficacious in the absence of words would be equally efficacious when words were present. Let us see how Wagner's argument develops. Speaking of the reform carried out by Gluck, and the consequent greater warmth of expression which was being put into the aria, he writes : — " In the situation of the Poet towards the Composer not one jot was altered ; rather had the Composer grown more dictatorial, ^ Conversely, a style of music such as recitative, that is not really self- existent, whose only raison d'ltre is its association with words, is quite out of place in symphonic music, which must be justified to the ear by its own mean- ing, and by that alone. See, for example, the curious sonata of Beethoven, Op. 31, No. 2, with the strange descent, near the close of the first movement, into recitative. Music like this is out of place in a sonata, just as the sonata- form is out of place in dramatic music. ^ M. Schure, Mr. Dannreuther, and others have regarded all operatic forms between the Greek drama and Wagner as merely bastard products. A scien- tific corrective has been administered by M. Henri Coutagne in Les dratnes musicaux de Richard Wagner (pp. 52-55), where the essentially evolutionary nature of the Wagnerian drama is shown, as well as its utilisation the sounds which it employs have no other raison d'ttre than themselves, and produce their effect independently of any rela-^ tion of imitation with any object whatever. It results from this- that the physiological study of sound plays a leading part in musical aesthetic, far greater than that of the study of light or of perspective in painting. What in the other arts is only a means is here both end and means." ^ There can be no question, of course, that Helmholtz is overstating the case here. Our appreciation of music is something more than physiological delight in an orderly arrangement of sound ; it involves also an intellectual mode of receptiveness.^ This would probably have been admitted by him in later days, in the light of the criticism which the aesthetic portion of his great work from time to time encountered. But divesting his theory of its extravagant trappings, we have to recognise the important truth running through it, that our appre- ^ "In der Musik wird keine Naturwahrheit estrebt " ; Sensations of Tont^ PP- 3. 4- 2 Sensations of Tone, p. 4. Compare with .this the extreme opinion of M. Victor de Laprade, who in his Contre la Musique pronounces music to be "the least human of the arts," because mathematical and physiological laws reign supreme in it, and the free intellect co-operates less than in any other' art except architecture. See also Ch. Beauquier, Philosophic de la Musique. ' See the criticism of Helmholtz by M. Combarieu, op. cit. , pp. 3-7. 174 A Study of Wagner ciation of music differs from our appreciation of poetry in the fundamental particular of sheer delight in the sensuous material of which it is composed. Of similar significance is the treatise of Hanslick on Musical Beauty,^ in which he argues that the distinction between the form and the content of music is altogether false, and goes so far as to say that "the sorrowful impression which a melody makes on us comes, not from the real sorrow of the musician, but from the intervals between •the notes of the melody ; not from the anguish of his soul, but from the tremolo of the cymbals ; not from his longing, but from chromatic progressions." ^ Hans- lick, of course, represents an order of musical mind diametrically opposite to that of Wagner, his book being, indeed, designed to combat what he held to be the errors of the Wagnerian aesthetic ; and in his zeal to discredit all attempts to look upon music as anything but music, he undoubtedly exaggerates, as Helmholtz does, the purely formal pleasure of the art. But under- lying his extravagant exposition is the psychological truth one feels compelled to insist upon as against Wagner — that he is hopelessly astray in omitting to recognise the satisfying quality of musical sound per se, the self-sufficiency of the musical imagination in its own domain, and the extent to which his theory of poetry, music, and music-drama will consequently have to be modified. What now is the explanation of this aesthetic blind- ness on Wagner's part ? Bearing in mind all that has been said as to the distinct cerebral tracts that are con- ^ Vom Musikalisch-Schonen. ' Op. cit., p. 58. M. Combarieu (pp. cit., p. 14, note) points out that similar ideas had been put forward in the last century by Boye, in his V Expression niusicale mise au rangdes chimh-es (Amsterdam, 1779). Boy^ " maintains that ,the expression is a matter of indifference, and ' bears the same relation to the words as the decoration to a room ' ; he goes the length of trying to prove .that ' the music which approaches most nearly to expression is the most wearisome,' the airs, for example, being much more agreeable than the Recitatives." Wagner's Theory of Music 175 cerned with speech and music, it seems probable that in Wagner these tracts were in closer correspondence than in most men, thus causing him to flood his sensa- tions of the one art with sensations derived from the other. His brain, indeed, seems to have been in many ways abnormal, and to have touched upon derangement at many points — though kept from actual derangement by the approximate balance of all the faculties. He himself has told us, in his Autobiographical Sketch,^ how he used to have visions in which chords " seemed to take on living form " — how he used, that is, to visualise an auditory impression.^ His mind, indeed, paid the usual penalty of extraordinary fleetness of sensation and ease of communication between its different parts ; he was sometimes subject to the delusions that ensue when one tract of the brain signals its message to another, and the higher inhibiting power is incompetent to point out how unreal is the phantom thus evoked. Read, for example, his own curious account of what happened when he was making the funeral speech over the remains of Weber, which had, in 1844, been brought from England to be buried in German soil. He seems to have fallen into a kind of hypnosis, induced by the sound of his own voice ; and he not only heard himself but saw himself in front of the audience, and waited expectantly for what was to come, as if he were another being than the speaker, until the curious silence and the sight of the faces turned towards jhim recalled him to himself.' The brain of Wagner thus seems to have been one in which certain centres communicated more rapidly 1 G. S. i. 6 ; Ellis, i. 6. ° A great many people, of course, analogise (if I may coin a word) music in this or similar ways, some conceiving a musical sequence in terms of line, others in terms of colour. But in its pronounced forms it is decidedly an abnormality. See the brilliant and instructive study of music-madness in Mr. Stanley V. Makower's story The Mirror of Music. 3 See the G. S. ii. 45. ' 176 A Study of Wagner with each other than they do in the majority of indi- viduals, and we have only to look at the matter in this way to see the real reason of his blindness to many of the effects of music and of poetry, as well as of his exclusive preference for that order of music that had poetical associations. In ordinary men the mental spheres that are severally concerned with the perception of poetry and music remain for the most part separate, so that music is cognised purely as music, poetry purely as poetry. But we have only to imagine a brain in which these tracts were in closer intercommunication, and we can see how such a brain would colour many of its musical impressions with poetry, and many of its poetical impressions with music. Of this kind we may conjecture Wagner's brain to have been. Everywhere, throughout his works and in his letters, we find him looking at poetry as no poet would look at it, and at music as few musicians would look at it ; railing at the poets for cutting themselves adrift from music, at the musician for striving to be independent of poetry ; read- ing poetical meanings into Beethoven, and stripping poetry of everything that made it poetry ; and laying it down that the musical art of the future should only be allowed to develop in the direction of poetical art. To support positions like these he indulges in the most extraordinary paralogisms, presenting, indeed, in his constant apriorism, in the perpetual weakness of his hold upon actual facts as they exist for the mass of men, the spectacle of a mind enslaved to an inborn hallucination. There can, I think, be no question of his being abnormal on this point, of his being utterly off the ordinary line of human psychology ; and I trust there is nothing extravagant in the hypothesis I have put forward in explanation of it — that in his fine and delicate brain poetry and music sang to each other across the strands of matter, so that he never thought of the one apart from the other, never knew ^n his own Wagner's Theory of Music 177 soul what were the sensations of the lover of poetry as. poetry, or those of the lover of music as music. In no other way can we explain all the aberration of con- ception and of argument in his theoretical work which I have tried to emphasise in the foregoing pages. VI Let us now, for the sake of clearness, briefly summarise the result of our criticism thus far. We have seen that Wagner's great formula — " The error in the art-genre of Opera consists herein : that a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means " — is altogether eprroneous. There is a primary fallacy in the use of the word drama at all in this connection, importing, as it does, alien meanings into opera ; for the addition of music to poetry so alters the whole complexion of the latter art, and gives rise to such utterly different emotions, that if we now say the drama is the " End " of the combination of poetry and music, we must look upon the word as having quite a different meaning from that which it has always had. Further, when Wagner complains that in the old opera the poem was written merely to suit the music, he forgets that his own poems are written on the same adaptive principle ; that upon this principle, indeed, in some form or other, all poems must be written which are intended for music. His complaint against the older opera really amounts to this, that forms which men had, by long experiment and by instinctive feeling, discovered to be the best for music unaided by poetry, were unthinkingly applied to music when associated with poetry. Here, however, the very purpose of the symphonic forms — to give coherence and intellectual meaning to music that had not the support of words — was distorted ; for a musical emotion reinforced by the M 178 A Study of Wagner concrete suggestions of poetry has no need of these forms. The result of the imposition of unnecessary restrictions upon operatic music was necessarily to pro- voke a feeling of discontent in the intelligent hearer, for an alien form is not merely useless but a positive burden, hindering spontaneous delight in the art. Wagner is then wrong, both psychologically and histori- cally, upon this point ; he attributes to the overweening pretensions of music in relation to poetry what should really be attributed to the mistaken use of certain more or less conventional forms. As a matter of fact, in his own operas, as in all vocal music, the main pleasure comes from the music rather than from the words ; and his failure to perceive the immense importance of "the sensuous element is a fundamental blunder on his part. Nor is there any " pretension " on the part of "the older composers which is not repeated by himself. He also shapes the words to suit the music ; he also hngers lovingly over a beautiful theme for the mere .satisfaction it gives. His own procedure is simply that inevitable to every composer, due to the very nature of music itself ; the only difference being that he is less iormalistic, less consciously swayed by custom and convention. Further, when, as in the two long letters to Uhlig, he states at length his own conceptions of poetry and music, we find him falling into the most extraordinary fallacies. We were forced to conclude that he knew nothing of purely musical pleasure and purely poetical pleasure as other men experience them ; that in him, by some curious structure of brain, music and poetry were more closely intertwined than in other men ; and we sought a physiological explanation of this. Finally, by examining the practice of primitive tribes — where we found music as music satisfying the mind in spite of any incongruities in the words, just as in modern Italian opera — and the opinions of certain musical Wagner's Theory of Music 179 sestheticians — who, in spite of the exaggerations of some of them, show the normal psychological condi- tions of musical appreciation — we came to the con- clusion that the element of delight in music for its own sake, which Wagner (in theory) so strangely neglected or despised, is of the utmost importance in any theory of opera. One or two points connected with Wagner's theory still remain to be discussed. It has been argued in the preceding pages that no one art or combination of arts can now satisfy humanity, and take the place of all the different arts, for the reason that these have developed to their present form in obedience to a diversity of intellectual and emotional wants ; and until humanity changes so far as to lose these wants, each of them can be satisfied only by the particular art that has been born from it. The truth of an earlier argu- ment must, I think, be admitted — that the man who can take up Wagner's standpoint only does so because he really knows nothing of the distinctive pleasures of the arts. He knows, that is, nothing of the poetical pleasure / feel when I read an ode of Keats, and still less of my pleasure in reading a dramatic lyric of Browning ; he knows nothing of the pleasure / experi- ence when hearing a simple melody played upon the piano, or of the pleasure given to me by the line and colour of painting. Pleasure in these things of course Wagner may have found ; but the point I am insisting on is that it was not the pleasure of other men, not the complete, wholly satisfying delight that craves no re- inforcement from any other art.^ And pushing the analysis a little further, it becomes more and more evident that Wagner, as I said in the earlier stages of ' M. Schure speaks of " the confused aspiration of poetry towards music, and of music towards poetry — the desire for the other muse-sister felt by every true poet mid by every musician " {Le drame musical, i. 287). One wonders what can be the mental state of people who can spin theories in this way, without the slightest regard for the facts that contradict them. i8o A Study of Wagner the present chapter, controlled poetry by music just as effectually as any of the composers whom he was never tired of condemning. He did not do it consciously, but his unconsciousness of the procedure made it none the less effectual. He was merely unconscious of it, indeed, because the musical mood from which this pro- cedure came was the very foundation of his nature. Hence at once his blindness to it, and his ignorance of the very different standpoint from which other men regard poetry and music. His own opera-poems, it may easily be shown, are for the most part not poetry at all in the proper sense of the word ; they are simply verses adapted for music. In writing them he adapted his poetry to his music as flagrantly as any previous composer could have done. The explanation of it is that the emotion from which he started out into expression was not a poetical but a musical^ emotion. It was vague, expansive, lyric, tonal. It was from a mental state of this quality that his creative thought took rise. This was what he wanted to shape into utterance, and he unconsciously, instinc- tively, moulded his words to run in harmony with its possibilities. The reader of his prose works notices that architecture, sculpture, and painting seem scarcely to have appealed to him, the three " human " arts, as he calls them, being Dance, Tone, and Poetry. The beginning of the second part of The Art-Work of the Future, again, proves conclusively that Wagner's own emotions were fundamentally musical, and that all his reasoning upon music and the drama is vitiated by the fact that the mass of men take a quite different view of the arts. See, for example, the passage already quoted on p. 65, and compare the following : — I 1 The reader, of course, must understand the term "musical" here in the sense I have already given to it in connection with Wagner ; that is, as im- plying a state of mind less abstract and more objective than that of the " absolute " musician, Wagner's Theory of Music i8i " Through this enforced renunciation, through this giving up of all delight in the physical element of his own utterance — at least of that degree of pleasure which the corporeal- and the emotional-man experience in their method of expression — the intellectual-man attains the faculty of giving by means of his speech-organ that certain utterance in seeking which the former found their bounds, each in his own degree. His capability is unlimited: he collects and sifts the universal, parts and unites according to his need and pleasure the images which all his senses bear him from the outer world ; he binds and looses the particular and general even as he judges best, in order to appease his own desire for a sure and intelligible utterance of his feelings, his reflections, or his will. Yet he finds once more his limit where, in the agitation of his feelings, in the living pulse of joy or the violence of grief — there, where the particular and arbitrary draw back before the generality and spontaneity of the feeling that usarps his heart ; where from out the egoism gf his narrowed and conditioned personal sensations he finds himself again amid the wide communion of all-embracing world-emotions, a partaker in the unconditioned truth of universal feeling and emotion ; where, finally, he has to subordinate his individual self-will to the dictates of Necessity, be it of grief or joy, and to hearken in place of commanding — he craves for the only adequate and direct expression of his endlessly enhanced emotion. Here must he reach back once more to the universal mode of utterance ; and, in exact proportion as he has pressed forward to his special standpoint, has he now to retrace his steps and borrow from the emotional-man the physical tones of feeling, from the corporeal- man the physical gestures of the body. For where it is a ques- tion of giving utterance, immediate and yet most certain, to the highest and the truest that man can ever utter, there above all must man display himself in his entirety ; and this whole man is the man of understanding, united with the man of heart and man of body — but neither of these parts for self alone." ^ This passage alone is sufficient to show how closely Wagner's theories were dependent upon his own pecu- liar psychology. For him, no doubt, " the highest and 1 Art- Work of the Future; G. S. iii. 65, 66 ; Ellis, i. 93, 94. 1 82 A Study of Wagner the truest that man can ever utter" found expression in sound ; but it is not so for thousands of other men. To refer to our modern poetry as merely the language of the understanding, and therefore not an expression of the whole man, is begging the question. A poet or a lover of poetry might very well make Wagner the rejoinder that poetry gives utterance to more and deeper things than music can do. Is not the conclu- sion unavoidable that while Wagner was deeply stirred by music, he knew practically nothing of the emotions engendered in other men by other arts ? ^ On almost every page, indeed, of Opera and Drama we can see the same tendency to glorify music as being able to express almost all that men can say, simply because it expressed almost all that Wagner had to say. When he girds at " word-speech," as " the organ of the understanding," for not being able to satisfy " the feel- ing," it is evident that he was unaware that word-speech in poetry does satisfy millions of human beings far more completely than music can do. What he really means by " the feeHng " is that peculiar impulse to generalised expression which can find vent only in music — that peculiar receptive faculty which in music alone can find satisfaction.^ Take one or two examples at random : — " In the Interest of this man all outward differences are to be raised into one definite thing; in which, however, the Interest must reveal itself according to its greatest, most exhaustive ' In the BeethiTven again he wrote that " Drama towers above the bounds of Poetry in exactly the same manner as Music above those of every other art, and especially of plastic art, through its effect residing solely in the sublime " (G. S. ix. 105 ; Ellis, v. 106). Here he certainly overrates the possibilities of his own art. Plastic art gives us a thousand emotions which music cannot give, but which are none the less indispensable to us. * This may be realised from passage after passage of Opera and Drama. See, for example, G. S. iv. 89, 90, 96, 99, 100, loi, 104, 120, 122, 127, 136, 137, 141, 142, 197, 198; Ellis, ii. 222, 229, 233, 234, 239, 257, 259, 264, 274, 275, 280, 343. Wagner's Theory of Music 183 compass. But this is as good as saying that from this Interest all which savours of the particularistic and accidental must be taken away, and it must be given in its full truth as a necessary, purely- human utterance of feeling." "A great conjuncture of phenomena — through which alone they are individually explicable — is only to be displayed, as we have seen, through a concentration of these phenomena; this concentration {Verdichtung), as applied to the phenomena of human life, means their simplification, and for its sake a strengthen- ing of the moments-of-action — which, again, could only proceed from motives likewise strengthened. But a motive can gain an access of strength only through the ascension of the various intellectual moments contained in it, into one decisive ' moment '- of-feeling ; while the word-poet can arrive at imparting this con- vincingly, only through the primal organs of the soul's inner feeling — through Tone-speech." ^ "A Tone-speech to be struck intofro?n the outset is therefore the organ of expression proper for the poet who would make himself intelligible by turning from the understanding to the feeling. . . ."■ So far as passages of this kind merely have in view the undeniable fact that in any dramatic form, | whether poetical or musical-poetical, the multiplicity of actual life must be concentrated and focussed in order to make an artistic effect, Wagner was simply expound- ing an aesthetic commonplace as old as Aristotle. His novelty consists in arguing that " the poetising under- standing," through its medium of expression — word- speech — cannot present this focussed, concentrated " moment " to us in its true reality, and that this can be done by "the feeling" only, through its organ of expression — tone-speech. Clearly the state of mind that generated a theory such as this was at bottom merely a musical one. This is evident again from all his remarks upon the function of the vowel in the expression of the truly-human, and the necessity of its being uplifted to the higher emotional plane of music. It is evident once more when he discusses the present 1 84 A Study of Wagner relations of music and poetry. Music, as he rightly says, does as it pleases with the rhythm of poetry, breaking it up or prolonging it according to its own necessities ; ^ while the rhyme of poetry is either drowned in sound or totally disregarded as a division of the phrase. For this reason, in his own drama "there shall be no discrepancy between the rhythm of the verse and that of the music. But he does not perceive that in writing verses such as his he is really controlling poetry by music just in the ordi- nary manner. For why do we not grumble when a ^ He has pointed out how, in Greek poetry, the speaking-accent was interfered with at will to suit the exigences of musical accent, but he failed to perceive that this was precisely what music always has done and always "will do with speech. He is right in saying that modern poetry cannot be made to proceed upon the basis of a sequence of classical " longs " and " shorts," though he does wrong in trying to enlist this fact in the service of his own theory of coincidence of musical and poetical accents. The true solution of the ■difficulty is that modern poetry is not quantitative in the sense in which Greek and Latin were — or are supposed to have been. The subject is too wide for discussion here ; but for light upon the hopeless chaos of the current notions upon " accent" and "quantity" in ancient and modern verse I may refer the reader to Poe's essay on The Rationale of Verse, the appendix (on "Accent, 'Quantity, and Feet ") to Mr. John M. Robertson's New Essays towards a Critical Method, Steele's ■/Vi'wo'za Rationalis (1779), Roe's Principles of Jihyihm, both in Speech and Music (1823), Sidney Lanier's Science of English Verse, Professor Sylvester's Laws of Verse, J. Addington Symond's Blank Verse, Mr. T. S. Omond's English Verse Structure, and Mr. Robert Bridges' Milton's Prosody. Wagner betrays the very grossest ignorance of what con- stitutes poetical rhythm when he approves the action of the German actress — he calls her "intelligent" — who "had all her roles written out in prose, so as not to be tempted by their look to exchange the natural speaking-accent for a sense-destroying scansion of the verse." Evidently neither she nor Wagner had any ear for the beauty and the variety of poetical rhythm. He tells us that " the secret of this Iambic has become patent on our acting stages. Intelligent actors, concerned to address the hearer's understanding, have ■spoken this verse as naked prose ; unintelligent ones, unable to grasp the content of the verse by reason of its beat, have declaimed it as a sense- and tone-less melody, alike unintelligible as unmelodious. " It is evident to any ■one who knows how to read poetry properly, that it should sound neither like unrhythmical prose nor like mechanical sing-song — that it has, in fact, a very subtle and constantly variable rhythm of its own. The point is interest- ing as affording yet another proof that Wagner knew nothing whatever of ■what constitutes poetry ; that he was insusceptible to it ; and that he saw real artistic beauty in music alone. Wagner's Theory of Music 185 musician plays havoc with the rhythm of a poem ? Why do we allow different composers to set the same poem to music of different rhythms ? Why should a lyric of Heine go equally well in f, in |, in ^, or in common time, with the syllables lengthened to any extent that the music may demand ? For the simple reason that the musical rhythm takes such complete possession of the senses that the poetical rhythm is wholly disregarded. It is useless for Wagner to say that we ought to look upon this procedure as inartistic.^ The plain and sufficient answer is that we do not ; that extreme delight even can be given by a word being made to stretch over two or three musical tones — the music, which is the main source of our pleasure, atoning for everything. Now Wagner's own procedure is on a par with this ; the only differ- ence being that whereas another composer musicalises {if I may coin the word) the verse after it is written, Wagner treats it in this way before it is written. The amount of genuine poetical pleasure that is given us by his later opera poems is exceedingly small ; they can hardly, indeed, be said to exist as poetry, their whole raison d'etre being the music. Their primitive rhythm, for example, is a very poor substitute for all the wealth of rhythm of modern poetry ; and since Wagner manages to make his lines acceptable to us by. dower- ing them with all the beauty and variety of musical rhythm, it is evident that in his opera music has the upper hand in relation to poetry as effectually as in the operas of any other composer. Nor, in face of ihe many passages, such as the Parnass und Paradies of ^ In his paper On Operatic Poetry and Composition he pointed out some ■blunders on the part of Weber and others in the union of poetical and musical accent and rhythm. He is quite right as far as he goes. Where we really feel that a verbal absurdity is being perpetrated for the sake of giving free play to the musical phrase, our aesthetic sense is of course outraged. But if no absurdity of this sort is committed, we do not mind whether a lyric poem is set in I or in f rhythm — the musical rhythm taking the poetical up into itself. 1 86 A Study of "Wagner the Prize-Song in the Meistersinger, where the one syllable is made to extend over several musical moments, quite in the style of every other man who has written vocal music, is it easy to see the justice of his sweeping con- demnation of the music that does as it likes with the rhythm and the accent of the words. The plain truth is that Wagner was grievously deluded when he ima- gined that in Opera and Drama he was vindicating the claims of poetry as against the pretensions of music. What he was really doing was to assert, more imperi- ously than ever, the claims of music as against those of poetry, /or the "feeling" to which he wished the art-work to appeal, and from which he wished it to take its rise, was really not a poetical but a musical frame of mind. VII More particularly can it be seen how in Wagner's* operas, as in those of other men, the music does the bulk of the work, and not only blinds us to the imper- fections of the verse but carries us over chasms that would be appalling were the music not there, by an examination of his own practice in connection with the theories of previous aestheticians. We have seen how clearly the best writers upon music in the eighteenth century marked out the difference between the drama, and the musical drama, and showed how the drama must be modified, both in fo'rm and in scope, by its union with music. There are two poles of expression in opera — the lyrical, and what can only be called, in. contradistinction, the non-lyrical. Poetry may be said to cover the latter field,' while the former is best occupied by everything we include in the term " Song." Not only can the girl sing her lost love better than the ' The reader will gather from the sequel in what sense I here use the terms "lyrical" and "non-lyrical," without my defining them at greater length. Wagner's Theory of Music 187 miser could sing his lost money-bags, but she can sing her passion more poignantly, more beautifully than she could speak it — this, indeed, constituting the peculiar strength of opera, where the great primary human passions are raised to their highest artistic power. But a song does not make a drama, nor would twenty songs make one. Some connective tissue must be run between the lyrical portions, this tissue being concerned with the narrative and conduct of the drama. There are thus two planes of emotion in opera — the lower, on which is enacted all that goes to make the drama a connected and intelligible picture of human life, and the higher, on which the characters pour forth the lyrical utterance of their passions in moments of intense excitement. The question is, what is to be the character of the music to which this non-lyrical connective tissue is to be set ? Obviously it must not be passionate, self-existent music, for between the exalted beauty of this and the more commonplace significations of the words there would be so obvious a difference in emotional pitch that the hearer's aesthetic pleasure would be partially destroyed. But since the drama cannot get on without these con- nective passages, there are only two alternatives : they must be spoken, or they must be set to music of some kind. That they should be spoken, as in Der Freischutz, has been proposed in our own day by M. Charles Beauquier in his La Musique et le Drame^ a work of much value in spite of its frequent self-contradictions. M. Beauquier, who is somewhat reactionary in his attitude towards the Wagnerian opera, holds that recitative is a bastard and essentially false form of expression, which had better be banished altogether from the opera,^ to be replaced by spoken words, as in the operas of Weber. He is forced to admit that the shock of falling from lyrical music to mere speech is ' Paris, 1884. ' Work mentioned, pp. 102, 103. 1 88 A Study of Wagner somewhat distressing, and one surmises that he was betrayed into so false a position in relation to recitative by sheer reaction against everything that is anathema to him in Wagner. Few will now be found to maintain that spoken words have any place in opera. They sound banal enough in Weber ; and placed between the glorious lyrical moments of such modern music as Tristan they would remind us rather too unpleasantly of the grit in the plate of strawberries. To music, then, this connective tissue must needs be set. The question is, to what kind of music ? Even in the eighteenth century it was seen that while certain parts of it approached closely to lyrical music, other portions were necessarily so bald and unilluminative that music of any degree of formal, independent beauty must seem incongruous with it. Let me illustrate the eighteenth-century opinion on this point from Brown's " Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera, addressed to a Friend." ^ "The Italians," he says — contrasting them with English writers in this respect — "have with great propriety considered that the speeches in the drama, whether in dialogue or soliloquy, must be either such as are expressive of passion and sentiment, or such as are not so. On this real distinction, and not, as with us, on the mere caprice of the composer, is founded their first great division of vocal music into recitative and air. It is evident, on the slightest consideration, that in the progress of the drama many passages must necessarily occur, such as simple narration of facts, directions given, plain answers made to plain questions, sometimes abstract truths or moral reflections — none of which, as they contain nothing of passion or sentiment, can ever become the subject of musical expression. Simply to have spoken these ^ The "My Lord" to whom the Letters are addressed is, I should say from internal evidence, Lord Monboddo. They are in the most approved polite style of the eighteenth century. Mr. John Brown might have been the subject of the classic story of the lecturer on chemistry who is reported to have said, "The gases will now have the honour of combining before your Royal Highness." Wagner's Theory of Music 189 passages, however, and then abruptly to have set up a singing, when any pathetic part presented itself, would have produced exactly that barbarous jumble of prose and poetry, of music and dissonance, which characterises the English comic opera.^ To avoid this, and at the same time not idly to bestow the charms of fancy and feeling where embellishment and expression would be improper, the Italians have invented that species of singing termed by them simple recitative. Its name almost sufficiently explains its nature : it is a succession of notes so arranged as to coincide with the laws of harmony, though never accompanied but by a single instrument, whose office is merely to support the voice, and to direct it in its modulations. Though, for the sake of this accompaniment, recitative is, like other music, divided into bars, yet are not these bars, as in other music, necessarily of equal lengths ; the notes of which they are composed being sub- jected to no precise musical measure, but regulated, in this respect, almost wholly by the natural prosody of the language. Thus this kind of recitative answers completely its end, and it detains the audience very little longer than the spoken recital would do ; and, being music itself, the transition from it to the higher and more interesting parts is perfectly natural and agree- able to the ear." ^ Further — "The Italians have observed that all those passages in which the mind of the speaker is agitated by a rapid succession of various emotions are, from their nature, incompatible with any particular strain or length of melody; for that which constitutes such particular strain is the relation of several parts to one whole. . . . But while the Italians conceived such passages to be incompatible with that regularity of measure and that unity of strain which is essential to air, they felt, however, that they were of all others the most proper subject for musical expression ; and, accordingly, both the poet and musician seem, by mutual consent, to have bestowed on such passages their chief study ; and the musician, in particular, never fails to exert on them his highest and most ' This was not written in 1898. * Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera, pp. 2-5. 190 A Study of Wagner brilliant powers. It is to them they adapt that species of recitative termed reciiativo istrumentato, or recitativo obbligato, accompanied recitative. . . ."^ In the eighteenth century, then, quite as much as in the nineteenth, there was felt to be some incongruity in writing very beautiful music to the more commonplace portions of the libretto. Nor do their attempted solu- tions of the difficulty seem to me to have been altogether successful. There are, of course, many fine examples of obbligato recitative in the works of the older opera- composers ; but the general disrespect into which recitative had even then fallen in the estimation of the musical public, shows clearly enough that after a lyrical outburst of passion we cannot take very much interest in ordinary musical declamation. What, then, is the ;Solution of the difficulty, if spoken words be summarily rejected ? Obviously to take the bull boldly by the horns, and sacrifice everything in order to satisfy the most important element in opera — the music. We already tolerate in a musical drama a score of weaknesses and incon- gruities that would be sufficient to damn any spoken drama ; we put up with wretched verses, paltry plots, absurd incidents, and attacks on our sense of the ludicrous, all for no other reason than that the music moves us too deeply, pleases us too completely, for these minor objections to have their full value in the mind ; the music compensates for everything — pro- viding, of course, a certain limit of absurdity or banality be. not passed. To maintain the even current of our delight, then, there must be no very perceptible dis- parity between the emotional planes of the lyrical and the non-lyrical portions of opera. Some difference, of course, there must be ; Walther's colloquies with Hans Sachs cannot have the same kind^of music as his Prize- Song. But the difference must not be too great ; it :must never go so far as to suggest to us that it has ^ Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera, pp. 13, 14. Wagner's Theory of Music 191 ceased to be a mere difference of degree and become a real difference of kind. If once it does this it is inevit- ably lost ; we no longer wish to listen to it. Thus the great interest of Wagner's operas consists in this even flow of the musical-emotional current throughout — or almost throughout. And, curiously enough, he himself has given the most instructive proofs of the truth of the sesthetic position here maintained. Let us take one example. In the first act of the Meistersinger occurs Pogner's beautiful and noble address to the Meister- singers — a long passage of ordinary communicative speech which by any other composer would, beyond a shadow of doubt, have been set to ordinary recitative. It has in it nothing whatever that demands beautiful lyrical treatment. I will quote it in Mr. Corder's English translation, in order that the reader may the better see the point I am driving at — merely stating that there is no special beauty in the German original that could make the quotation of it in an English trans- lation at all unfair : — St. John's most holy festal day, You know we keep to-morrow ; In meadows green among the hay, With song and dance and merry play, Each heart will gladness borrow, And cast aside all sorrow, So each will sport as best he may. The Singing- school we Masters here A staid church-choir will christen ; From out the gates, with merry cheer, To open meadows we will steer. While festal banners glisten : The populace shall listen To Master-songs with layman's ear. For those who best succeed in song Are gifts of various sizes, And all will hail, full loud and long, Eoth melodies and prizes. 192 A Study of Wagner I am, thank God, a wealthy man ; And, as each giveth what he can, I've ransacked every coflfer To find a prize to offer. To shame not to be brought. Now hear what I've bethought. No one, I think, will allege that there is any especial reason why words of this kind should be set to music at all ; they are merely what I have called connective tissue, essential to the carrying on of the drama, but not demanding emotional musical treatment in the same way that a passionate lyric does. Yet these very words, which another composer would have set to conventional recitative, are set by Wagner to very beautiful music to which the ear listens in continuous delight. The succeeding words of Pogner's address, however — Through German lands when I have roved. It pained me, as I listed. To hear the Burghers are not loved, Deemed selfish and close-fisted. In low life as in Courts the same, I always heard the bitter blame, That only treasure and gold The Burgher's thoughts can hold — are set to recitative of the most wearisome and commonplace order ; while lyric — or semi-lyric — beauty is once more given to the closing words — That we in all the kingdom's bounds Alone Art have promoted, I fancy they scarcely have noted. But how in this our honour redounds. And how with proudest care We treasure the good and rare, What Art is worth, what it can do, Now I have a mind to show unto you. Wagner's Theory of Music 193 So hear, Masters, what thing As a prize I mean to bring. The singer to whose lyric skill The public voice the prize shall will, On John the Baptist's Day, Be he whoe'er he may, I, Veit Pogner, an Art-supporter, A townsman of this quarter, Will give, with my goods and gold beside, Eva, my only child, for bride. Will any one allege that there is the slightest differ- ence in the emotional value of these three sections ? Surely not. Yet, while Wagner has made the first and last exceedingly beautiful, he has deliberately made the second exceedingly dull and wearisome. There can be only one conclusion possible — that not only must the composer swell the emotional significance of the words in the lyrical portions of the opera, but even in the non-lyrical portions he must, if he is to engage our aesthetic interest, give music of a certain degree of emotional beauty to words that have not a sha 'ow of emotional beauty of their own. But, in face of a con- clusion like this, it is surely idle to dispute the position we have reached upon so many other lines of argu- ment — that music, and not poetry, is from first to last the dominant, the tyrannous factor in the musical drama.^ Grdtry, I think, once said that if put to it he could set the Belgian Gazette to music. This is, of course, exaggeration ; there is a certain line over which words will simply not bear musical treatment ; one could not very well listen to a speech on Welsh Dis- establishment even if set to the finest music. But such words as form the connective tissue between the lyrical ^ See, in this connection, Wagner's Prologue to a reading of the Cotter- ddvimerung before a select audience in Berlin, G. S. ix, 308-310 ; Ellis, v. 305. 306- N 3 94 A Study of Wagner portions of opera, though they suggest little or no lyrical feeling, can yet be allied without incongruity to music that is emotionally beautiful ; and to do this is the business of the musician, if he wishes his work to please and to interest. The eighteenth-century view of the functions and powers of recitative was only a stage in the aesthetic problem. In the state of operatic music at that time no other conclusion, perhaps, was possible. In our own day it becomes more than ever clear that in any combination between poetry and music in opera, the latter art must be the shaping factor almost throughout, for it occupies our attention almost exclusively. It is certainly significant that while thousands of poor or mediocre poems live in virtue of their being set to beautiful music, mediocre music will not be listened to even if associated with the finest poetry. Wagner himself, in his confused and roundabout way, has pointed out that since the lyrical moments themselves cannot tell the story, and therefore cannot make the drama, there must be a connective tissue of less emotional value, which must be set to less emotional music, but still to music. " In this Tone-speech," he writes, " must the dramatic person speak, if we are to understand him with our kindled Feeling : but he must also speak in such a way as to determine the emotions roused in us; and our vaguely roused emotions can only be determined by their being given a fixed point round which they may gather as human Fellow-feeling, and whereat they may condense themselves to a specific sympathy for this one man, involved in this particular plight, influenced by this surrounding, ensouled by this will, and engaged in this project. These necessary conditions for displaying an individuality to the Feeling, can be convincingly set forth in nothing but Word- speech — in that language which is instinctively intelligible to ordinary life, and wherein we mutually impart a plight or Will Wagner's Theory of Music 195 such as must be resembled by those laid bare by the dramatic person, if these latter are to be understood by us at all. As our kindled mood, however, has already claimed that this word- speech shall not be one at total variance with that tone-speech which has so lately moved us — as it were the interpreter, but alike the partner, of the roused emotion — so by this very fact, the Content (Irthalt) to be set forth by the dramatis personm is prescribed as one as much uplifted above the matters of our daily life, as the Expression itself is raised above the language of that life." i All this, in plain language, simply means that if you are to present a story in an opera, you must have non-lyrical as well as lyrical portions. Now it has been recognised from the very beginning of opera that the non-lyrical portions cannot bear the same kind of music as that which fills the more impassioned moments. Caccini in 1601 was trying to find "a kind of melody by which it would be possible to speak in music " ; and Jacopo Peri also sought to " utilise the accents which we unconsciously employ in moments of deep emotion." ^ Wagner, with his " intensification of ordinary speech," is simply travelling along the same line. In practice, however, we find that so far as his non-lyrical portions are music they are in no way, as he wrongly thought, developments from or intensifications of speech ; while in so far as they are not music they are simply boredom insufferable. We have seen, in the Meistersinger, words of simply no beauty at all rendered palatable to us by lovely music that has not the remotest affinity with speech. Let us now look at an opposite case, where words in no way better or worse than those I have quoted from the Meistersinger are set to something that is not 1 G. S. iv. 19s ; Ellis, ii. 340, 341. ^ See E. de Bricqueville, VOpira de Pavenir dans le passi, pp. 71, 72. See also Hubert Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music, p. 127. 196 A Study of Wagner music. Look at the following passage from the ist Act of Parsifal:'^ — m. lE 'Jr=aL ^ I± Now say ! Nought know'st of all I have asked thee, then ^^ ^ m: -^Z z^=^- i^zi: &c. Say what thou know'st ; of some-thing must thou have knowledge. In the name of all that is artistic, who wants to listen to dreary stuff of this kind ? The boredom here arises from the fact that while the tones are not beauti- ful enough to give us any musical pleasure in them- selves, the aridity of the words is too plainly forced upon our consciousness ; whereas the same words, if set to beautiful music, would scarcely be noticed as commonplace, the mind being wholly interested in the musical current. Wagnerians have told us that Wagner by the use of this " speaking music " avoids both the error of making the non-lyrical portions too highly emotional, and of introducing merely spoken words with their terrible lapse into the commonplace. Mr. Hadow, for example, writes that " the only alternative is to intensify the tones of ordinary speech until they reach the minimum of tonality which is compatible with their being embodied in musical notation and accompanied by the melodies of the orchestra. This is precisely what Wagner has done. In general his aria parlante is a marvellously devised system of musical equivalents for the actual tones and cadences of the speaking voice." ^ That seems to me wholly fallacious. As soon as the sounds acquire tonality and are accom- panied by harmony they cease to be spoken, and cease to appeal to the faculty by which we appreciate the ^ Vocal score, p. 55. ^ Studies in Modern Music, i. 314. Wagner's Theory of Music 197 intellectual meanings of words ; they become music and appeal to the musical faculty in the first place. If a passage such as that I have just quoted from Parsifal is " a marvellously devised system of musical equivalents for the actual tones and cadences of the speaking voice," how comes it that it bores us so dreadfully ? If the words were spoken we would listen to them with a certain amount of interest ; and we would still listen to them with interest if they simply intensified the speaking accent. The fact that they now bore us indicates clearly that we judge them by a different standard, because we are listen- ing to them in another mood and from a different standpoint of expectation ; we listen to them as words set to music, and are wearied because we hear the banal words instead of being charmed with the accents of music. And if they were set to beautiful music, the words might be ten times as banal as they are without that fact troubling us in the least. But this fact has an important corollary. If the passages in Wagner's operas that most interest us are those that contain beautiful music,^ and if our interest shades away gradually as the music becomes less fasci- nating, down to the point of absolute boredom, it follows that the more lyrical tissue a composer can put into his opera the better. We do not, in these days, agree with the older critics who thought the second and third acts of the Valkyrie almost unmiti- gated dulness ; but who, among the most ardent admirers of Wagner, would not have preferred these two acts in the style of the second or third act of Tristan — had it been possible to write them in that manner ? Thus we see that the ideal opera would ' I do not, of course, mean beautiful music merely in the sense of shapely lyrical passages of melody or harmony. I include under the phrase all his finest dramatic passages so long as they can keep us interested in the perform- ance — such as the tarn-helm motive, or Alberich's curse, or the scene between Alberich and Hagen in the 2nd Act of the CStterddmmerung. 198 A Study of Wagner be one in which the non-lyrical portions would be reduced to the minimum compatible with presenting a connected dramatic action.^ Tristan comes the nearest of all operas to this ideal ; and we may suppose that it is impossible to construct an opera-poem with less waste matter than this contains. But on these terms not only is it quite clear that, in opera, music must necessarily determine the drama, instead of the drama determining the music, as Wagner thought, but the limitations imposed by this musical domination become plainly evident. It is seen at once how greatly the range of drama becomes restricted ; how a thousand subtle shades of thought and emotion, that are capable of expression in the poetical drama, become quite out of the question in the musical drama. And here we light once more upon that peculiarity in Wagner's mental constitution that made all other forms of art but the musical drama seem inefficient to him, simply because he was a musician and nothing more. " Let us finally," he writes at the conclusion of Opera and Drama, " denote the measure of poetic worth as follows : As Voltaire said of the opera, 'What is too silly to be said, one gets it sung ' — so let us reverse that maxim for the drama which we have in view, and say, ' IV/tai is not worth being sung, neither is it worth the poefs pains of telling.' " ^ Perhaps not, when the " poet " is of Wagner's calibre ; but there are other kinds of poets in the world.^ Clearly then, it was the musical quality of Wagner's 1 Wagner's theory that the myth is most suited for musical-dramatitf pur- poses, because it avoids the multiplicity of detail of " historical " subjects, was anticipated by Beaumarchais, in the preface to his opera Tarare (1787) : "II m'a semble qu' a I'Op^ra les sujets historiques devaient moins reussir que les imaginaires." The whole preface is well worth reading. 2 G. S. iv. 208 ; Ellis, ii. 355. ' Mr. James Oliphant thinks " there is no denying that had destiny ordered his course so, Wagner might have become chief among the masters of spoken drama (Article on "The Place of Poetry in a Music-Drama," in the Scottish Art Review, 1888). Wagner would have been the first to reject this flattering estimate. Wagner's Theory of Music 199 mind, the vagueness of his conceptions as compared with those of a poet proper, that led him to exalt the musical drama as he did. In the same way Walter Pater regarded music as the most perfect of the arts simply because his own nature leaned towards, the art in which there is the most perfect absorption of idea in form ; and upon a similar attitude towards life and art Nietzsche based his theory that the ancient Greek tragedy was born from the spirit of music.^ These solutions of the aesthetic problem can only be valid for minds whose whole outlook upon art is from the standpoint of music ; they fall lament- ably short of the truth for all whose artistic needs are of quite another order. Let any one who has seen Shakespeare's Othello and Verdi's Otello upon the stage recall his impressions of the drama and the opera, and he must be struck by one thing that shows clearly how music alters the mood in which we regard a drama. One of the most impressive episodes in the spoken play is that in which lago relates to Othello- his discovery, during Cassio's sleep, of his passion for Desdemona. Now in Verdi's opera, though the words at this juncture are practically the same as in Shake- speare's drama, the dramatic effect is shorn of half its impressiveness and half its terror by the beauty of the music. The composer, of course, cannot write ugly music for the scene ; if he is to add music at all to the ^ On these subjects I may refer to my articles on " Walter Pater on Music," in the Musician, 29th September 1897 ; and the "Wagner-Nietzsche View of Drama," in Music (Chicago), May 1898. It is of a piece with Wagner's theory that the Greek drama showed a progressive decline from song to speech, from an appeal to the feeling to an appeal to the understanding, that he should join in the current unthinking disparagement of Euripides at the expense of his two predecessors. To the modern mind, the work of Euripides is intensely human, and the dramatist himself a most interesting psychological study. For a sane appreciation of him, as well as of .(Eschylus and Sophocles, see Mr. Gilbert Murray's recent volume on Ancient Greek Literature. Once more it is apparent that Wagner depreciated the intellectual and artistic world of Euripides simply because his brain was not of an order to appreciate any world but that of music, or of poetry that had some psychological affinity with music. 200 A Study of Wagner -words it must be of an order to capture our interest and to please us aesthetically. But this feeling of sensuous pleasure comes into conflict with the horror of the poetical situation in a manner to which there is no parallel in the spoken play. All art, of course, must wrap up its terror in beauty or it would not be art ; but the peculiarity of music is that its sensuous beauty is so great as to dull the nerves somewhat to impressions of dramatic terror. lago in an opera cannot possibly be the evil compound he is in Shake- speare's play. Music, in fact, is powerless to mate itself with a thousand subtle dramatic emotions of the highest interest ; while it has the power of raising the great primary emotions to extraordinary heights of expression. This is its strength, these its limitations ; and they explain at once the secret of Wagner's success in practice and of the failure of his theory.^ Taking his theory as a whole, with its dictum that all the scattered arts ought to be reunite^ in the musical drama, one might say, even without any ac- quaintance with its details, that it was an utterly vain dream. We can no more set back the hands of time in art than we can in social life. If the arts have de- veloped along divergent lines, it is because the human brain has in the course of the centuries become more complex ; if poetry and music have become self-depen- dent arts, needing no assistance from each other, it is because there are deep fountains of specialised emotions in us, each of which can only be put into play by ^ For an admirable analysis of the psychological and sesthetic possibilities of opera and drama, see Professor Sully's article on " The Opera, " in vol. 26 of the Contemporary Jieview (1875). For some weighty criticism of the Wagnerian theory see the chapter on "Opera" in Edmund Gurney's Power of Sound. In chapter vi. of the present volume I have endeavoured to find a via media between Gurney's mind and Wagner's. The reader may derive a little inno- cent amusement from reading Bitter's book Die Reform der Oper durch Cluck, und R. Wagner's Kunsiwerk der Zukunft, which is anti-Wagnerian, along with Ludwig Nohl's Cluck und Wagner: Ueber die Entwickelung des Mmik- dramas, which is very Wagnerian. Wagner's Theory of Music 201 poetry or by music. A priori, then, we are entitled to say that Wagner's attempt to satisfy humanity with an art-work that shall be a fusion of all the arts is necessarily foredoomed- to failure. Much as his art- work may do for us, this at all events it cannot do. Whether we consider the theoretical psychology of poetry and of music, or their actual conditions of existence to-day, or the manner of their exercise in Ihe past, it is indubitable that no one art can now be found to do the work of both of them. As Dr. Wallaschek has expressed it — "It would be contrary to all laws of development that the accomplished arts should once more form as organic union as they might have formed in their primitive state. Therefore the attempt to unite the accomplished arts in equal rank to a single art is theoretically a contradiction and practically an impossibility. The result of such an attempt was always that the composer either spoiled his art by a theoretical prejudice, or practically acted con- trary to his rules. Wagner's artistic genius was never in doubt for a single moment which way to go, and therefore his theory has remained an intolerable chaos, while his art has flourished in unrivalled splendour." ^ This, seemingly, must be the verdict of posterity upon him. His notion of an art-work, a combination of the arts, that is to take the place of the arts in separation, is simply a melancholy delusion. We cannot be so easily persuaded to remove our old landmarks ; we cannot, merely at his bidding, forego our old delight in poetry and music because he was incapable of feeling this delight. The upshot of our analysis must be that he was just an opera-composer like the rest ; greater than any that went before or any that have come after him, but still of their craft and lineage ; his art being stronger, finer, firmer, lovelier than theirs, but still a rational development of theirs and not a new art-work. ' Primitive Music, pp. 215, 216. CHAPTER VI THE RING OF THE N IB E LUNG I IT was in the full flush of enthusiasm over his new ideas on the musical drama that Wagner set to work on the huge tetralogy that occupied him, in one way and another, for more than twenty years. In 1848 he wrote his prose-sketch The Nibelungen myth arranged as a drama, which plans out the play practically as we have it now. Later on in the same year he dramatised the final portions of the myth, under the title of Siegfried's Death, which corresponds in the main with the present Gotterdammerung. He soon saw, how- ever, that Siegfried's Death was imperfect, by reason both of its containing much in narrative form that ought to be visually present in the form of drama, and of its assuming too great a knowledge on the spec- tator's part of the preceding portions of the myth. Accordingly, in 185 1 he wrote the drama of The Young Siegfried — the prototype of the present Siegfried. Then, feeling again that the poem was not so clear to the spectator as it should be, he prefixed to The Young Siegfried, in 1852, the Valkyrie, and to this, later in the same year, the Rheingold. The music was written in the reverse — ^that is, the natural — order. Rheingold was written in 1853 and 1854, the Valkyrie between 1854 and 1856, part of Siegfried in 1856 and 1857, and the remainder in the years between 1865 and 1869,^ and the Gotterdammerung between 1869 and 1872. ' The musical setting of Siegfried was finished in 1869, but the scoring was not completed until 1 87 1. The Ring of the Nibelung 203 No work of Wagner's — probably no work of any man except Shakespeare — has been the starting-point of so much discussion as the Ring. One curious fact must have struck the student of the Wagnerian literature of late years : while there is coming to be less and less discussion of his music or of his musical system, there is an increasing body of writings on the ethical import of his dramas. I have already argued that Wagner is not to be taken quite so seriously on the intellectual side as many of his admirers would like him to be ; and perhaps the Ring will furnish as good a text as could be desired for that sermon. Here, as in so many other instances, the best way to study Wagner's theories is in connection with the circumstances of his own life. It was characteristic of him, as we have seen from his aesthetic theories and from his three earlier operas, that he should try to elevate his own idiosyncrasies into norms of thought and action for the rest of the world. One of the most curious features of Wagner's mind was this passion for holding up his own peculiar and a priori ideas as laws of life or laws of art for others, in the most perfect unconsciousness that his ideas were born of an organism not only physiologically abnormal in many ways, but radically incapable of sane objective thinking. From his first work to his last he presents a pathetic picture of the hopeless idealist in conflict with external forces too vast and too complex for him to understand. His writings on social subjects — particu- larly his early ones — are sometimes a priori to the verge of absurdity ; scarcely another man, we may safely say, could have been found in Europe to advocate so earnestly, with such sincere conviction, a return to the social and artistic ideals of the Greeks. That vain dream, clung to by Wagner with extraordinary tenacity, is typical of the unreal, fantastic cloudland in which the great musician lived. He himself — the sincerest and most unselfish artist of his day — wanted only, as he 204 A Study of Wagner used to tell Liszt and his other correspondents, a competency sufficient to free him from the ignobler cares of existence, and to enable him to compose for the benefit of his race and its culture ; and upon this personal desire, and upon the fact of the dramatic representations of the Athenians being, in a sense, the work of the community, he built the strange philosophy of life and art that we have glanced at in Art and Revolution and The Art-Work of the Future, and that has gone so far to reveal the incompetence of his mind to deal with questions of the positive and the actual. I have already tried to show the dependence of this social creed upon his own congenital ideas and his pecuniary circumstances, by comparing his letters of the period immediately following his flight from Dresden with the above-named treatises. One brings, of course, no charge against him of casuistry or deliberate self-seeking ; the very naivete both of the theories themselves and of their correspondence with his own personal needs is conclusive as to Wagner's sincerity in the matter. He was simply a man of enormous musical power, filled with peculiar notions as to the importance of the musical drama in the development of culture, and with too little objective outlook upon the world and too little capacity for impersonal reason to allow of his seeing the utter unreality and apriorism of most of his theories for all other men. In later life he partly came to recognise some of his deficiencies in this respect — adniittin £to Roeck eLJ.Qr exa mple, that though he, read and wrote_so_jQ.VLCh,_pf philosophy, he had little head for_£hilosopbiciliinkiii.g. And on one notable occasion — when he had given birth to a more than usually preposterous theory as to our duties in relation to vegetarianism — he admitted that his suggestions be- longed to the sphere of " phantasms." ^ But taking his prose works and his letters on their face-value, the most ^ See the final chapter of the present volume. The Ring of the Nibelung 205 cursory reading suffices to show how abnormal he was in many respects, how he dwelt with exaggerated emphasis upon theories and suggestions that appear to us hopelessly a priori, how he argued in the most sincere unconsciotisness from the desires and needs of Richard Wagner to the supposed desires and needs of civilised mankind. This we have seen in connection both with his theories of life and his theory of the drama ; and it is of the utmost importance not only in the diagnosis of his character but in the attempt to comprehend his musical works. One has o nly to_bg££lQi£~-acquaiated with his C9XIfiSJlQJld£nC£-during -^e- twenty-three years he spent upon the Ring, to realise,. Jhat he„ine.ant that worlc to be something more.than a, mere opera, a mere sfory of gods and men, of , love and, hate, and life and death"; that he intended it as a serious contribution to the philosophy of the universe. In the case of the DutchrnStty TanHkdiiser, and Lohengrin, we have been able to understand the dramas better by becoming acquainted with Wagner's ideas upon art and life at that time. Hence also the need of studying the i?w^ in connec- tion with some of the theories expressed in his prose- works and elsewhere. We do not, of course, necessarily invalidate, a priori, the philosophy of the drama by showing its dependence upon Wagner's innate ideas and his outward circumstances ; but we undoubtedly obtain a better standpoint from which to view the scheme of philosophy put forward, and to judge its objective value as a contribution to human knowledge. The biographies of Wagner contain so many ac- counts of The Ring of the Nibelung that it is unneces- sary to tell the story once more here. It is perhaps sufficient for present purposes to remind readers and opera-goers of the main features of the drama — the attainment of the gold by Alberich by the denial of love ; the curse that follows it and devolves upon each successive possessor of the Ring ; the contest. 2o6 A Study of Wagner in the person of Wotan, between authority and moral right ; the need for renunciation on his part ; the means by which he effects this renunciation ; the advent of Siegfried as the Hberator, and of Brynhild as the incarnation of love the conqueror ; the murder of Siegfried, the voluntary death of Brynhild, the re- storation of the Ring to the Rhine-maidens, and the final dissolution of the gods. The "problem" of the drama, as it has been stated by a recent writer, is the revolt of the " natural individual " against constituted authority as embodied in conventions and formulas. The Ring " and all Wagner's sayings and writings of this period maintain enthusiastically the inherent good- ness of nature and man, and the glory of physical vitality. Laws, imposed by the few on the many, first made sin possible. Man, to work his way out of the possibility of sinning, had to cast off the restraints of the law. The i?m^ is„ thus solely occupied with^a con- flict between the assumed right of traditional authority and the natural instinct in man to satisfy his desires." ^ ^ See Mr. David Irvine's Wagner's King of the Nibelung and the Condi- tions of Ideal Manhood, chapter i. Mr. Irvine makes some curious blunders in his exposition of this " problem " of the Ring. Whenever he comes across the word "authority," for example, he assumes it to mean authority in the ■external sense in virhich Wagner conceived it. Thus he quotes from Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief, "We must not forget that it is authority rather than reason to which in the main we owe not religion only, but ethics and politics," and rejoins that "the mere existence of liberalism, which ■consists of relaxing instead of tightening the strain of constituted authority, is a standing denial of this assumption." But Mr. Balfour, in the passage in question — as indeed throughout the Foundations of Belief— r^e^ex means ^^constituted authority" when he speaks of "authority." When he argues that such beliefs as "God exists," or "There is an external universe," or "Matter is extended," are held on "authority," not on "reason," he means that they are based on non-rational processes of the mind, i.e. they are quasi- instinctive convictions with which reason has nothing to do. Thus " autho- rity" in Mr. Balfour's sense is equivalent to "necessity" in Wagner's sense. Each holds up the instinctive promptings of "natural man" as against his "reason" or "understanding"; so that Mr. Balfour's position, instead of being opposed to that of Wagner as Mr. Irvine imagines, is really one with it. i(See the telling criticism of Mr. Balfour's book in Mr' Hugh Mortimer Cecil's Pseudo-Philosophy at the End of the V)th Century.) The Ring of the Nibelung 207 One need not follow Mr. Irvine and his fellow-com- mentators into those jungle-depths of interpretation where every character in the drama becomes a per- sonified abstraction of some social or political or moral tendency.^ One has no desire to multiply Gervinus- literature in England on musical subjects ; that way Wagner - madness lies. But without out - Heroding Herod in the fashion of the modern Wagnerian " in- terpreter," without reading into the Ring more pseudo- philosophy than it has the misfoHunelo contain already, ■One- can see- clearly enough from a mere perusal of the poem, that i n that drama W agner was preaching a soci al evangel w hich, with characteristic "Seriousness," he held to be of prime importance to mankind. Now one has only to go back to his .prose-works and his correspondence to see the theories of the Ring in all their naivete, freeTroifi" the glamour in which they^ are eu'veldped, in the tetratogy itself, by the wonderful art of the musician. Hearing or studying the music, ■one almost feels inclined to subscribe to the theorems of Wagner, just as Tristan tempts to the longing for Nirvana, and Parsifal to asceticism ; one gets a clearer notion of the ideas and their objective value by con- templating them in their plain prose expression. And looking at the matter in this way, one gets new proof that Wagner was a man of high spirit and generous sympathies, acutely sensitive both to his own miseries and those of others, but quite incapable of thinking any social problem out, or of doing anything more than offer the most a priori solutions of it. We have ^ Mr. Irvine tells us, for example, that Mime is " that spirit which super- ficially appears as the educator of mankind, and when intelligence begins to perceive that nature is its true educator and the other a mere charlatan, with which it, has nothing in common, then craft and subterfuge are called into requisition in order to turn this step, leading to a truer knowledge of things, into the further service of self-interest. Mime is thus the craft which finds its best soil in the Church, impressing every one in early youth, before judg- ment is ripe, with the belief that it is a spiritual father and mother." — Ibid., i)p. 66, 67. 2o8 A Study of Wagner only to look at his correspondence of 1849, just after his flight from Dresden, when he was confronted with the problem of compromise between artistic desires and plans and the earning of one's daily bread, to realise that the philosophy and the portraiture of the Ring are only objectivations of the personal problem of his own existence. In his correspondence with Uhlig he not only foreshadowed the theories of his Art and Revolu- tion and The Art-Work of the Future, but unconsciously sketched out, as it were, the moral theme of the Ring and some of the characters. Just as we can recognise much of Wagner himself in Walther of the Meistersingery so one can see that Siegfried in the tetralogy is just a peg whereon to hang certain theories he then held as to the wholesome vitality of the " free individual " — the theories expounded in his letters to Uhlig, already quoted in chapter iv. It is a kind of philosophising that has gone sadly out of fashion, the day being past when vaporising about the free individual, and inner necessity, and man being that which he is by virtue of his inner essence, and the rest of the windy jargon of the dreamer, can do much more than make us yawn. The passage is only of interest.^ for the light it,, throws upon the philosophical scheme of the Ring. . At the end of A Communication to my Friends (1851), when Wagner was relating the steps of his musical and intellectual development, he told how in the drarna as he had then worked it out he had found expressiojijor-.- his inmost philosophy of life. / " With the conception of Siegfried," he wrote, " I had pressed /forward to where I saw before me the Human Being in the most natural and blithest fulness of his physical life. No historic garment more confined his limbs ; no outwardly-imposed relation hemmed his movements, which, springing from the inner fount of Joy-in-life, so bore themselves in face of all encounter, that error and bewilderment, though nurtured on the wildest play of passions, might heap themselves around until they threatened to The Ring of the Nibelung 209 destroy him, without the hero checking for a moment, even in the face of death, the welUng outflow of that inner fount ; or ever holding anything the rightful master of himself and his own movements, but alone the natural outstreaming of his restless fount of Life. It was Elsa who had taught me to unearth this man ; to me, he was the male-embodied spirit of perennial and sole creative instinct ( Unwillkiir), of the doer of true deeds, of Manhood in the utmost fulness of its inborn strength and proved loveworthiness. Here, in the promptings of this Man, Love's brooding wish had no more place; but bodily lived it there, swelled every vein and stirred each muscle of the gladsome being, to all-en thraUing practice of its essence." ^ This ill-co nceived abstraction was the type of man Wagner ha3 held'upTor admiration in his writings and in"his~'retters ; it was the type *tD' which he himself wished to conform. He was oppressed with a sense of the hardness of the world andTthe restraint which our modern society, based on commerce and indus- trialism, imposes upon the artist ; and he was filled with vague longings for a condition of things more favourable to art. Thousands before and after him have felt the same weariness and cherished the same desires ; but him they always impelled to random philosophising, to weaving cloudy schemes of social and political and artistic improvement. There is con- sequently from first to last in his works — outside the department of music — hardly one suggestion as to art and life that is worth attention — or at least any more attention than one usually gives to the earnest and sincere but unpractical prophet ; hardly one that shows the slightest sense of the reality of things. It is a somewhat saddening spectacle, this of the sensitive artist quivering under the blows of the huge unfriendly world ; feeling dimly that in the evolution of mankind, he, whose business is with heart and soul alone, has become inextricably entangled with the limbs and the 1 G. S. iv. 328 ; Ellis, i. 375. O 2IO A Study of Wagner viscera of the race ; but able to offer towards the diminishing of the grievous burden nothing more than petulant outcries, and sad looks upon the past, and vain hopes that the wheels of evolution will stand still that the universe may be built again according to the plans of the idealist. He lived, we must always re- member, in a time of obscure social and political ferment, and in a country where the tendency has always been to philosophise in abstracto. Everything — his own nature, his training, his associates, his enemies — combined to make him a mere declaimer upon themes that require anything but declamation to eluci- date them. Heajways—S^iesjust that half of^any problgm__which serves the—end^^^oT^^is ow n artist ic theories ; anything like a sanely comprehensiye view of^the intermixture of good and" evil in the world is impossible to him. " Our god is Gold," he cried ; "our religion the Pursuit oi WeaTtET" ^ STodern arf is a mere product of Culture, not of Life itself ; there- fore, being simply a hot-house plant, it cannot take root in the natural soil, or exist in the natural climate of the present. ^JThere is r^^^ rio_jn,eai:iing,Jn^talk_jof__this_ kind ; it is wiiT3y rhetoric pure and pimple — the mere sad declaination of a frustrated artist, in a world of dark complexities whose meaning and whose inter- connection he cannot fathom. The mood in which Wagner thought outj^e philo- sophyjbt the Rtng^lEoh', was^one]]pt^emoBonal revolt against the "resistance of^.mQ4,e;rn..iif^. ,tQ the impulses oT the artist — a revolt determined in its form and theories" bylhe~musician's idealism, and by his lack of objective visijon and of impartial reason. The part played, .by_ the /Ring itself in the -tetralogy .can be clearly seen to be an expression of Wagner's own passion for attri- buting most of the evils under which art now suffers to its dependence upon gold and commerce. 1 G. S. iii. 28; Ellis, i. 51. The Ring of the Nihelung 211 " This is art as it now fills the entire civilised world ! " he cried, in Art and Revolution. " Its true essence is industry ; its ethical aim the gaining of gold; its aesthetic purpose, the entertainment of those whose time hangs heavily on their hands." 1 In the famous Vaterlandsverein speech of 1848, mis- inspired no doubt by some of the economists of the time whom he had read and only half understood, he fulminated against the evil wrought among men by gold. "When all the classes hitherto at enmity, and parcelled off by envy, have been united in the one great class of the free Folk, embracing all that on the dear German soil has received its human breath from God — think ye we first begin in earnest ! For then must be taken firmly and deedfully in eye the question of the root of all the misery in our present social state — then must be decided whether Man, that crown of the creation, whether his lofty spiritual, his artistically stirring bodily powers and forces, were meant by God to serve in menial bondage to the stubbornest, the most lifeless product in all Nature, to sallow Metal?" 2 And finally, among his theories of this period was that of the necessity of the downfall of the State. In Opera and Drama, after a long " interpretation " of the (Edipus of Sophocles, in which the action of Antigone is taken to mean " the annulling of the State by her love-curse," he proceeds in a passage that shows how prone he was to read extraneous meanings into certain artistic products, and at the same time throws light upon the kind of subtle theorems he tried to incorporate in his own dramatic works, " To-day," he writes, " we only need to faithfully expound the myth of (Edipus according to its inmost essence, and we in ' G. S. iii. ig ; Ellgl, i. 43. '' The Vaterlandsverein speech, in Ellis, iv. 1 38. 212 A Study of Wagner it win an intelligible picture of the whole history of mankind, from the beginnings of society to the inevitable downfall of the State. The necessity of this downfall was foreboded in the Mythos. It is the part of actual history to accomplish it. . . . With this concrete State — whose substance Louis XIV. correctly designated as himself — we need not further occupy ourselves : its kernel, also, is bared us in the (Edipus-saga ; as the seed of all offences we recognise the rulership of Laius, since for sake of its un- diminished possession he became an unnatural father.. From this possession grown into an ownership, which, wondrously enough, is looked on as the base of all good order, there issue all the crimes of myth and history. — Let us keep our eye upon the abstract State alone. The thinkers of this State desired to plane down and equalise the imperfections of actual society, according to a thought-out ' norm ' ; yet that they retained these very imperfections as a given thing, as the only thing to fit the sinfulness of human nature, and never went back to the real man himself — who from his at first instinctive, but at last erroneous, views had called those inequalities into being, exactly as through experience and the consequent correction of his errors he must also bring about, quite of itself, the perfect Society, i.e. one answering to the real needs of men, this was the grand error through which the Political State evolved itself to the unnatural height whence it fain would guide our Human Nature far below ; that nature which it did not understand at all, and understood the less, the more it fain would guide it. The Political State lives solely on the vices of Society, whose virtues are derived solely from the human individuality. Faced with the vices of society, which alone it can espy, the State cannot perceive the virtues which society acquires from that individuality. . . . The essence of the Political State is caprice, whereas the essence of the free Individuality is necessity. From out this Individuality, which we have recognised as in the right in its thousand-years' battle with the Political State— from this to organise Society, is the conscious task imposed upon us for the future. But to bring the unconscious part of human nature to consciousness within Society, and in this consciousness to know nothing other than the necessity common to every member of Society, namely of the Individual's own free self-determining — this is as good as to say. The Ring of the Nibelung 213 annul the State ; for through Society has the State marched on to a denial of the free self-determining of the Individual — upon the death of that has it lived." ^ This was Wagner's method of dealing with prob- lems of the philosophy of history — merely declaiming a number of pseudo-propositions that explain simply nothing. It is a typically Teutonic method, requiring for its most perfect exhibition nothing more than a half-comprehension of any question under the sun ; and it is somewhat strange that Wagner's panegyrists should have followed his lead so blindly in discus- sions of this kind, and have sung paeans in his praise as a great and original thinker. Nothing could more clearly prove his incompetence to handle a philosophi- cal question than this innutritious rhetoric about the " annulling of the State," " the free self-determining individual," and the rest of it. Civilisation is, of course, faced with the perennial problem of the re- spective spheres of activity of the individual and the State ; how far the State is morally justified in re- straining the impulses and desires of the individual, and how far these impulses and desires are morally right as against those conventions of the State which alone make individual existence possible — these are problems that have indeed pressed for solution from time immemorial. But no one with a grain of philo- sophical ability will set about the business in the manner of Wagner, retailing empty platitudes instead of arguing, verbalising instead of thinking, and maun- dering for pages together about those precious entities " the State," " Society," and " the individual." ^ There ' G. S. iv. 65-67 ; Ellis, ii. 191-194. ^ The peculiarity of the problem is that it must for ever remain insoluble. While on the one hand our social and other laws are justified by the fact that they represent a working compromise between the opposing desires of individuals — being, indeed, simply one phase of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest— on the other hand, individuals are perpetually in revolt against laws and conventions that seem to limit their freedom too 214 A Study of Wagner is no special merit in multiplying darkness in this way in quarters where there is already too little light ; and it is a hopel ess absurdity for . a_musician,._Hdth no mHocInirive ability to begin with, no habits of c6bl~persistent, objective" thought, and no training in the special siibject he is so fain to meddle with, to inflict his frothy rhetoric upon an unoffending world. One blames him and his thoroughgoing wor- shippers only in so far as they attempt to handle subjects with which the y are q uite incompetent, to deal ; and one's obJectTon to their voluminous writings is not that they expound wrong or doubtful theories, but that their pseudo-demonstrations are mere shoddy, having as little relation to the subjects they are actually concerned with as a seventeenth-century divine's com- mentary on Genesis has with modern science. With the best will in the world, indeed, and with all one's admiration for Wagner's stupendous musical genius, much. As soon as we attempt either to defend " Society " or " the Indi- vidual " by means of reason, we are landed in a series of logical difficulties, simply because the actions of neither party are really based upon reason. Thus nothing is easier than for the conservative to show the immorality of the individualist, or for the individualist to show the stupidity of the conservative. This latter has been delightfully done by Mr. George Bernard Shaw in his little book on The Quintessence of Ibsenism, where the conceptions of "God," "reason," and "duty" are proved to be merely idealist veils thrown by society over the face of reality. But any one — say Mr. Shaw himself — could just as easily show that the "realist," who imagines that he is fighting for what he calls truth against what he calls convention, is as much the victim of an idealist delusion as any Philistine of them all. Mr. Shaw terminates his book with a quotation from Wagner : " Man will never be that which he can and should be until, by a conscious following of that inner natural necessity which is the only true necessity, he makes his life a mirror of nature, and frees himself from his thraldom to outer artificial counterfeits. Then will he first become a living man, who now is a mere wheel in the mechanism of this or that Religion, Nationality, or State." Wagner did not know, and Mr. Shaw knows but will not tell, that any amount of following " inner natural necessity " will not alter the constitution of things. Since individuals are of different natures, if they are to live together at all they must compromise — that is, repress their individualities to some extent. In this way Society and its con- ventions have come into being ; and if individuals could act upon Wagner's advice, the ultimate outcome would be a state of affairs precisely similar to that we no have. The Ring of the Nibelung 215 it is sometimes hard to feel well-disposed towards him when reading his prose-works. To say that the root of all our social misery is money, and that in "pro- perty" originate "all the crimes in myth and in history" — to carry on a brazen trade in facile half- truths of this kind, is to place oneself almost outside the pale of serious discussion. Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain has recently told us that "with Wagner the faculty of negation went hand-in-hand with a rare faculty of affirmation." It did indeed. The trouble is that mere " affirmation " is not what we want from a musician who insists on importing his untrained imagination into questions of philosophy and sociology and economics. II It will be admitted, I think, on the basis of the above citations from the prose-works and the letters, that in the Ring Wagner was simply preaching a scheme of philosophy purely personal to himself. Most artists, of course, tend to express in their works their own congenital or acquired leanings towards this or that view of life. The difference between these and Wagner is, however, enormous. One does not urge it against any artist that he sings his own moods and desires, so long as these are capable of being bent towards and com- prehended in an artistic effect. We read certain things of Baudelaire and Verlaine, for example, not because we admire the inverted eroticism of their temperaments, but because they manage to make their faults of mood and impulse lyrical, emotional, artistic, beautiful in their form of presentation. With Wagner the case is precisely the opposite. The unfortunate part about Wagner's Ring is that he does not merely voice the mere crude notions of his own organism, but that these notions step outside the circle of art into those of 21 6 A Study of Wagner philosophy and politics, and therefore provoke criticism from other than artistic sides. A novel that is a tract is bad enough ; a poem that is a tract is infinitely worse ; but what shall be said of a musical drama that is a tract ? The thorough-going Wagner-worshipper may object to the term as being irreverent, and missing its mark by over-statement ; he prefers to speak of the " philosophy " of the Ring. " Philosophy," however, is a somewhat more dignified word than suits the occasion. Most art-works that set out to "prove" something are flawed at the commencement ; if you take them asjworka_of_art^ignoring the argumentation, the latter seems somewhat superfluous ; while if you find that the premisses of the work do not really lead to the conclusion the author has aimed at, you resent his having chosen an artistic medium for a mere piece of bad philosophising. As Flaubert said, the objection to writing a novel to prove something is that any one can sit down and write a novel to prove just the opposite ; you have only to select and ignore the material at your discretion. But when the " philosophy " of the work is forced down your throat, and you are compelled to make some effort to digest it, and you find yourself disagreeing with it for reasons that are patent to any one who will think, you are not inclined to be very " reverent " to the philosopher or to his admirers. Now the scheme .of the Ring, in so far as it leaves the broad currents of human passion, and affects to preach a social or philosophical evangel, is essentially a childish^ one. Wagner has shown considerable art in the way he has welded the various sagas together in his poem ; ^ it was not an easy task, and he has performed it for the most part with signal success. The music, again, in its best moments is unapproachable, and even ' On the relation of Wagner's poem to the mythical sources from which he compiled it, see Dr. Ernst Koch's Richard Wagner's Buhnenfestspiel Der Ringdes Nibelungen, The Ring of the Nibelung 217 in its lapses from its highest standard is interesting in a way that is without parallel in operatic music. But Wagner would Jhawe, been .offejlded. at thfi suggestion tEat^tire;j???«^ wasjo^ b^ upon rnerely as a good dramatic poem set to immortal music. If there was one point upon which he was more positive than any other, it was the stupidity of regarding his works as mere operas — as mere combinations of music and poetry. They were dramas; and not merely dramas in the orcfinary^ sense of the word, but lights upon man and the universe, elucidations of problems of life and art and conduct. He was a born preacher ; and if you did not care to pay attention to the matter of his sermon, he did not wish you to listen to his words and his accents as you would simply to a fine oratorical per- formance. All his life he fought the German theatres, the German performers, and the German public upon this point,_insisting— that— he- who only heard beautiful music and expressive -orchestration at a performance of one of his operas had r^ot even made an approach to understanding it. I have often wondered how much his worshippers, or the public, or the performers, would have understood of his operas, in the sense he intended them to be understood, had he not given the key to his intentions in his prose works. Let any one, as an experiment, who is well acquainted with Tannhauser and Lohengrin, sit down and write out his ideas as to the psychology of the characters in these two operas, and then compare his reading of them with the analyses Wagner has given in "The Performing of Tannhauser" and " A Communication to my Friends," 1 and he will, I venture to think, agree with me that nine-tenths of the treatises upon the philosophy of Wagner's dramas are based not upon the dramas themselves, but upon tjae prose-works and the letters. Wagner's own delusion upon the point was really something abnormal ; but ^ See the remarks already made in Chapter iii. 2i8 A Study of Wagner one can pardon in him what one cannot pardon in his worshippers, for in him it was part of the very structure that made him so wonderful a musician. He saw things in music that no one else can see there ; it aroused in him suggestions of concrete things ; it spoke to him of definite thought and action, where to us it is only beautiful and vague emotion. Hence the folly of his worshippers, who are by no means built upon his cerebral pattern, in attempting to make his philosophy of music theirs. This aspect of mind may be illustrated from his attitude towards Tannhduser. For the benefit of all concerned with the performance of that work, he wrote a small treatise giving the most valuable hints to all who took part in the performance, as well as an analysis of the character of Tannhauser as he conceived it. Now it is quite safe to say, as a piece of assthetic psychology, that no living man or woman can have the slightest notion of the philosophy of that or any other opera except from the words of the poem. The music may enforce the emotions aroused by the wordSj^^'anti' the leading-motives_ may throw~many side-lights upon the utterances of the characters; but to no one whatever can the music give an insight into the psychology of the characters further than that given by the poem. No one, I think, not under the sway of Wagner's theories, and not merely echoing, parrot-like, Wagner's ideas as to the psychological power of music — ideas, be it re- membered, that were perfectly natural to his abnormal brain — can dispute the truth of this. Now Wagner held that a piece of psychological portraiture that was impossible to the mere actor, dependent as he is upon mere words, was rendered possible to the singer by the expressive power of the music. "I declare," he writes, "that not even the most eminent actor, of our own or bygone times, could solve the task of a perfect portrayal of Tannhauser's character on the lines laid down in the above, analysis ; and I meet the question : ' How could I The Ring of the Nibelung 219 hold it possible for an opera-singer to fulfil it ? ' by the simple answer that to Music alone could the draft of such a task be offered, and only a dramatic singer, just through the aid of Music, can be in the position to fulfil it. Where a Player would seek in vain, among the means of recitation, for the expression where- withal to give this character success, to the Singer that expression is self-offered in the music." ^ And that this passage bears out the interpretation I have put upon it — that it correlates with a hundred other passages of unconscious self-revelation — may be seen from the fact that Wagner regarded the music of the Ring as affording the true key to the comprehen- sion of its philosophy. " I now realise myself," he wrote to Roeckel, " how much of the whole spirit and meaning of my poem is only made clear by the music ; I cannot now for my life even look at the words with- out the musical accompaniment." This does not mean merely that by the system of lead- ing-motives a light that would otherwise be lacking is thrown upon certain scenes and incidents. One has only to understand the peculiar psychology of Wagner, and the exaggerated stress he laid upon the power of music in the drama, to see that to his mind the philo- sophy of the Ring was not only revealed by the music, but made clearer, more convincing, more universal than could possibly have been done by words.^ Upon this point Wagner certainly deceived him- self. At the risk of repetition, let me say once more that from beginning to end of his career, he laid down for universal acceptance ideas and theories that were purely personal to himself, and that he was unable to conceive how the whole world, when it came to its senses, could think differently from him. We have seen him declaring Lohengrin to be the type of the ' G. S. V. ISS, 156 ; Ellis, iii. 201, 202. ^ See the later remarks, in the present chapter, on his use of leading- motives in the Ring. 220 A Study of Wagner only true tragedy of modern times. Now he avows to Uhlig his belief that the poem of the Ring is "the greatest ever written '' ; and to Roeckel he writes_that he is certain the hearer wiTrsee" the phiTosophy of the drama as the composer has conceived it. His faith in hrs own philosophical ideas, his belief in their irnport- ance for the regeneration of the universe, would surely be grotesque if it were not so pathetic. His purely musical gift, which has never been equalled among men, he seemed to lay comparatively little stress upon ; while he constantly troubled himself, his correspon- dents, his readers, and his hearers, with speculations in philosophy and other subjects for which he had only the most mediocre capacity. One sometimes rises with a feeling of sadness from a study of the Ring and all Wagner's writings connected with it — a feeling of pity that this man should have spent precious year after year of his life gnawing at his own heart to no purpose, embittering his days and nights with long meditation on questions that any clear-headed school- boy could quickly have settled for him. For it must be reiterated that Wagner had no more capacity for philosophical speculation than the average curate. He hung upon the fringe of every great question, half understanding it and half perverting it, falling a victim to the most elementary of verbal fallacies, twisting everything into a kind of forced harmony with his own preconceived notions, but reaching no conclusion by dint of solid thinking, and in the long run adding nothing to the sum of human knowledge. He fell an easy victim, first to Feuerbach, then to Schopenhauer. In the case of the latter philosopher, he was unable to detect the simplest of his errors by reason of his lack of real metaphysical training ; and he maundered on in his terribly serious way about the Will, and Time, and Space, and Causality, and the rest of it, without ever a suspicion that he was following the The Ring of the Nibelung 22 r lead of Schopenhauer in the merest verbal absurdity. And he confesses withal that he can only understand even Schopenhauer by a kind of intuition, not by real assimilation of the argument — evidently regarding one of the simplest and clearest of writers as a thinker almost too profound for the comprehension of ordinary minds. " I cannot pretend," he writes to Roeckel, " that I am at all times able to follow the process of the solution of this mighty problem, still less to expound it clearly. The clear realisation of the subjective character of time, space, and causality, as mere forms of perception, argues a mental process of so sublime a nature that, as Schopenhauer proves beyond dispute, it can only be possible to an abnormally organised brain, and under conditions of peculiar excitement." ^ The man who is capable of a performance of this kind had really better leave metaphysics alone ; one begins to wonder whether he did not see something rather profound in the multiplication table or in Euclid's Elements. Yet this was the man, and this the mind, that preached in season and out of season upon questions of philosophy, and economics, and history, and aesthetics, and sociology ; that really felt a mission to give to the world, not only in prose but in a drama, the true solution of the problem of human existence. Ill For that, finally, is what the Ring pretends to do. Enough has already been said to show what were Wagner's views upon certain great questions of human life during the years when he was thinking out the drama. He was living, as he always did, in a mental world of fog and mist, wherein everything took the strangest of forms. His essay on The Wibelungen, written at that time, is still worth reading as an 1 Letters to Roeckel, p. 129. 222 A Study of Wagner example of the most approved Teutonic apriorism ; a purely historical subject is treated from the point of view of the most abstract dialectics, and historical events, depending upon all kinds of economic, social, and military forces, are made to stand as " moments " in a development that follows its dialectical course like a piece of prearranged clockwork. He was not alone in this manner of writing history in Germany just then ; other men were doing it almost as serenely and as absurdly as himself. The only things worth won- dering about are, first, how a musician who could treat history and sociology in this, the easiest, the most primitive, the most banal of all possible methods, could ever have been held up to men's adoring gaze as a great thinker ; and second, how it is that those who have shrugged their shoulders in quiet tolerance over Wagner's world-philosophy as expressed in the Wibe- lungen and other prose works, should have failed to pass a similar criticism upon the philosophy of the Ring. For surely one has only to read that poem with one's eyes open to be convinced that Wagner was labouring under the most pathetic delusion when he thought he was contributing anything of the slightest value to the intellectual store of the race. It is quite unnecessary for his disciples to take such infinite pains to prove that he was a Schopenhauerite before ever he read a line of Schopenhauer. That is just the trouble ; he had already certain vague innate notions as to re- nunciation and redemption, and Schopenhauer, so far as Wagner could understand him, simply gave a sup- port to these notions. He took the philosopher up, not because of his interest in philosophy, but because of his interest in his own ideas. " In accepting unreservedly the profound truths of his teach- ing," he wrote, " I was able to follow my ow^ inner bent ; and although he has given my line of thought a direction somewhat The Ring of the Nibelung 223 different from its previous one, yet only this direction harmonised with the profoundly sorrowful conception I had already formed of the world." ^ The confession was quite unnecessary ; the impression one gets from all his prose works is that of a man who could assimilate only so much of other men's ideas as happened to harmonise with his own — he being curiously like Schopenhauer himself in this respect. There was no correction or readjustment of view by the clash of other men's opinions ; if he changed at all, it was merely in obedience to the changes in his health, or in his personal relations to the world. The programme of the Ring, in its final form, was not exactly what Wagner intended it to be in the beginning. At first the hero was Siegfried, the man of the future ; in the drama as we now have it the real hero is Wotan. Wagner's curious explanation of this reversal of mood — optimism giving way to pessimism, or what looks very like pessimism — is that in the first sketch of the drama he was obeying his intellectual instead of his artistic nature. The latter, he assumed, was always correct in its intuitions ; the former was liable to error. " I made my most remarkable discovery in this respect," he wrote, " with my Nibelung drama. It had taken form at a time when, with my ideas, I had built up an optimistic world on Hellenic principles j believing that in order to realise such a world, it was only necessary for man to wish it. I ingeniously set aside the problem, why they did not wish it" [which is as good a criticism as one could desire on Art and Revolution and The Art-Work of the Future\. "I remember that it was with this definite creative purpose that I conceived the personality of Siegfried with the intention of representing an existence free from pain." 2 ' Letters to Roeckel, p. 124. ^ Ibid., p. 149. 224 A Study of Wagner The drama was, in fact, simply a moral treatise on the wrongness of wrong and the rightness of right — not a particularly illuminative philosophy. As he went on, however, he discovered, according to his own account, that he was "unconsciously being guided by a wholly different, infinitely more profound intuition, and that instead of conceiving a phase in the development of the world, I had grasped the very meaning and essence of the world itself in all its possible phases, and had realised its nothingness ; the consequence of which was, that as I was true to my living intuitions and not to my abstract ideas in my completed work, something quite different saw the light from what I had originally intended." This "something quite different" was the making of Wotan the centre of the whole drama, as the embodi- ment of the principle of renunciation. Wagner, in fact, was suffering from a very bad attack of Schopen- hauerism, partly congenital and partly induced. There is undoubtedly a touch of old-world grandeur even in the more metaphysical portions of the Ring; but that effect is produced mainly by the nobility of the music. On the purely philosophical, side,, upon which Wagner laid so much stress, the scheme is hopelessly mediocre in conception ; it is just a very jdull sermon on liberty and law. Fricka, as the representative of conventional law and order, is as hopeless a lay figure as one could meet in drama ; and all the other characters, in so far as they do not interest us on the purely human side, in so far as they merely pose as symbols of various parts of the social structure, are not only dull but fooHsh. For what is the great " tragedy of renunciation " which Wotan accomplishes of his own free will ? As Wagner expresses it, the lesson that " we have to learn from the history of mankind is to will what necessity imposes, and ourselves to bring it about." ^ Well, the comment ' Letters to Hoeckel, p. 97. The Ring of the Nibelung 225 upon that kind of thing is that it is painfully reminiscent of the dialectic of the young curate. What is necessity in nature ? If there is " necessity," can it be opposed ? and if it can be opposed, ought it to be called necessity ? Wagner's doctrine was that " we must will the inevitable, and accomplish it spontaneously." What conception could he have had of the inevitable ? If you can will what- ever you like and get it, then necessity is not inevitable ; and if you cannot get what you want by willing — if you can only get what inevitable necessity has predestined for you — then it is somewhat superfluous to talk of "accom- plishing freely what necessity wills." Wagner, in fact, was not only trying to treat in music a subject for which music is quite unfitted, but he was setting about to preach a new philosophy of society with only the merest smattering of knowledge, and only a mediocre capacity for thinking. Undoubtedly there is, and always has been, a conflict between the interests and desires of the individual and the laws of society. But who is going to treat with even average respect a theory that affects to settle the whole complex question by mere rhapso- dising about the " free individual," and the necessity of " willing the inevitable," and the rest of that airy jargon ? If a musician must needs preach a social evangel in his operas, have we not a right to expect of him some little logical preparation for his task ? Who cares for all this vapouring about "the individual," and "constituted authority," and the " immorality of convention " ? who wants the characters of an opera to be a procession of dull abstractions drawn alternately from anarchistic and socialistic handbooks ? To repeat once more, Wagner was not contributing one iota to the knowledge or the wisdom of mankind ; he was simply throwing at our heads the crude and primitive ideas of an organism radically incapable of patient and profitable thinking. He perpetually rambles, in his confused and amateur way, about the superiority of "instinct" to "abstract P 226 A Study of Wagner knowledge," of the feeling to the understanding. One does not, in the year 1898, set oneself to combat primi- tive psychological blunders of that kind ; it is sufficient to note the phenomenon as being of importance in a diagnosis of Wagner's character. Holding these ideas, he argued, as he always did, from the particular to the general ; because he could see no further than this himself, he failed to perceive that to other people his " philosophy " was only arrant nonsense. His Wotan, for example, was meant to typify a being "who has wished to drink at the fountain of wisdom — to be guided by the counsels of sovereign reason" ; while "Siegfried, on the contrary, always obeys the primordial law of instinct." Who takes any serious interest in these crude metaphysical antitheses ? and who, above all, wants them embodied in music ? Or take again his lay figure of Fricka, as the guardian of the conven- tional marriage-law, and his Brynhild as the upholder of Love against traditional morality. Even the most thoroughgoing revolutionary must draw back in amaze- ment at this childlike mode of settling a huge social question. Has " traditional morality " no justification ? Are we to have all our doubts allayed by this sentimen- tal rhapsodising about Love, and by the assurance that if we were all actuated by no other motive than Love we should all be very happy ? No doubt ; but that is not a particularly profound philosophy, nor does one need it preached at him in a four-barrelled opera. That the so-called "philosophy" of the Ring is merely the crude sentiment of a man incapable of thinking out the great problems he was interested in, must, I think, be the verdict of every one who considers it on its merits, apart from the glamour of the musigi^ It was only natural that a mind of this kind should be impervious to criticism ; the ideas not being got at through solid thinking — being in fact nothing more than the irresponsible self-expression of the artist — The Ring of the Nibelung 227 were not likely to be affected by the views of other men. So that it is not surprising to find Wagner writing to Roeckel that " it was not so much the obscurity of my version of the poem, as the point of view which you persistently adopted in opposition to mine, which was the cause of your failing to understand many important parts of it. Such mistakes (sic) are of course only possible in the case of a reader who substitutes his own ideas for those of the poet, while the simple-minded reader, perhaps unconsciously to himself, takes in the matter more easily, just as it is." 1 In other words, you must not criticise the poem by bringing to bear upon its philosophical and social theories your own knowledge of philosophical and social problems. That is " substituting your own ideas for those of the poet " ; what you have to do is to be a " simple-minded reader," open your mouth and shut your eyes, and take in the matter "just as it is." Well, Wagner has had followers enough of that order ; but to the outside mind the letter to Roeckel has its touch of pathos. From an intelligence of this kind no light could possibly come upon concrete matters of life and art ; and we may surmise that the shrewd Roeckel had an intuition of this, and hinted as much to Wagner. " You must not take it ill," we find the musician replying, " if I only smile at the advice you give me to tear myself away from dreams and egoistic illusions, and to devote myself to what alone is real, to life itself and its aspirations. For I, on the contrary, believe that I am devoting myself to absolute Reality, in the most effective, deliberate, and determinate way, by carrying out my own views, even those that entail the most suffering, and by dedicating every one of my faculties to this end." The self-delusion was complete. The man with no notion of reality believed that he alone saw reality as 1 Letters to Roeckel, pp. 94, 95. Compare p. 104. 228 A Study of Wagner it actually was ; the man whose every conception was abstract and a priori lamented the tendency of other men to live in abstractions ; the man whose powers failed ignominiously whenever he came to touch a concrete question must needs attempt to deal with the most intricate of all concrete questions in the most unsuitable of all possible mediums. It was probably some such reflection as this that was in Roeckel's mind at the time of his correspondence with Wagner. Knowing the man's enormous musical gift and the mediocrity of his talent in other directions, he must have regretted the one flaw in Wagner's mind, the one malign gift his natal fairies had bestowed on him — this desire t.o_make_his_ musical genius the niere mouthpiece of his crude philosophical notions. That is the regret that fills the minds of some of Wagner's admirers to-day, and that will probably be dominant in men's minds a century hence, when the metaphysics and sociology of Wagner and his era shall have become as utterly alien to the race as those of the sixteenth century are to us. In those days, when Wagner's prose-works will be reprinted only in short extracts and summaries, and men will recall, as they listen to his music, vague traditions of certain pseudo-philosophical notions which the operas are supposed to embody, they will regret that he did not choose somewhat less grandiose and somewhat more human subjects for his muse to work upon. That is what a great many of us feel to-day. We do not want a composer to give us tracts instead of operas, particularly when the tracts themselves are uninteresting to a degree. Fifty years ago, A. B. Marx, reviewing in a not unsympathetic spirit such of Wagner's works as had then seen the light, called attention to the fact that some of the composer's ideas were so far off the ordinary line of human psychology as to be almost incomprehensible to the majority of men. In the case of Lohengrin, for The Ring of the Nibelung 229 example, he remarked that few people could take much interest in a man who leaves the woman who loves him simply because she asks his name. It is what a great many other auditors of Lohengrin have felt ; but it was an aspect of the question that had never presented itself to Wagner. He was concerned with Lohengrin as the representative of certain social and personal ideas which were of profound interest to the composer, but of little interest to any one else ; and he failed to perceive that other people, whose notions of life were not congeni- tally coloured by these prepossessions, would look at the tragedy of the drama in a very different way. Had Marx been acquainted with the Ring he would, I think, have had an even better text for his sermon. These musical dissertations on freedom, and convention, and the marriage laws, and necessity, and renunciation, and regeneration, have little interest for any one but those constructed somewhat upon Wagner's pattern. To the vast majority of us they are merely dull. IV It is to Wagner's preoccupation with his moral scheme, again, that we have to attribute some of the artistic faults of his work. It has led him to write page after page of matter that is quite unsuitable for music, and in which the pse udo-music that a ccompanies the words is padding pure and simple. He has also inserted scenes that might well have been dispensed with, though he was hampered here by the fact that his poem was written in the reverse order of the drama, repetitions being thus almost forced upon him. The scene between Mime and the Wanderer, for example, in the 2nd Act of Siegfried, would have served the purpose, if no previous drama had existed, of acquaint- ing the reader with all that had happened before the opening of Siegfried; but it is almost entirely super- 230 A Study of Wagner fluous after the Rheingold and the Valkyrie, where the events discussed between Mime and the Wanderer have been already presented upon the stage. A similar criticism applies in great part to the scene of the Norns at the commencement of the Gotterdammerung, which was justifiable in the first sketch of Siegfrieds Tod, but mainly superfluous here. There is no need, again, for Wotan to tell Erda, in the 3rd Act of Siegfried, what we already know from the Valkyrie; while the later scene between Siegfried and Wotan might have been shortened with advantage. Apart from difficul- ties of this kind, placed in his way by his constant reshaping of the poem, Wagner's intentness on his moral scheme is answerable both for his dramatic blunders and his absurdities. The unsophisticated hearer who wonders why Erda should pop up now and again, and discuss metaphysics and cosmogony with Wotan, can only allay his dissatisfaction if he submits blindly to Wagner's guidance through the scheme of the drama. Unfortunately the bulk of us cannot do this ; we are not sufficiently hypnotised to take this kind of thing very seriously. All that Wotan has to do with Erda in the 3rd Act of Siegfried is to tell her he sees the approaching end of the gods and is resigned ; and simply for this purpose there is really no need to drag a dreary old abstraction upon the stage and expect our dramatic sense to be interested in it.^ ^ An enthusiastic lady who has recently published a guide to the Ring gives us the following analysis of Erda : — "The Impersonation of the Earth. All the secrets of Nature and Destiny are known to her : But she has no power to change either the one or the other. Her voice is only heard as a warning against evil. She is vanquished by the Will of Wotan, to whom she reveals herself; And to him she imparts knowledge and wisdom. She furnishes him with the means by which to combat hostile forces : But her wisdom and foresight vanish before the power of Wotan's Will ; And at his bidding she sinks again (sic) into eternal (sic) sleep." {The Epic of Sounds, by Mrs. Freda Winworth, p. xxxiii). Absurdly as this reads, it is really a fair transcript of Wagner's notion of Erda, and the reader The Ring of the Nibelung 231 Wagner, in fact, for all his anxiety to teach the world what did and what did not constitute drama as dis- tinct from literary poetry, quite failed to apprehend the difference himself. Philosophical poetry may be made extremely impressive only so long as there is no pretence of an appeal to the visual sense. A poet may present philosophical ideas as incarnated in human figures, but he can only do so as long as the figures appeal simply to the internal imagination ; the im- pressiveness vanishes when an attempt is made to represent these personifications to the eye. Just as the huge bulk of Milton's Lucifer could not be depicted upon canvas without becoming absurd instead of terrifying, so the personification of a moral or philosophical con- cept becomes unimpressive when taken from the inner imagination and set visibly before the eye. We imme- diately judge it by a different standard of probability, and the ludicrous contrast between the merely human figure and the vast cosmic forces which it is supposed to represent, not only prevents any belief in the figure itself, but weakens the philosophical effect that might be had from the mere reading. Erda, as the embodi- ment of the forces of the earth, might be made a solemnly impressive conception in the hands of a fine poet ; but Wagner's Erda — a woman rising from a hole in the rock, to the accompaniment of blue light — simply jars on the artistic sense.^ She may utter such pseudo- profound jargon as " Whatever was, I know ; whatever is, whatever shall be, also I do see ; the endless world's can estimate from it how inappropriate the conception is to a drama. The good ladies and gentlemen who spell "Will" always with a capital W, and fancy they are philosophising when they write of the wisdom and foresight of the Impersonation of the Earth yanishing before the power of Wotan's Will, could surely find more scope for their great powers in another medium than that of the drama. Cest magnifiguc, mats ce t^ est pas le drame ! ^ The stage directions in Siegfried axt — "A bluish light glows in the rocky chasm. Illumined by this, Erda very gradually rises from the earth. She appears covered with hoar-frost ; her hair and garments emit a glittering light." 232 A Study of Wagner all-wise one, Erda, speaks to you " — but we never for a moment believe in her as an artistic creation. She is a pure abstraction, and has no place in acted drama. Once more does Wagner's artistic sense blunder when he brings the dragon upon the stage in the Gptterdammerung, and when he makes Alberich go through his transformations into serpent and toad in the Rheingold. Here again what is valid in a poem or tale intended merely for reading is quite invalid in a dramatic representation that is set before the eye. The dragon is particularly absurd. No spectator with any real artistic sense could take quite seriously the scene between the dragon and Siegfried ; there is a touch of pantomime that is inseparable from it, that even refuses to vanish at the bidding of the music. Wagner, in fact, was always making the strangest lapses as a dramatist, partly because of his childish seriousness in face of certain elements of the old myths, and partly because of his tendency to use the dramatic picture or action as a mere pretext for a moral or metaphysical treatise.. Thus the scene between Siegfried and Wotan, where the god attempts to bar his path to Brynhild's rock, only becomes intelligible, and it is only saved at times from puerility, by a knowledge of what Wagner intended it to symbolise — the last ineffectual stand of constituted authority against the young, untrammelled individuality of the future. Wotan has already, in the preceding scene with Erda, told us very categorically that the end of the gods was drawing nigh, that Siegfried would attain to Brynhild's fire-girt rock, that Brynhild would subsequently achieve the redemption of the world, and that he himself looked towards the end with calm resigna- tion. On these terms there hardly seems any particular reason why he should go through the farce of attempt- ing to bar Siegfried's path.^ The only valid explanation ^ The current Wagnerian view is that Wotan's action is the last dying spark of his Will — the last kick of the mule, as it were, if the simile be not too The Ring of the Nibelung 233 seems to be that Wagner wanted to enforce the moral scheme at this point — to show visually to the spectator the result of the conflict between old authority and free individuality. It takes all the seriousness we can sum- mon up for this conception to suppress hilarious thoughts at what actually happens on the stage — an old man, wearing a large hat, stretching out a spear, getting it chopped in two, quietly picking up the pieces and walk- ing off with them, remarking to Siegfried, " Advance ! I cannot stop thee ! " That is what the eye sees ; and Wagner has made a mistake in putting upon the stage a scene whose symbolism loses most of its impressive- ness when made visible. The spear as the symbol of constituted authority is a purely imaginative conception, and should appeal to the imagination alone ; when stretched out before our eyes across the stage it has an unfortunate tendency to look merely like a piece of ordinary wood. Wagner, as we know, always regarded the theatre in a very serious light ; but his dra matic sen se, fine as it was at times, was always prone not only to artistic blunders^but to_jchild.isb_Iap_ses. Nothing, for example, could be more absurd than the scene where the corpse of Siegfried lifts its hand to stop Hagen from seizing the Ring. The dramatist's dilemma is of course apparent ; it is necessary for the purposes of " redemption " that the Ring shall not go to Hagen and Alberich but to Brynhild, and through her be restored to the Rhine. Yet now that Siegfried is lying dead, and Gudkar has just fallen by Hagen's sword, there is really nothing whatever to prevent Hagen wrenching the Ring from Siegfried's finger ; and the only device open to Wagner is the dreadfully indigent irreverent — and that he is particularly roused to anger at the thought of his beloved Brynhild falling into the hands of Siegfried. That is quite a rational view, as far as it goes ; but it seems to me that this explanation still fails to square with the previous scene between Wotan and Erda. Wagner ha simply pieced his drama together unskilfully. 234 A Study of Wagner one of making the corpse raise its hand in warning. A dramaturgist is occasionally reduced to great straits in order to pave the way for his closing scene ; but it is characteristic of the peculiar weakness of Wagner's dramatic sense that he should insert this mere piece of melodrama in a work that, as a whole, is an attempt to deal with life intellectually instead of sensationally. Of a similar order is the sinking to the level of the old legends in the use of the magic potion in the Gstterddmmerung, that takes away Siegfried's memory of Brynhild and causes him to love Gudrun. One feels that there is something crude in the episode, playing, as it does, so important a part in the evolution of a drama that is elsewhere worked out on such philosophical lines ; while the singing dragon and the speaking bird are also sore trials to our sense of veri- similitude — even the sense of verisimilitude as affected by stage conditions. We are told, of course, that we are not to be too critical, too modern in our attitude towards these elements in the Ring; that Siegfried "is a fairy tale, and Wagner expects his adult hearers to take it in the way adults generally take a fairy tale — in a humorous or semi-humorous way. Even children do not believe you are a bear when you ' play bear ' with them ; they are half frightened, half amused when you pursue them on all-fours ; and for grown children it is not necessary to take the dragon seriously in order to be delighted with the scene." ^ Mr. Finck opines that " no scene ever written has given the musical experts more oppor- tunity to show their habitual lack of poetical feeling, of naivetd, and sense of humour, than this. ... A man who cannot see the exquisite combinations of humour and pathos in this fairy scene for grown children, cannot be helped by argument, however much we may pity him." ' Finck, Wagner and his Works, ii. 351. The Ring of the Nibelung 235 It is decidedly amusing to be told, by the good souls who take the dragon-nonsense quite seriously, that we object to it because we lack the sense of humour ! The truth is that the scene is only made tolerable to the audience by its musical accompaniment — thus showing once more that in Wagner's operas, no less than in those of previous composers, the beauty of the music makes us less critical of the substance of the play than we would be towards prose or poetical drama — makes us tolerant of exhibitions of childishness that would be sufficient to damn a real play. The Wagnerians naively imagine that incidents of this kind show the superiority of the musical to the spoken drama, in that things are possible in the former that would be impossible in the latter. In reality, they simply show that the intellectual level and critical standards of opera are much lower than those of drama, and that consequently no combination of music and poetry — not even Wagner's — can ever take the place, among men of civilised and educated minds, of the real drama. One begins to understand Wagner's antipathy towards the more intellectual work of other men, and his failure to comprehend it, when we see the primitive level at which his own dramatic sense existed. It may have satisfied him, and it may now satisfy Wagnerians, to have the problems of life pre- sented to them in the form of fairy tales |-but-we are not all constituted like that. In any case, if the drama is to be a fairy tale, let it be a fairy tale pure and simple — not a combination of pantomime heroics and the children's story-book with long dissertations on the will, and the basis of social obligation, and the conflict between Authority and the free Individual of the Future. 236 A Study of Wagner V We may put the matter succinctly by saying that Wagner was not a dramatist but a musical dramatist. He himself did not see the absurdity of a great deal of the Ring because his mind was intent not so much on the objective aspects of the drama as on the musical forms and phrases in which the drama was conceived. There can be no proper understanding of the complex problem which Wagner's brain presents, if we do not recognise how entirely different it was from that of all other musicians. He lived, as we have seen, in an ideal world of politics and economics — a world having few points of contact with that of other men. We need to recognise, further, that his dramatic conceptions also were denizens of an interior world whither we are unable to follow them ; the most we can sometimes do is to see that his mental pictures were creations peculiar to himself. This becomes very clear when we examine the leading-motives of the Ring and their various uses throVighout the tetra- logy. We have to remember all along that Wagner did not build up the score by means of leading- motives because of certain abstract notions on the subject, or because he was unable to compose con- tinuous music throughout the work : as far as the latter point is concerned, no one who knows his musical powers can doubt that he could have written five beautiful operas in the ordinary style with less trouble than any one section of the tetralogy must have cost him. He took so kindly to the principle of the leading-motive^ because it was the natural out- come of his peculiar imagination, the natural vehicle of expression for a brain constituted like his. He ■^ It is probably unnecessary to remind readers that the convenient term ' ' leading-motive " is not Wagner's own. The Ring of the Nibelung 237 saw human life and character, the outward world, the interplay of force with force, of element with element, all in terms of music. Those who are acquainted with his scores stand astonished at the rare felicity of some of his conceptions, his power to sketch char- acter in a musical phrase, to write descriptive music — such as the forest-scene in Siegfried or the fire- music in the Valkyrie — that can only be described as marvellous in its pictorial quality ; and no less wonder- ful than the veracity of these pictures is the unerring colour-sense that gives that " inevitable " quality to his orchestration — gives us the feeling that ear and eye are interchanging their functions, that the music of the orchestra is only another aspect of the person or the scene upon the stage. Wagner could, have achieved these results only in virtue of a cerebral constitution that was unique ; and the manner in which he thus saw external life in terms of music helps us to under- stand his failure, in his prose-works, to get outside the circle of his own musical prepossessions. Not only, however, did he conceive man and nature in terms of music, but the inter-relations of one with the other were symbolised for him in the inter-relations of the musical phrases in which they were expressed. A musical phrase once created, as the representative of some character or motive in the drama, became hence- forth for him a thing of flesh and blood, a living thing that played its part in the orchestra in the manner of its prototype upon the stage ; significant in its speech, in its silence, in the countless transformations it was made to undergo ; suffering defeat, rising triumphant ; a warning from the past, a prophecy of the future ; a proclamation of things invisible and unspoken. At the end of the Gdtterdammerung it is not Brynhild or the Gibichung spectators who have the final word in this vast and complex drama ; it is the orchestra that mingles the song of the Rhine-maidens, Alberich's 238 A Study of Wagner curse, and Wotan's lust for power, in one fierce con- test, from which there emerges at the last the trium- phant strain of, redemption by love. Wagner had no need of words for the construction of many of his dramatic pictures ; using the musical phrases as sym- bols, he could present dilemmas or strike conclusions into the auditor's mind merely by his manner of combining them. But his existence in this world of music had its drawbacks as well as its advantages. If it sometimes led him to results hitherto undreamt of in opera, it also tempted him to things that no reasoning can justify. His memory of a dramatic character would be along the lines of music rather than of the more objective aspects of the character ; and hence in his preoccupa- tion with the musical phrases he sometimes relies too implicitly on the similarity of other men's concep- tions to his. One example will make this clear. In the 2nd Act of the Rheingold, Wotan and Loge ask Alberich to show the magic powers of the Tarn-helm by assuming the form of a serpent. Alberich does so, and the appearance of the monster is accompanied in the orchestra by a heavy unison phrase which, in the strange clumsiness of its turnings, is a perfect analogue of the motions of the unwieldy monster on the stage. As a piece of musical description it is decidedly clever, but one never expects to meet with it again in the course of the drama. What then is our surprise to find that in Siegfried, when a phrase has to be found for Fafner, who has now turned himself into a dragon, it is this old phrase from the Rheingold that is made to do duty ! The amazed hearer asks himself on what grounds Wagner or his disciples can justify so strange a procedure as this. It is quite true that both Alberich and Fafner have converted themselves into serpents by the magic of the Tarn-helm, and that therefore there is a faint connection between the two circumstances The Ring of the Nibelung 239 in this respect. But that is quite insufficient to justify the mechanical transference of the motive that repre- sents Alberich as serpent to the figure of Fafner as serpent. A German critic once compared the leading- motive to the labels that one sees issuing from the mouths of persons in old pictures, informing us of their names and qualities. That of course is a very shortsighted view of the leading-motive as Wagner generally uses it ; but it is singularly appropriate to the particular case we are now considering. Even the Wagnerians who accept so unquestioningly all that the master has done, must admit that this use of the Albe- rich motive in connection with Fafner is bound to lead to confusion. Whenever it occurs in Siegfried or the GoUerdammerung we are, of course, supposed to refer it to Fafner. But why ? If it has once been appro- priated to Alberich, why should it not again carry the mind back to him ? Surely to use leading-motives in this way is to create the very uncertainty which they were introduced to avoid. Wagner, in fact, here as elsewhere, was unable to look at his drama through the eyes of other men, because his thought travelled along musical by-paths where no breath of outside criticism could reach him. He probably used the same serpent-motive for Alberich and Fafner because he conceived the two characters not as concrete beings, but as symbols of the one order of sub-human life. In the same way we may account for his giving to the bird-voice in Siegfried a form of melody that is very similar to that of the Rhine-maidens.-^ Dramatically there is no justification for this ; the hearer is simply puzzled at first by the similarity, and wonders what reminiscence of the Rhine-maidens Wagner wishes to arouse by this echo of their song. The explanation of his procedure seems to be that he conceived both the Rhine-maidens 1 See Wolzogen, VAnneau des Nibelungen, p. 93. 240 A Study of Wagner and the bird as representations of pure nature, each serviceable to Siegfried in its own way ; and that he accordingly wished to indicate their equality of level in organic life by giving a similarity of form and phrase to their music.^ These are attempts to convey to the hearer mystic significances to which he is quite indifferent. The earlier operas had prepared us for the spec- tacle of a mind living among its own preconceived ideas, and incapable of assimilating the ideas of other men ; but it is in the Ring — the work conceived in the full flush of Wagner's first consciousness of all the heights and depths of his new theory — that we get the most instructive light upon the peculiarities of his psychology. Particularly in regard to his handling of the eighty or ninety motives of the Ring do we see how liable his system is to abuse, and how he himself has frequently misapplied it. This may seem a very bold assertion ; but I believe that no one can go through the score of the tetralogy with his eyes open, without becoming conscious that Wag- ner frequently makes a double error — that of expecting from the leading-motive more than it can possibly perform,^ and that of employing it where it^ is quite unnecessary. One or two examples may suffice to make this clear. When, at the end of the Rheingold, Wotan sees the future unfolded before him, and re- cognises the danger that threatens the gods if Alberich should again become possessor of the Ring, he looks towards Valhalla, raises his sword, and cries " So greet I the castle, secure from fear and terror ! " The orchestra gives out a theme that has never been heard before, and which first becomes significant in ^ We know, in the case of the Rhine-maidens' song, that he wished to convey by it a suggestion of the innocence and simplicity of primitive nature. " See Mr. J. D. Rogers' appendix to Mr. Bosanquet's History of Esthetic (1892), for some remarks on Wagner's misapplication of the motive principle in the Meistersingir. The Ring of the Nihelung 241 the Valkyrie, where we learn to associate it with the sword. We are told by the Wagnerians that the "So!" accompanied by the gesture, immediately in- forms us of what is passing in Wagner's mind — of his resolve to combat the schemes of Alberich by raising a race of free heroes, who shall get the Ring into their possession and lift from the world the curse that lies upon it. "The 'So'" writes Mr. Chamberlain, for example, "is a thought which for the present only finds, and can find, expres- sion in the gesture, and which through the gesture attains a vastly higher significance than if Wotan indulged — as he would do in a spoken drama — in a long soliloquy about a thought which has only juSt at that moment entered his mind as a sudden inspiration. The spectator is not left for an instant in doubt about the meaning of that so! the gesture has told him every- thing; it is: 'heroism against gold.' The working out of the thought had to be deferred till later ; but in this sudden resolve lies eternal truth, the source of everything which Wotan could and must achieve."^ Now with all respect to the gentlemen who indulge in this kind of aesthetics, one has to say that it is simply ultra-Wagnerian nonsense. Neither the ges- ture, nor the "so," nor the musical phrase, can for a moment tell us the plan that Wotan is revolving in his brain ; if it could, it would surpass the signifi- cance of Burleigh's famous nod in the Critic. The Wagnerians are simply following Wagner's lead in utter blindness when they profess to see meanings of this kind in music or in situations where no such meaning can really be discovered. Mr. Chamberlain did not, could not, grasp the significance of the passage until he had been through the other three sections of the tetralogy. It is only when, with the knowledge of the events of the Valkyrie, Siegfried, and the Gotter- 1 Richard Wagner, p. 316. 242 A Study of Wagner dammerung in our minds, we come back again to the Rheingold, that we see what Wagner meant this passage to signify. If he had died after completing the Rhein- gold, without leaving any indication of the future development of the Ring, neither Mr. Chamberlain nor any one else would ever have discovered the meaning they now see in the passage ; and if they had begun trying to find the inner significance of it, there would certainly have been as many guesses as there are Wagnerians. Yet there can be no question that Wagner intended the passage in question to bear this interpretation ; and the cause of his blunder — as will be explained more fully in a later chapter — was his predisposition to see in musical phrases all sorts of meanings that do not exist for other men. When he was writing the Rhein- gold, he would have before his mind's eye the whole subsequent development of the story, together with the music of the leading themes.^ He knew what use he intended to make of the sword-motive in the succeeding dramas ; and with all the later associations clustering round it in his mind, he failed to perceive that to us who hear it for the first time at the end of the Rheingold, it has no associations whatever. It is to us two bars of music and nothing more. When, like him, we are acquainted with all that subsequently happens, when we have seen the part played by the sword and its theme in the three dramas, we can then, like him, look beyond the musical phrase and Wotan's gesture, and see with prophetic eye the whole future contest between Alberich and Wotan's offspring. But until we know all this, the phrase cannot mean a tenth , of what Wagnerians imagine it to mean ; and Wagner ' Wilhelm Tappert tells us that from the first conception of the Ring Wagner had in his mind some of the musical phrases that were to accompany salient features in the Drama (Richard Wagtur, sein Leben und seine Werke, p. 76). It was, in fact, his practice to conceive the character and action musi- cally in the first place. See the preceding chapter. The Ring of the Nibelung 243 must be held guilty of a palpable misuse of his own system. Other examples crowd upon the recollection. In the 2nd Act of Siegfried, when Mime takes the hero to Fafner's cave and tells him that here he shall learn what fear is, the orchestra gives out the slumber-theme from the 3rd Act of the Valkyrie. We are told that this signifies, "in a beautiful way," that it is not from Fafner but from Brynhild that Siegfried is destined to learn what fear is. How can that be ? The phrase in question might mean a dozen different things. We know, of course, after Siegfried has penetrated the flames, that this use of the slumber-theme meant that he would ultimately reach Brynhild's rock and rouse her from her slumber ; but will any one venture to say that upon the first hearing of the and Act of Siegfried, ignorant of what happens in the 3rd Act, he would immediately seize the significance of this motive ? He might or he might not — probably not ; but the mere fact that there can be any doubt in the matter is fatal to Wagner's theory, since the very object of the system of leading-motives was to make the past and present and future of the drama intelligible to a degree that was impossible by any other means. If there is any room for doubt as tp the meaning of a musical reminiscence, it might as well have been omitted from the_score. Similarly Wagner must be said to have missed his mark in several other cases, where either the form of the motive or the use to which he puts it leaves the hearer simply puzzled. The theme known as "the triumph of the Nibelung," that is compounded of the Valhalla theme and that of Loge,^ is particularly fruitful in confusion. Wolzogen tells us that this motive is based on "the second part of the Valhalla theme, which Alberich has really annexed. . . ." To it " Loge will afterwards add, when, a little latter, he will dupe ■* See the Rheingold, vocal score, p. 145. 244 -^ Study of Wagner the proud one by means of his own pride, the mocking leaps of his own motive, expressive of an ironic joy of victory." ^ The difficulty attendant on making a motive out of two others, in this manner, is that not only is its first appearance somewhat perplexing, but one is never quite clear afterwards as to whether we have the motive or not. On page 146 of Siegfried, for example, there is a phrase that might be either a modification of the theme of the Nibelung's triumph, or of the fire-motive ; while the confusion is increased by the fact that the words give no positive indication of what is signified in the music.^ Wagner must have had some purpose in his mind at the moment ; but he has quite failed to make his scene self-explanatory by the use of the leading-motives. Even more numerous, however, than the cases in which he has missed lucidity in the employment of the system, are the cases in which the score is quite unnecessarily burdened with motives, that simply tell us nothing we do not know already. Let us take, as a salient example, the two phrases associated with the dragon — the serpent-theme already mentioned, and one formed by a slight modification of the giant-theme from the Rheingold? There is probably no motive which Wagner has employed with such unnecessary frequency as these. The object of a leading-motive is to acquaint the hearer with something not revealed either injhe. v^fords or on the stage, by the use of a phrase in the orchestra that carries the mind back to some previous character or circumstance. When Sieglinda, for example, 1 L'Anmau des Nibelungen, p. 42. ' The same remark applies to the use of Fafher's motive, in the preceding bar. * The first three notes are the same as in the Rheingold phrase, the fourth a semitone lower. An unconscious French humorist informs us that " in this way Wagner apprises us that Fafner, by changing himself into a dragon, has descended one degree in the scale of beings" One welcomes the suggestion, although one would have thought the difference between a giant and a serpent was more than that. The Ring of the Nibelung 245 in the ist Act of the Valkyrie, is telling Siegmund of the mysterious old man who struck the sword into the ash-tree, the orchestra gives out the majestic Valhalla- phrase. Sieglinda herself does not know who the old man was ; but the spectator learns at once from the orchestra that it was Wotan. This is a quite legitimate use of the leading-motive principle ; but there is surely no necessity to employ a motive that refers to a certain person, when the audience already knows who is being referred to — nay, even has the character before its eyes upon the stage. In the scene between the Wan- derer and Alberich, in the and Act of Siegfried, the Wanderer speaks of the hero who is shortly to slay Fafner and take possession of the Ring. "Wouldst thou know more ? " he continues. " There lies the dragon ; warn him of his doom, and he perhaps will give you the toy." ^ What earthly necessity is there for the Fafner-motive to be sounded in the orchestra here, and again throughout all the ensuing colloquy between the dragon and Wotan ? We have the dragon visibly before our eyes ; we know him to be Fafner trans- formed ; what then can the leading-motive add to our comprehension of the scene ? On very few of the occa- sions, indeed, on which Wagner uses the Fafner-motives, can we say that they are really required. Without discussing in detail any other cases in which they are thus unnecessarily dragged into the score, I may refer the reader to pages 76, 163, 185, 186, 224, and 265 of Siegfried, and pages 29, 50, 66, 136, 138, 186, 247, 255, and 260 of the Gotterddmm'erung. A Wagnerian may answer that Wagner, by the use of the motives, intends to remind us not so much of the dragon himself as of his qualities — his ethical significance in relation to the Ring. That rejoinder is quite invalid in all the cases I have cited. Fafner is being spoken of ; the mention of him recalls his appearance and all the incidents in which ' Vocal score, pp. 152, 153. 246 A Study of Wagner he has taken part ; and the orchestra simply tells us nothing more of him than we know already. Let any Wagnerian who thinks Wagner justified in the use of the Fafner-motives in the places I have mentioned, read through the score and imagine these motives absent wherever they now occur, and he will realise that they add nothing whatever to our understanding of the drama. Other instances are not far to seek. Apart from many passages that might be cited in which it is only after long reflection that we can grasp the significance of a motive, there are cases where themes are used as unnecessarily as those of Fafner. I do not for a moment deny that in some of these cases there may be a slight justification pleaded for the themes. The principle by which to test them, however, is this — Do they or do they not tell us something we would other- wise be ignorant of — as in the case already cited, of the use of the Valhalla motive in Sieglinda's recital ? That is the true function of the leading-motive ; it is by his un- equalled skill in using it in this manner that Wagner has made it so important an element in the musical drama. If it cannot justify its existence in this way it is quite superfluous — a mere label stuck on a character or an object, as a child writes across its drawing, "This is a horse." It seems to me that Wagner has made this unnecessary use of the Ring-motive on pages 8, 58, and 155 of Siegfried; of the gold-motive on page 206 of Siegfried and page 16 of the Gotterdammerung. In Siegfried the Valhalla-motive is superfluous on pages 61 and 313 ; the Volsung-motive on page 67;^ the 1 Wotan asks Mime, " What is that race that Wotan dealt so hardly with, and yet loves so dearly ? " This is a case in which the Wagnerian may say that the use of the Volsung-phrase in the orchestra tells us clearly which race is being referred to. But we would know it with equal sureness if the phrase were not used. The answer to Wotan's question has been given in the whole three Acts of the Valkyrie; and the Volsung-phrase on page 67 of Siegfried is therefore quite superfluous. In this and the next case (p. 71), the use of the phrase would have been justifiable had no other drama preceded Siegfried. The Ring of the Nibelung 247 sword-motive on page 71 ; Mime's motive on page 228 ; the Wanderer's motive on page 245 ; Wotan's farewell on pages 252 and 253 ; the Valkyrie-motive on pages 287 and 289 ; the bird-motive on page 332. In the Gotterddmmerung, the Volsung theme is unneces- sary on page 49 ; the forge-song on page 65 ; the Tarn-helm-motive on pages 67 and 185 ;^ the Rhine- maidens' theme on page 327. In all these cases, I think, our understanding of the drama is not in any way assisted by the leading-motives ; Wagner has simply ridden his.hobby to death. On the other hand, the number of cases in which a motive has been used judiciously and legitimately is, of course, legion ; and the reader who wishes to see the distinction between a merely mechanical use of the motive-principle and a use that really helps to elucidate the drama, may compare the passages I have just cited with the employment of the curse-theme on page 200 of the Rheingold, pages 191, 222, and 223 of Siegfried, and pages 18, 61, 72, 75, 77, 85, 125, 126, 182, 190, 215, 296, 314, and 337 of the Gotter- ddmmerung. Any one who will take the trouble to go through the scores of the Ring, and note the various ways in which Wagner has employed his motives — wrongly, confusedly, unnecessarily, and judiciously— will light upon a significant fact. He will see that while the musician has frequently blundered in the use of themes that refer to persons or events, he is quite unerring in his use of themes that refer to what we may call the invisible forces of the drama. Thus while the Fafner-motive is constantly being thrust upon us where it is not needed, the motive of Alberich's ' Here again Wagnerians will hold that the motive of the Tarn-helm informs us, while all the occupants of the stage are perplexed, how Siegfried obtained the Ring from Brynhild. But we know all this from what has already gone before ; and not a spectator in the audience needs the informa- tion given him by the motive in the orchestra. 248 A Study of Wagner curse keeps recurring always at the most appropriate moment, always adding to our knowledge of what is going on upon the stage. It is by such achievements as this that Wagner has made his leading-motives such a marvellous instrument in the dramatic effect. It is necessary, for our comprehension of the evolution of the drama, that we should have the curse upon the gold suggested to us whenever its fruits are seen upon the stage ; and the orchestra can not only do this where the characters cannot, but can speak with far greater dramatic effect than words can do. At the end of the Rheingold, for example, Fafner and Fasolt, having acquired the gold that has only a little while before been wrested from Alberich, immediately begin to quarrel for possession of the Ring ; and Fafner strikes his brother dead with his staff. No words could thrill us with such tragic terror as now descends upon us when the orchestra gives out the sombre theme of the curse, amid the solemn silence of the characters upon the stage. And throughout the re- maining dramas of the Ring the motive of Alberich's curse plays the same eloquent part of prophecy and retrospect. It is more than a character in the drama — more significant than any living character could be ; it seems to be the symbol of forces too vast, too terrible for visible representation, the silent, implacable cosmic forces, proceeding with their inexoi-able work through all the mutations of individual life and circum- stance. It is by such uses as this of the leading-motive that Wagner has made his drama a living, -thing, that cariTstand unashamed" among the finest artistic products of all the ages. - The Ring of the Nibelung 24.^ VI Of the Ring as a whole it is impossible to speak with any attempt at completeness within the Hmits of a single chapter ; a proper consideration of it would involve the writing of a work almost as huge as itself. The more one studies it the more one stands astonished not only at the enormous expenditure of mental energy that must have gone to its creation, but at the striking originality of Wagner, his unequalled gift for musical- dramatic writing, the unique structure of brain that, by device after device makes the most volatile and least intellectual form of art coherent, vitaly surcharged with quintessential meanings. To attempt to show by mere description the almost incredible heights and depths of expression to which Wagner attains in the music, or the Titanic force with which he urges all this unwieldy matter towards the one consumma- tion, would be but a vain task. Nothing short of an intimate knowledge of the scores can give even a faint idea of what the work really is ; the work that occupied Wagner more than twenty of the strongest years of his life is not to be discussed without our having studied it with some share of his own eternal patience and unflagging enthusiasm. There is. nothing like it in art, nothing to equal the marvellous results Wagner has obtained from this mass of the most unpromising material with which a musician ever had to deal. That it is a failure, in the artistic sense of the word, will probably be the verdict of posterity. From, its very nature it could not help being a failure, for no one could fill that libretto and its philosophy always with the warm breath of musical inspiration, and no one but Wagner could have brought it so near to success. The really wonderful parts of, the 250 A Study of Wagner score are not the glorious lyrical moments — ^the superb love-music of the Valkyrie and Siegfried; the solemn Trauermarsch — that seems too vast, too universal for association with mere human death, that seems rather to be such music as the spirit of the universe might hear when world crashes into world at the end of time ; the exquisite music descriptive of fire and flood and forest ; the great triumphant theme that wins its way through all things and crowns the drama at the last. These are beautiful as no other music is beauti- ful ; but to the observant eye they are not the greatest things in the work. The unapproachable Wagner is seen in the non-lyrical portions, where there seems to rage a perpetual conflict between the spirit of music and all that is most antipathetic to her. It is these portions, which any other musician would have shud- dered at the idea of setting to music, that Wagner has filled almost throughout with life-blood by his own peculiar art. The eloquent orchestra courses through it all, carrying us over sand and rock and stone by its own sheer force. Of necessity these passages can- not be always beautiful ; there are times when one catches the breath with wonder at the magic of this alchemist, who can turn the hardest and strangest things to gold ; there are times when the alien elements refuse to answer to the charm, and instead of the gold in the crucible we see only a turbulent mass of half-compounded matter. But if Wagner has not achieved everything he strove for, it is certain no other musician could have achieved half as much. When he fails, it is due to no defect in his powers as a musician, but because of the utter unsuitability of certain passages of the poem for any kind pi musical treatment. The extent to which his mind worked along musical lines, representing character to itself by sound rather than by speech, may be seen from his curious effort The Ring of the Nihelung 251 to make each leading-motive tell its own tale, and not only speak its own philosophy but throw side- lights on the philosophical meanings of other themes. His disciples, of course, have been his posthumous enemies in this as in every other matter, exaggerating his theory to the point of downright absurdity.^ He was unfortunate enough to say, in one of his letters to Roeckel, that there was scarcely a bar of the orchestral music that did not develop out of previous motives ; and the bare hint, of course, has been suffi- cient to start his worshippers on their usual career of absurdity. They ^ould have us- believe that each leading-motive is simply a modification of a kind of basic theme that exists potentially in each of them. To a certain extent they are right ; one can readily see that the theme with which the Rheingold opens, Erda's motive and its opposite, the sword-motive, the Valhalla-motive, and perhaps one or two more, are in a sense thematically akin. But to push the analogy beyond nine or ten motives at the outside is to run headlong into folly ; and no one but the typical un- critical Wagner-worshipper could profess to believe that there is any thematic connection between some ^ "Suffice it to say," remarks Mr. Frank Parkinson, "that the whole of the music is thematically developed, and worked up from the first, which is characteristically called, from its mythical (sic) attributes, ' the motive of the primeval element ' " (A Commentary upon "The Nibelung's Ring" pp, 25, 26. See also Mr. David Irvine's book, already cited, chapter v.). Passages like the following are quite common in the Wagnerian literature upon the Ring : Wotan, as " the type of Creed, and an incarnation of Will," has "two motives assigned to him, one called by the name of Walhall, over which he rules as Supreme God ; the other is his Wanderer-motive, performed by the same instruments in Siegfried, but its element of repose is gone, for it is absolutely devoid of definitive key-colour." . . . " In the Z'a/ir^OTOK, the curse is brought on by a defiance of the laws of Nature, and the music which paints it has its spirit imbued with the sternness of her command . . . but in the Ring the curse attaches itself because there has been a want of regard to the dictates of custom and society; moreover, the theme which represents this idea is as unswerving as its nature is destructive . . . further, this motive is in its musical structure as pitilessly relentless as it is lowering and debasing in its effects" (Frank Parkinson, work cited, pp. 24, 25). 252 A Study of Wagner of the motives they quote.^ Even if there were any such connection between the themes, it could only puzzle the hearer in five cases out of six. One may, by a stretch of the imagination, see in the Ring-motive a kind of degenerate form of the Valhalla-motive ; and we may listen with constrained seriousness when we are told that each theme represents power, but that the power typified by the former is of a baser, more worldly kind than that typified by the latter — as, indeed, befits a power based upon mere gold.^ But when the ear sud- denly notes a remarkable thematic similarity between the motive of " Siegfried the Volsung " and the motive of Alberich's curse, how is it to discover the hidden significance of this resemblance ? I have no doubt that Wagner meant the themes to be similar in their ■* The Wagner-guides are as amusing in this respect as in every other, particularly when they disagree as to the derivations of certain themes. Mr. Irvine is quite sure that " the chief source of the motives peculiar to Siegfried and the Dusk of the Gods is found in the Horn-motive of Siegfried, which does not adapt itself readily (sic) to any of the motives already provided in the Rheingold and Valkyrie." On the other hand, he hastens to tell us, ' ' Albert Heintz finds room for its subsequent introduction in the cadence of the Sword-motive, which in the earlier drama, the Valkyrie, discloses the Volsungs' distress theme ; but even in this case there is obviously no develop- ment of the Horn-motive. Wolzogen connects it in some way with the first rhythm of the ride of the Valkyries, and an inversion of the first notes of Siegfried's heroic Volsung theme" [The Ring of the Nibehmg, &c., pp. 242, 243). One is at a loss which to admire most — the desire of all these gentle- men to find an analogy by hook or by crook, or the charming unanimity of the results they obtain. In any case, a perusal of much of the esoteric literature upon the Ring makes it comprehensible how Wagnerians come to take such an interest in the pantomime dragon. ^ Mr. Irvine shall again be our instructor : " There is another form of the Valhalla-raotive, as unrealisable as that of the aspiration to rule worthily by means of coercion, but equally sought after by man — in short, part and parcel of coercive rule. That is the power of gold. The Ring-motivt possesses all the rhythm of the Valhalla-moivve. It is, however, devoid of majesty. It is empty, dispiriting, and unworthy [sic). The Valhalla-moine, which must always be regarded as transcendent, never realisable — in short, an ideally egoistic aim of the few — has its ignoble counterpart in the Ring-motive " (Work cited, pp. 258, 269). I confess that, for my part, I am unacquainted with the ethical meanings of sounds, and do not know when a musical phrase is morally worthy or unworthy. But so far from the Ring-motive being dispiriting, it has always seemed to me particularly bright and cheery. The Ring of the Nibelung 253 difference ; his mind, as I have already attempted to show, thought in musical phrases as other minds think in words, and probably he had some concept of the moral interconnection of the Alberich and Siegfried principles that was self-evidently expressed — for him — in their themes. But it is a stark im- possibility for any one else to see these things as Wagner saw them ; even those who know the Ring through and through are frequently puzzled at some of the thematic resemblances that suggest themselves. To claim that we can see the moral problem of the Ring incarnated in its musical motives is pure affecta- tion. When Wagner combines two themes, or makes one follow another in a peculiar way, he is probably bent on expressing in this way a struggle for mastery between the principles represented by the themes. In some cases we can catch his meaning ; in other cases the key is lacking. The phrases may have been as definite, as clear, as concrete to Wagner as figures of sculpture or of painting to other men ; but to us, as we hear them, they may mean any one of a dozen things. Edmund Gurney has told us that he listened with close attention to "the wonderful passage where Siegfried is breaking through the ring of fire." The Wagnerian may ask himself where there occurs any passage de- scriptive of Siegfried breaking through the fire ; and he may find Gurney's later note somewhat instructive : " Alas for the uninitiated ! Having been forewarned of this passage, I felt my pleasure in listening to it distinctly increased by the idea that the hero's advance through the flames was typified by the manner in which the melodic strain seems again and again to force its way through the changing harmonies. What, then, was my chagrin, on consulting the Guide through the Music, to discover that the strain was the ' slumber-motive,' and that what was really being typified was Brynhild's repose." ^ ' " Wagner and Wagnerism," in Terlium Quid, ii. 44. 254 A Study of Wagner That experience must surely be what we have all gone through on listening to Wagner for the first time ; the leading-motives have not always told their own tale, because we had not the key to their concrete significations. Afterwards, of course, when we have had the opportunity to view the Ring from every side, and to think out Wagner's intentions in detail, we have learned the secrets hidden in the thematic web. But this is to prophesy after the event ; if the very object of the leading-motives is to make easier our path through the psychology of the drama, a motive in the Rheingold ought to deliver its message direct to us, and not need elucidation afterwards from Siegfried or the Gotterdam- merung. One needs only to recognise that Wagner's abnormal brain saw in a musical phrase things that we can only express in words, in order to find the tertium quid between the Wagnerian who pushes his " inter- pretations" to the point of absurdity, and the anti- Wagnerian to whom the leading - motives suggest nothing because they are not symphonic in form and content. Thus we can now see that Gurney was as wrong when he denied the right-to-exist to the motives, as the Wagnerians are when they see moral worth in one musical phrase and moral unworthiness in another. The psychological and aesthetic truth lies between the two parties. " The ear's strictness," writes Gurney, " is thus at once ac- counted for and justified. It must take kindly to the strains which salute it, and find in them the coherent stuff that it wants, before it will at all credit them with emotional messages or pass those messages on further. It must frankly enjoy the label before it will permit the slightest artistic appreciation of the labelled idea. . . . No outside signs of expression, no noisy stamps of determination, no spasms of exaggerated intervals, will take it in ; no juggling with the labels, or mixing them up together, will move it to more than scornful amusement, unless the juggling be the true magician's juggling, and produce the The Ring of the Nibelung 255 musical magician's prime result — beauty. And inasmuch as this beauty is essentially an attribute of form, and musical forms are built, just as much as human ones, out of definite elements, the substitution in Opera of the dramatic stream for the symphonic structure — however rightly descriptive of the general arrangement of the larger musical sections — is a perpetual trap. For that most intimate and organic sort of structure which lies in the constant vital necessity of each bar as it stands to its neighbours as they stand, can never be abandoned while the ear holds the keys of emotion — a musical ear being nothing more or less than one which is percipient of such structure." ^ The aesthetic analysis of the preceding chapter will, it is hoped, afford a basis of compromise between the Wagnerians and the anti-Wagnerians. It is quite true that the ear demands specific musical beauty in a phrase of absolute music before it can enjoy it ; but on the other hand the demand for strictly formal structure in the phrase diminishes when dramatic rather than sym- phonic elements enter into it. Gurney, in his insistence upon the need of pleasing the ear first and last, forgets the all-important psychological fact that we do not hear with the ear alone, but with the brain ; and that music may^ appeal either to a purely subjective sense — as in symphonic music, or to a more objective sense — as in dramatic music set to words, placed in the mouths of living characters, and accompanied by action upon the stage. No composer, not even the most un-Wagnerian who ever lived, has written operas without putting in them miany bars of music whose effect is wholly dis- similar to that of symphonic music, that appeal to a different sense, and are justified by a different law. The mere fact of the existence of these "dramatic" passages, with their power to move us in their own peculiar manner, proves that both ear and brain stand towards them in an attitude of expectancy quite different from that in which they stand towards absolute music. ^ Essay cited, pp. 35, 36. 256 A Study of Wagner The composer, indeed, inserts them because just then his mind is intent on some more concrete image than usual — something whose sharp significance cannot be suggested by a form of music born of more subjective, more abstract moods. Now Wagner's mind is simply that of the ordinary opera-composer pushed to its logical extreme. Instead of being spasmodically dra- matic, it is dramatic from start to finish ; instead of being able to find merely for an utterance here, an episode there, the musical form and colour that will suggest an external thing rather than create simply an internal mood, Wagner is abJLe.-to conceive in musical phrases all characters, all episodes, a//, the internal play of force upon force. We, however, who listen, cannot always pierce through the envelope of music to the concrete suggestion that lies inside ; though in most cases we are enabled to do so by the aid of either the words or the scenic action. Thus while the aestheticians of Gurney's school are altogether wrong in maintaining that Wagner's motives are merely "outside signs of expression, noisy stamps of determination, spasms of exaggerated intervals," on the other hand the hearer must sometimes take in the music merely as music, instead of as the outward and visible sign of an inward dramatic action. The verdict, of course, is finally in Wagner's favour as against his detractors. Strike off the cases in which he has assumed too readily that a musical phrase that had a definite meaning for him would have a like definite meaning for every one else, and there remain a thousand happy examples of his use of the leading-motive that speak to us with a positive- ness beyond question. It is, indeed, one of the clearest proofs of Wagner's unapproachable superiority as a dramatic composer that he should be able to suggest all kinds of shades of thought and mood by harmonic and rhythmic variations of a motive. Any one who will follow up the themes of the Ring in all their uses The Ring of the Nibelung 257 cannot fail to realise this. Wagner can employ the Valhalla-motive, for example, in such a way that while recognising it as the symbol of Wotan's power, we can read in it also the story of Wotan's frustration, as in the particularly fine passage in the 2nd Act of the Valkyrie} Again, one has only to compare the theme at the beginning of the 3rd Act of Tristan with the form in which we heard it in the prelude, to be conscious, almost as clearly as if we had been told in words, that the love of Tristan and Isolde has brought them to the uttermost ends of woe ; the phrase has lost its feverish unrest, its suspense, and breathes now only of the weariness of pain and grief. If an aesthetician cannot see or hear these things, and a thousand others like them, one can only say either that he is criticising a form of art which he is constitutionally unfitted to assimilate, or else that he is framing his opinions upon the mere blind, inconsiderate sensations of the moment — Gurney's criticism coming perhaps under both these categories. In any case, setting aside all those passages in the Ring that require a Wagnerian brain to appreciate them, there is surely music enough of the most " musical " kind, to satisfy even those who want an opera to be merely a succession of highly interesting moments of sensation. There is scarcely an emotion of which human nature is capable that does not find expression somewhere or other in this encyclopaedic score — and what expression ! One only realises the musical power of Wagner when one comes to compare him point by point with other operatic writers, and notices the imaginative truth of the expression of each scene, as contrasted with the more or less conventional handling of other men. For each emotion, each situation, he seems to have found the one expression that was in- evitable for it, from the grandeur of the Valhalla music ' Vocal score, p. 134. R 258 A Study of Wagner to the horror of Alberich's and Hagen's, from the lyric rapture of Siegmund and Sieglinda to the poignant simplicity of the dialogue between Siegmund and Brynhild. Everything and every character is in heroic size. Even the defects of ensemble of the work seem to have a paradoxical fitness ; the figures and the canvas being so large, so remote from all our ordinary concep- tions, that even the asymmetry and unwieldiness of the whole scheme gives a certain sensation of grandeur. The work is like some immense quarry with huge figures of gods and men and beasts standing sculptured in the rock, not statuesque, not plastic, not submissive to the ordinary canons of the sculptor's art, sometimes fascinating, sometimes terrifying, sometimes unpleasant, but always impressive by reason of their strength, their strangeness, their suggestiveness of the whole range of human and sub-human and superhuman life. Against such a work the ordinary formulas of criticism are impotent : we may tell the creator of it that he did wrong in conceiving it, but it holds us and draws us back for all that. When criticism has said the worst it can against the Ring, there remains nothing but to bow the knee and worship. CHAPTER VII WAGNER AS GERMAN EDGAR ALLAN POE, in a little note on German Literature, suggested by La Motte Fouqu6's Thiodolf the Icelander, once found occasion to make some remarks on the state of German thought which are as essentially true to-day as when he wrote them : — " This book could never have been popular out of Germany. It is too simple, too direct, too obvious, too bold, not sufficiently complex, to be relished by any people who have thoroughly passed the first (or impulsive) epoch of literary civilisation. The Germans have not yet passed this first epoch. It must be re- membered that during the whole of the Middle Ages they lived in utter ignorance of the art of writing. From so total a darkness, of so late a date, they could not, as a nation, have as yet fully emerged into the second or critical epoch. Individual Germans have been critical in the best sense, but the masses are un- leavened. Literary Germany thus presents the singular spectacle of the impulsive spirit surrounded by the critical, and, of course, in some measure influenced thereby. . . . For my own part I admit the German vigour, the German directness, boldness, imagination, and some other qualities of impulse, just as I am willing to admit and admire these qualities in the first (or im- pulsive) epochs of British and French letters. At the German criticism, however, I cannot refrain from laughing all the more heartily the more seriously I hear it praised. Not that, in detail, it affects me as an absurdity, but in the adaptation of its details. It abounds in brilliant bubbles of suggestion, but these rise and sink and jostle each other until the whole vortex of thought in which they originate is one indistinguishable chaos of froth. 26o A Study of Wagner The German criticism is unsettled and can only be settled by time. At present it suggests without demonstrating, or con- vincing, or effecting any definite purpose under the sun.''^ The critical reader is forcibly reminded of these words when he comes to the study of Wagner's writings dealing with Germany and the Germans, their place in culture-history, and their influence upon other nations. In a series of writings, not particularly note- worthy for any intrinsic value of thought, but interest- ing and illuminative in a study of Wagner's mind as a whole, he enlarges on the themes that German culture is mainly independent of all other cultures, and that German art is to be the salvation of modern Europe. There are traces of this way of looking at things in his earlier literary works, though it was only in later years that he gave a connected form to his thoughts on these questions. Judaism in ilfws/c (1850),^ though ostensibly a demonstration that the Jews can never create vital art, by reason of their being an alien race among the European nations, is really concerned, in a negative sense, with the topic of nationalism ; while more extended treatment is given to the question in German Art and German Policy (1867), and What is German? (1865).* All three treatises are interesting, not only as aids to the study of Wagner, but for the light they throw upon the intellectual condition of a large part of the German artistic world in the middle of the century. There was, indeed, a time when, as he himself has it, " Deutschland schien mir nur ein sehr kleiner Theil der Welt " ; this was in his young days, when he was in ' Marginalia, No. 76, in Works, iii. 387, 388. ' A reference to the Synthetic Table will show ihs.t Judaism in Music was written for the Neue Zeitschrift fiir Musik in 1850, under the pseudonym of " K. Freigedank," and published in pamphlet form under Wagner's own name in 1869. ' Written in 1865, but only published in 1878, in the second number of the Bayreuther Blatter, Wagner as German 261 that state of sensuous excitability that gave birth to Das Liebesverbot. " I was then twenty-one years of age, inclined to take life and the world on their pleasant side. Ardinghello (by Heinse) and Das Junge Europa (by H. Laube) tingled through my every hmbj while Germany appeared in my eyes a very tiny portion of the earth. I had emerged from abstract mysticism, and I learnt a love for matter. Beauty of material and brilliancy of wit were lordly things to me : as regards my beloved music, I found them both among the Frenchmen and Italians. I for- swore my model, Beethoven; his last Symphony I deemed the keystone of a whole great epoch of art, beyond whose limits no man could hope to press, and within which no man could attain to independence. "1 It was in this state of mind that he fell a victim to Bellini's Romeo and Juliet — or, more probably, to the acting and singing of Madame Schrsder-Devrient in that opera ; and in the enthusiasm of the moment he wrote an article in which he lauded Italian music and referred to the German in somewhat depreciatory terms.* Malicious critics have contrasted this with his later attitude, but to do so is to attribute a very exaggerated importance to the youthful lucubration. It was prob- ably no more than a momentary enthusiasm, such as musicians at the age of twenty — and afterwards — are all too subject to. On the other hand, his specifically German sympathies were from the beginning a matter of comment among his friends. Laube remarks in his " Memoirs " that " according to Wagner's conversations at the time, he had already, at the age of twenty (1833), formed the intention of creating a German dramatic genre that should surpass the French " ; ^ and his Teu- tonic enthusiasm grew in depth and ardour until in 1872, ^ G. S. i. 10 ; Ellis, i. 9. * See a quotation from the article in Glasenapp, Richard Wagner's Leben und Wirken, i. 48. ' S e Freson, V Esthitique de Richard Wagner, i. 38, note. 262 A Study of Wagner when writing the Introduction to the third and fourth volumes of his Gesammelte Schriften, he was convinced that — "According to the high opinion which this great thinker [Carlyle] has proclaimed, of the destiny of the German nation and its spirit of veracity, it must be deemed no vain presumption that we recognise in this German people — whose own completed Reformation would seem to have spared it from the need of any share in Revolution — the pre-ordained ' Heroic Wise ' on whom he calls to abridge the period of horrible World-Anarchy. For myself, I feel assured that just the same relation which my ideal of Art bears to the reality of our general conditions of existence, that relation is allotted to the German race in its destiny amid a whole political world in the throes of 'Spontaneous Combus- tion.'"! The general movement in Germany towards political union, and the vague sense that a united Germany might be a power among the nations, must have had some influence in the formation of Wagner's patriotic theories. But here again, as in his general views upon art and civilisation, we must probably look into his own personal history for the main force that generated his theories. His early experiences in Dresden must have gone far to imbue him with his detestation of foreign influences in music — a detestation that at times was~ simply insensate. Ever since 1817 Weber at Dresdefi had been trying to stem the tide of the Italian domi- nation, and to establish German opera ; ^ and Wagner's boyish admiration of Weber would enlist his adolescent sympathies in the cause for which the great German master was fighting. At a later stage he himself was destined to feel the power of the Italian rule in Dresden. It took him two years to get Rienzi brought 1 G. S. iii. 7 ; Ellis, i. 29. * See the Life of Weber, by his son, vol. ii. chap. 2. Though conductor at Dresden, Weber found it impossible to produce Der Freischiiti there until a year after it had been performed in Berlin. Wagner as German 263 out there — it being put off on one occasion in order that an Italian opera of Reissiger, the Dresden con- ductor at that time, might be brought out. Afterwards, when Wagner obtained a kapellmeistership at Dres- den, in succession to Morlacchi, he had to take up the battle in which Weber had been defeated. The Dresden opera-stage, like every other stage in Ger- many, was over-run by Italian composers, while the great native masters could scarcely obtain a hearing. Even in 1845 (the year in which Tannhauser was produced), says Mr. Finck — " Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini had thirty-three performances together, while Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber combined had only twenty-four. 1 How much the great German composers needed such a champion as Wagner, may be inferred from the extraordinary fact that two of the finest productions of German genius — Marschner's Bans Heiling (that gloomy but splendid opera which cast its shadow on the Flying Dutchman) and Gluck's Armida — had never been heard at Dresden till Wagner brought them out, though Marschner's masterwork was eleven years old, and Gluck's sixty-six." ^ At an earlier date Wagner himself had been unable to get his youthful opera Die Feen performed in Leipzig, owing to the abnormal demand for Italian music at that time. All through his early struggles, indeed, down to the culminating period of his exile, he must have felt that the Italian domination was fatal to new and original German dramatic music. It was not long, indeed, before his rapidly developing mind saw that even some of the finest of his countrymen's 1 One gets a curious sensation in reading, at the present time, some of the high eulogiums which were passed upon men like Rossini, Meyerbeer, and Bellini in their own day. See, for example, Balzac's Gambara and Masimilla Doni, and Heine's Florentint Nights. ' Finck, Wagner and his Works, i. 157, 158, going upon the statistical tables given in the Wagner Jahrbuch, 1886. 264 A Study of Wagner work was flawed by the foreign influences ; * and his own aim was to create an opera that should be truly German : — "That this opera" [7%« Flying Dutchman^ he wrote to Heine in 1846, "not only in Dresden, but especially in Cassel and in Riga, has gained for itself so many friends, and even won the favour of the larger public, appears to me a finger-sign pointing to show us that we must only write just as the poetic sense inborn in our German hearts dictates, never making the least concession to foreign modes, and simply choosing out our stuff and handling it as it appeals to ourselves, in order to be surest to win the pleasure of our fellow-countrymen. In this way may we win for ourselves once more a German School of Original Opera; and all who despair of this, and import foreign models, may take an example from this Dutchman, which certainly is so conceived as never a Frenchman nor Italian would have dreamt of conceiving it." ^ It was in this spirit that Wagner had come to regard art and life in the period of his greatest literary activity ; * and it was partly under the influence of these ideas' that he wrote his Judaism in Music. One ' "Yesterday," he writes to Uhlig, in 1852, "I saw Marschner's Vampyr [at Zurich] . . . This time the music quite disgusted me : this duet, trio, and quartet singing and drawling is downright stupid and devoid of taste, as it ' does not even charm the senses, and so only offers so many notes played and sung. I willingly grant that there are some exceptions to be made ; but now first I see how far above this so-called ' German ' manner my operas stand. Heaven knows this is only a German-soled-and-heeled Italian music, im- potent sophistry ; nothing more nor less " (Letter 59 to Uhlig ; Eng. trans, p. 209). " Letter 8 to Heine ; Eng. trans, p. 457. See also the letter of 24th Jan. 1844 (recently published for the first time), in which Wagner tried to induce Breitkopf and Hartel to publish the score of the Dutchman. ' ' Finally, listen to the voice of patriotism within you, and remember that it is an ORIGINAL German Opera." See Mr. Shedlock's translation of the letter in the Musician, 17th Nov. 1897. ' There was, it must be remembered, what might be called a wave of Germanism in Germany at that period. See, for example, Heine's Religion and Philosophy in Germany, where, in the closing words, Heine indulges in a piece of portentous braggadocio at which he himself must surely have smiled cynically in his wiser moments. See also his laudation of German poetry in Wagner as German 265 has always to remember that the Semitic question in Germany and Austria has an importance to which there is no analogue in England ; and we need also to bear in mind that the German press of that epoch was largely in the hands of the Jews, to whose hostility Wagner attributed, rightly or wrongly, a great deal of the opposition he had to encounter, and a great many of the attacks that were made upon his art and life. The historical interest thus possessed by Wagner's pamphlet is not by any means equalled by its intrin- sic value as a contribution either to aesthetics or to sociology. His thesis is that whereas we at one time emancipated the Jew, it is now our turn to seek emancipation from him, inasmuch as he rules all Europe by his financial power. That may or may not be an exaggeration ; it is more to our purpose to consider Wagner's dictum that the Jew is " incapable of any artistic utterance of his inner essence." The Jew, he maintains, is always an alien, immiscible element in our modern nations, preserving his mental as well as his physiognomic peculiarities, never becom- ing an integral, organic part of the national life of any country. This holds good even of the cultured Jew, who cuts himself off from his commoner fellows, but does not thereby become any better assimilated to the race among whom he is living ; he is an alien " in the midst of a society he does not understand, with whose tastes and aspirations he does not sympathise, whose history and evolution have always been indifferent to his essay on Don Quixote — a passage in which the racial conceit is clearly seen to be due to the fact that German literature is of comparatively recent origin. Nations with centuries of fine literature behind them do not pat them- selves on the back in this self-complacent manner. Note also the passage in his Confessions. " It is much to be a poet, especially to be a great lyric poet, in Germany, among a people who in two things — in philosophy and in poetry — have surpassed all other nations." And once more in the Religion and Philosophy — "We Germans are the strongest and wisest of nations." Every nation can and does talk in this foolish way when the fit is on it. 266 A Study of Wagner him." Thus the culture even of the educated Jew is doomed to remain inorganic, infertile. "Our modern arts had likewise become a portion of this culture, and among them more particularly that art which is just the very easiest to learn — the art of music, and indeed that music which, severed from her sister arts, had been lifted by the force and stress of grandest geniuses to a stage in her universal faculty of Expression where either, in new conjunction with the other arts, she might speak aloud the most sublime, or, in per- sistent separation from them, she could also speak at will the deepest bathos of the trivial. Naturally, what the cultured Jew had to speak, in his aforesaid situation, could be nothing but the trivial and indiiferent, because his whole artistic bent was in sooth a mere luxurious, needless thing. Exactly as his whim inspired, or some interest lying outside Art, could he utter him- self now thus, and now otherwise ; for never was he driven to speak out a definite, a real and necessary thing, but he just merely wanted to speak, no matter what ; so that, naturally, the how was the only ' moment ' left for him to care for." '^ Correlative with this phenomenon was another. No man can ever learn a foreign language, says Wagner, so thoroughly as to be able to speak it Hke a native ; least of all can he learn it so intimately as to be able to compose poetry in it. Now the Jew, though he adopts the'speech of each country in which he finds himself, never learns to speak its tongue otherwise than as an alien ; and since every language is thus to him an acquired language, he can never express himself in it with perfect idiomatic ease and freedom, in such a way as to give utterance to the whole of his nature. " A language, with its expression and its evolution, is not the work of scattered units, but of an historical community; only he who has unconsciously grown up within the bond of this community, takes also any share in its creations. But the Jew has stood outside the pale of any such community, stood solitary 1 G. S. V. 74 ; Ellis, iii. 88. Wagner as German 267 with his Jehovah in a sphntered, soilless stock, to which all self- sprung evolution must stay denied, just as even the peculiar (Hebraic) language of that stock has been preserved for him merely as a thing defunct. Now, to make poetry in a foreign tongue has hitherto been impossible, even to geniuses of highest rank. Our whole European art and civilisation, however, have remained to the Jew a foreign tongue ; for, just as he has taken no part in the evolution of the one, so has he taken none in that of the other ; but at most the homeless wight has been a cold, nay more, a hostile looker-on. In this speech, this Art, the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch — not truly make a poem of his words, an art-work of his doings." ^ This inability to handle the language at first-hand also debars the Jew from song, for " Song is just Talk aroused to highest passion." The latter statement has already been criticised in a previous chapter ; here it must be said that not only is the Jew not incapable of music on this account, but his comparative independence of each nation among which he lives is no a priori hindrance to his becoming a poet. Wagner's argument, indeed, is throughout a mixture of misstatement and overstatement. A Frenchman, it is true, who learns English in mature life is not likely to be able to handle it so idiomatically as an English- man ; but a Frenchman brought up in England from his infancy will speak the language as purely and as idiomatically as a native ; and, if he be of poetic temperament, will not find any check placed either on his imagination or his expression, by the fact that his ancestors lived on the other instead of on this side of the English Channel. Few Englishmen have handled the language so easily, so imaginatively, so beautifully, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who " in blood . . . was three- fourths Italian, and only one-fourth English ; being on the father's side wholly Italian (Abruzzese), and on the ' G. S. V. 70, 71 ; Ellis, iii. 84, 85. 268 A Study of Wagner mother's side half Italian (Tuscan) and half English." ^ A man brought up as Rossetti was is English to all intents and purposes. In his blood there would of course be certain hereditary predispositions from his Italian ancestry ; but in everything that concerned the shaping of thought into speech he was at no more disadvantage than one whose ancestors had lived in London for a thousand years. Similarly the Jew, though mentally and physiognomically different in some respects from the Germans among whom he lives, can certainly handle the German language as well — frequently far better — than nine true-born Teutons out of ten. If Heine and Lassalle are not to be re- cognised as masters of idiomatic German, it is difficult to know where to look for that commodity. It is non- sense to assert that to employ a language with perfect ease, in order to express oneself to the utmost, and to get the greatest artistic finish upon the speech, one's ancestors must have grown up for centuries within this particular "historical community." All our Welsh, Scotch, and native Irish poets, novelists, and thinkers would, on the lines of Wagner's argument, be incapable of making a "true art- work'' in the English language. The fact that they are writing and speaking in a tongue which is not that of their ancestors is no more bar to the flow of their artistic imagination than the fact that French is the native tongue of half the Canadian people hinders them from equalling the English inhabitants in literature and art. Wagner's formula is a puerile absurdity, only surpassed in this respect by the cor- relative formula that the Jews cannot hope to become original musicians. There can be no question, indeed, that here, as in so many other cases, Wagner was merely rushing from a particular fact to a supposed general principle. The main factor in the production of his thesis — apart from ^ See Mr. W. M. Rossetti's preface to his brother's Poetical Works. Wagner as German 269 the influence of the Jews upon the press — seems to have been his dishke of the music of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. One has only to bear in mind Wagner's peculiar view of post-Beethoven instrumental music in the one case, and his detestation of the meretricious French-Italian opera in the other, and the further fact that the leading representative of each of these despised forms of art was a Jew, to comprehend the psychological genesis of his treatise. "At present," he wrote, "no art affords such plenteous possibility of talking in it without saying any real thing, as that of Music, since the greatest geniuses have already said whatever there was to say in it as an absolute separate-art. When this had once been spoken out, there was nothing left but to babble after ; and indeed with quite distressing accuracy and deceptive likeness, just as parrots reel off human words and phrases, but also with just as little real feeling and expression as those foolish birds.'' This of course was his normal view of the post- Beethovenian symphony. As has been abundantly shown in Chapter V., he was insusceptible to a great deal of the charm other men find in instrumental music — even missing, in this respect, the beauty of some of Beethoven's work that was off the line of what he would call " poetical " development. And if his opinion of the lack of originality of a great deal of the symphonic music that followed Beethoven had been put forward merely as a critical judgment, one would not have found very much reason to quarrel with it. It was imitative, derivative, a second-hand repetition of things that had already been said, it being the peculiarity of music — due to the sensuous factor of sound — that this kind of thing is more tolerable there than in any other art. One does not see anything particularly profound, for example, in the slow movement of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto ; yet any one — with the exception of Wagner — could listen to it with real 270 A Study of Wagner pleasure. Certain turns of melody, certain harmonic combinations, certain instrumental effects in it must delight us so long as our auditory nerves remain what they are ; and there are innumerable compositions that hold their place in virtue of these qualities, not in virtue of any particular originality or profundity of thought. But Mendelssohn was neither the first nor the last musician to live by retailing other men's wares. That he missed greatness, that he was too frequently common- place, was due to the defects of his artistic nature, not to the fact that he was a Jew. Wagner says very truly that " in hearing a tone-piece of this composer's, we have only been able to feel engrossed where nothing beyond our more or less amusement-craving Phantasy was roused through the present- ment, stringing-together, and entanglement of the most elegant, the smoothest and most polished figures — as in the kaleidoscope's changeful play of form and colour — but never where those figures were meant to take the shape of deep and stalwart feelings of the human heart." ^ Quite so ; but are there not a thousand composers in Europe to-day of whom exactly the same thing can be said, not one of whom is a Jew ? Why put down to a man's Hebraic origin what is solely due to the fact that he has a mediocre brain ? The plain truth is that the circumstance of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer being Jews counted for a great deal in Wagner's pseudo-demonstra- tion of the incapacity of the Jew to write great music. Demonstration, in the strict sense of the term, there is none at all ; Wagner starts out with the blind assump- tion that the Jew is artistically impotent qua Jew, and all the pretended argumentation is simply the finding of bad reasons for a worse theory. His bias is plainly seen when he tells us that had the Jews been able to do anything in music, this would simply prove that we 1 G. S. T. 79 ; Ellis, iii. 94. Wagner as German 271 were stagnating — " we should merely have had to admit that our tarrying behind them rested on some organic debility that had taken sudden hold of us," a delightful way of settling the controversy, but not a very con- vincing one. Finally, coming to defend his dictum that "the Jews have brought forth no true poet," this is how he disposes of Heine : — "At the time when Goethe and Schiller sang among us, we certainly knew nothing of a poetising Jew : at the time, however, when our poetry became a lie, when every possible thing might flourish from the wholly unpoetic element of our life, but no true poet — then was it the office of a highly-gifted poet-Jew to bare with fascinating taunts that lie, that bottomless aridity and Jesuitical hypocrisy of our Versifying, which still would give itself the airs of true poesis. His famous musical congeners, too, he mercilessly lashed for their pretence to pass as artists ; no make- believe could hold its ground before him : by the remorseless demon of denial of all that seemed worth denying was he driven on without a rest, through all the mirage of our modern self- deception, till he reached the point where in turn he duped him- self into a poet, and was rewarded by his versified lies being set to music by our own composers. He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilisation."^ For lunacy of this kind the most ironic condemna- tion is probably the simple quotation of it. It might have interested Wagner to learn that poetical Europe thinks, and will continue to think, more of Heine's " versified lies " than of the libretto of The Ring of the Nibelung; and that there are certain dull moments in that musical masterpiece which we would gladly barter away for some of the musical settings of Heine's lyrics. One is forced to the conclusion that Wagner knew no more what constituted real poetry than he knew of politics or philosophy ; and that the blind eagerness he shows to discredit, by any means he can think of, any- 1 G. S. V. 85 ; Ellis, iii. 99, 100. 272 A Study of Wagner thing that fails to appeal to him, ought to be charac- terised occasionally by a stronger term than mere stupidity.^ It goes without saying that the man who could make so sorry an exhibition in his handling of an ethnical problem that is not particularly abstruse, was bound to blunder serenely when he came to discuss the influence of one national culture upon another, and the sociological problem of international contact. His thesis may briefly be said to be this : that the " German spirit '' — to which is due everything that is noble and original in German art — has developed out of the German folk by a natural process of evolution, different from that of the French, for example, in that the people owed less to their princes. French civilisation is materialistic ; and the German princes who try to bring about the triumph of that civilisation over the German spirit, will find that their days are numbered. The Germans, in fact, are the intellectual and artistic kins- . men of the ancient Greeks ; they are " a nation of high- souled dreamers and deep-brained thinkers." Further, " ever since the regeneration of European folk-blood, considered strictly, the German has been the creator and inventor, the Romanic the modeller and exploiter; the true fountain of continual renovation has remained the German nature." The last extraordinary passage may be serenely disregarded ; not in this mood of blind and ignorant self-confidence is the history of European civilisation to be written. But it is worth while to give a moment's ^ It is distinctly refreshing to read, in the appendix to the edition of 1869, that Wagner felt aggrieved at the hostility the Jews showed towards him after this ! A friend — a Jew, but of course "an undoubtedly very gifted, truly talented, and intellectual writer " — who had conceived an admiration for the poems of The Ring and Tristan, wished to publish his views about them, but found his co-religionists would not let him do so. Nothing could more clearly show Wagner's childlike lack of all sense of reality than his open-mouthed astonish- ment of this fact. The man who thinks he can attack as he did without being attacked in return exhibits an idealism so naive that it almost disarms criticism. Wagner as German 273 consideration to the proposition that Germany owes very little to other nations. Wagner dogmatises to the effect that the princes have been an un-German element. That they imbibed foreign culture, so far from being, as he thinks, a clause in the indictment of them, is really a strong point in their favour. One almost blushes to have to say in cold print that there is no such thing as " the German spirit," seeing that the German national character, like every other, must needs be a medley of all kinds of conflicting thoughts, pas- sions, and ideals. To pick out the noblest elements of human nature, and style these "the German spirit," as Wagner does, is amateurish to the verge of stupidity.^ Goethe and Schiller, he thinks, held up the banner of the German spirit on the stage, in opposition to the crude inanities of dramatists like Kotzebue. Well, but were not Kotzebue and his fellows also Germans ? If Schiller and his actors exhibited " the German's aptitude for the ideal," what are we to call the extreme apti- tude for the other thing exhibited by nine-tenths of Germany ? Was this not German ? Wagner himself admits that the universal rage for vulgar and foolish drama enabled the wretched dramatists to live in clover. Who did this for them, if not Germans ? The point is that no one but a clumsy thinker or a rabid partisan would think of selecting a handful of able and earnest men as the true types of the German spirit, when what gave point to their own attempts at reform was the crude materialism of taste exhibited by the German nation at large. On Wagner's method you could prove any proposition you set yourself to prove ; could show, for example, the beauty of the monarchical system by selecting the best types of monarchy and quietly ignor- ing the rest. The hundred pages of Wagner's German 1 Wagner forgot that the very Beethoven whom he regarded as the typical representative of the German spirit, owed almost every strong feature in his character to his Flemish ancestry. S 274 A Study of Wagner Art and German Policy contain little in the way of argument that rises above this transparent fallacy ; while as for his contention that German civilisation has developed directly from the people, that proposi- tion could only be put forward by a man ignorant at once of the really vital forces of culture, and of the historical debt which Germany owes to other countries. A nation develops in civilisation and culture through the stimulus of a thousand external forces, the influence of which is not to be disposed of by the mere amateur rant of a great musician about "the true German spirit" and "the Folk." One wonders what Goethe would have said to all this cheap and narrow-minded laudation of the German race — the wise Goethe who saw how little he or any man could owe to the mere fact of his being born in one country rather than another, and how much to the vitalising touch of all the thought and art of all the nations that have been under the sun, each, like coral insects, leaving its deposit of culture to be built upon by others.^ Even at the beginning of the seventeenth century France was exerting an influence upon the culture of the best German families, and this influence persisted for some- thing like two hundred years. In the early eighteenth century, almost the whole of the history of belles lettres, such as they were, is concerned with the struggle between the school of Gottsched, who modelled him- self on the French, and that of Bodmer, who looked for light to Milton ; even the German historians of ^ Goethe did, indeed, upon one occasion deny that the French had any influence on his productions (Conversation with Soret, 6th March 1830). But this must have been in one of those moments of patriotic hysteria when men are inclined to underrate their debts to other nations. It was the saner Goetlie who said to Eckermann (14th March 1830) : " How could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth, and to which I owe so great a part of my own cultivation ? " (Bohn's ed. ii. 259). See also the conversation of January 3, 1830. Wagner as German 275 the present day admitting that the Uterature before the accession of Frederick the Great was poor and taste- less. When we come to the great German names of the eighteenth century, the influence of France and England — to say nothing of that of antiquity — is clearly marked. Lessing's acquaintance with English literature, though not equal to his acquaintance with French, had certainly something to do with the im- provement of his taste in dramatic matters ; while his own earliest model in playwriting was Molifere.^ In dramatic criticism he undoubtedly profited by French example ; even his own movement towards naturalness and directness — which critics of the Wagner type would attribute to his "German heart" — being stimulated, even if not generated, by French critics like Marmontel and Diderot.^ In his aesthetic theories again, Lessing certainly owed something to — among other books — the Reflexions Critiques sur la Poe'sie et la Peinture of Du Bos. Herder, like every other thinking man of the epoch, was deeply indebted to the nature-movement of which Rousseau was the great moving force ; * and Herder in his turn led Goethe to Rousseau and to Shakespeare. Goethe's intellectual life in particular was the product of influences from every quarter — from ancient Greece, ^ Sime's Life of Lessing, i. 49. See also p. 61. ^ See the Hamburgische Dramaturgic, No 14; and Mr. John Mor ley's Diderot, i. 310 &c. Mr. Motley remarks, "It has been replied to the absurd taunt about the French inventing nothing, that at least Descartes invented German philosophy. Still more true is it that Diderot invented German criticism." On the influence of Diderot upon Lessing's art-criticism see ii. 80-82. ' In his Beethoven (1870) Wagner wrote: "We know that it was the 'German spirit,' so terribly dreaded and hated 'across the mountains,' that stepped into the field of art, as everywhere else, to heal this artificially induced corruption of the human race" — the "rescuers from that corruption" being Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and the rest. It is a peculiarly offensive form of national vanity that blinds men like Wagner to the influence of France upon Germany in the eighteenth century. On Herder's debt to Rousseau, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith, see Mr. Sime's Life of Goethe, P- 39- 276 A Study of Wagner Italy, France, England, and the Netherlands ; influences which he, the most cosmopolitan man of his time, would have been the last to deny. Even without adding further evidence, it can be seen that Wagner's high- sounding thesis breaks down at every point. Germany has been influenced and stimulated by foreign culture at least as much as any other nation ; and the racial vanity that can see anything degrading in such in- tellectual influence is a fitting companion to the glib ignorance that denies one of the most evident of historical phenomena. The fertilising seed of foreign culture must, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have been working in a thousand ways to- wards the literary, artistic, and scientific efflorescence of the Germany of the present day. And as for Wag- ner's contention that the German princes, being under French influence, were antagonistic to the true German spirit, that is of a piece with his whole argumentation. It is the dictum of a man who knows nothing of how national changes come about ; who can only indulge in wild rhetoric about that undiscovered entity "the Folk." So far as the French influence tended to stereotype artificial customs it was harmful ; but no one would ever contend that any foreign influence can work the maximum of good without any admixture of evil. What remains certain is that without the French influence the period of Germany's barbarism would have been indefinitely prolonged, and the system of princely patronage, though it certainly had its bad side, yet on the whole must be said to have wrought for good in Germany.^ Wagner himself, when his thesis was not the glorification of Germany, but the need of providing adequate opportunities for the culture of art — as in the Report to his Majesty King Ludwig II. of Bavaria, upon a German Music-school to be founded in ^ See Note, p. 138. Wagner as German 277 Munich — could very readily admit German debts to Italy and France, even saying that " it is the peculiar mark of the German cycle of culture that it takes its form and motive mostly from without, consequently that it tries to digest a conglomerate culture whose elements lie primarily remote from it, not merely in space, but also in time. Whereas the Romanic nations abandon themselves to a dubious life of the moment, and, strictly speaking, have a sense of nothing but what the immediate Present offers them {sic), the German builds his world of the Present out of motives from all zones and ages."i He further admits, after implying a score of times that the German princes were inimical to German civilisa- tion, that they did a great deal of good in the eighteenth century by sending their proteges to Italy for musical instruction.^ His culture-thesis is, in fact, utter chaos whichever way we look at it. He had no grasp of sociological problems, no real understanding of the subtle interplay of the forces that control national life and art; so that when he came to treat of these questions he could do no more than ignore every historical fact that told against him, and give the rein to the cheapest and crudest spirit of national self-lauda- tion. We cannot afford to let pass in silence Wagner's writings upon these questions, bad as they are. Not only are they significant elements in the diagnosis of the man as he really was — showing how hopelessly unfitted he was to treat of any but musical subjects — but they are so far backward steps towards social bar- barism that one is compelled to combat them, more especially as the vogue of his prose-works is now so great among his more unintelligent admirers. He and they need to be told that this crude spirit of national 1 G. S. viii. 136 ; Ellis, iv. 183. 2 G. S. viii. 141 ; Ellis, iv. 188. 278 A Study of Wagner vanity is a mark of the beast rather than, as they suppose, of the angel; and that moralists who are so very anxious for the rehabilitation of the "purely- human " may be sometimes reminded, to their own advantage, that their moral fervour does not appear quite so " purely-human " to others as it does to them- selves. CHAPTER VIII TRISTAN AND ISOLDE AND DIE MEISTERSINGER I A GLANCE at the Synthetic Table will show that Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger belong to the middle of the period during which Wagner was engaged on the Ring, the tragedy being written between 1857 and 1859, and the comedy completed in 1867 ; both works thus coming between the composition of about half of Siegfried, in 1857, and the remaining portion in 1869. The biographical details are, in brief, that Wagner undertook these two fresh works in order, for pecuniary reasons, to have something produced immediately upon the stage — ^there being very little prospect in 1857 of the Ring ever being performed. In March 1857 he received an invitation from the Emperor of Brazil to write an opera for Rio de Janeiro, and at first he thought of offering Tristan for this pur- pose ; but the notion was soon abandoned. His hopes that the opera might be quickly produced in Germany were, however, doomed to bitter disappointment. The intrigues of his enemies combined with the difficulties of the work itself to keep it from performance. Even so important an operatic establishment as that of Vienna rehearsed the opera fifty-four times, and then gave it up as unplayable ; and it was not until 1865, more than six years after its completion, that it had its first per- formance, at Munich. The Meistersinger, again, was first sketched out by Wagner in 1845, immediately after Tannhauser; but other plans intervened, and the subject 28o A Study of Wagner was only taken up again in 1861, the opera being com- pleted six years later. It was more fortunate than Tristan on the practical side ; its first performance took place in the year following its completion. The two operas are thus seen to fall between the years 1857 and 1867, when Wagner was for the first time the real Wagner as we now know him. One period of his development may be roughly said to close with Lohengrin; and any one who compares that opera as a whole with any of the later works will see how enormously Wagner's brain had grown in complexity since 1847. There are, it is true, certain resemblances to be noted between Lohengrin and the Rheingold^ although the advance as a whole is very great from 1847 to 1854 ; while in the Valkyrie, and still more in Siegfried, one sees Wagner's musical style becoming less and less like that of any previous or contemporary composer — becoming less formally melodic, more homo- geneous, and at the same time more complex. A com- parison of the love-duet in the ist Act of the Valkyrie with the love-duet in the 3rd Act of Siegfried will serve to show how, even on the side of lyrical and impassioned beauty, Wagner's style was moving from every point of contact with that of other musicians, and becoming distinctly his own. Beyond the point represented by Siegfried his mind did not develop so much. There are, of course, in the Gotterddmmerung and Parsifal, visions of worlds of music that are not to be had in Siegfried ; but in everything that concerns the handling of his forms and his material, it may be said that Sieg- fried shows us the fully developed Wagner, thoroughly conscious of his own aims and ideals, and more per- fectly equipped for the realisation of them than at any previous period of his life. So that in Tristan and the Meistersinger, written as they were in the plenitude of his artistic powers, we may expect to find Wagner deal- ^ See, for example, in vocal score of the Rheingold, pp. 68-76, 88, 89. Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger 281 ing with the musical drama as he had never done before, drawing from his pecuHar form of it more than he had previously been able to draw, when his intuitions and his reasoned ideas of its possibilities were as yet unmated with the strong and easy hand of the mature craftsman. It was probably some kind of revolt, conscious or unconscious, against the enormous mass of material with which he had burdened himself in the tetralogy, that led him to the simplicity of outline and clearness of content of Tristan; while the ardour with which he threw himself into the work may have been partly due to the desire of the artist to see something grow into actual life under his pen — a desire, born of the apparently unending labour of the Ring, to find artistic joy and new energy in some work that should stand before his eyes complete, harmonious, and alive. " For the sake of that most beautiful of my life-dreams, Young Siegfried" he wrote to Liszt in 1854, "I shall have to finish the Nibelungen pieces after all. ... As I have never in my life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of all my dreams, in which, from beginning to end, that love shall be thoroughly satisfied. I have in my head Tristan and Isolde, the simplest but most full-blooded musical conception ; with the ' black flag ' which floats at the end of it I shall cover myself to die." ^ He was impelled to the composition of Tristan with an urgency rare even with him, the apostle of " Need " ; his interest in the story, the place of love in his philo- sophical system, the gloom of his outward circum- stances, the need of self-expression, and the influence — then at its strongest — of Schopenhauer's pessimistic theories — all combined to make the new opera personal and vital in the highest degree. After the huge canvas of the Ring, the scheme of ^ Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Eng. tran. ii. 54. 282 A Study of Wagner Tristan is of course simplicity itself ; and Wagner showed once more the general rightness of his intui- tive sense as to the essentials of good music-drama, in his reduction of the mass of material in the old Tristan-legends to the particular form to which he has set his music.^ The tendency to drop into the epic or narrative form, which at first troubled him in writing the poem of the Ring, is here almost entirely avoided by the skilful weaving of all the events anterior to the drama into the structure of the drama itself, so that although these earlier events are communicated to the spectator in the narrations of the characters them- selves, they are for the most part not mere pieces of narration grafted on to the drama, but vital elements in the dramatic action, woven into the general texture in an extremely skilful way, by the use of certain leading-motives. As for the general structure of the poem and the music, and their congruence with his theories, Wagner himself has told us that he was quite willing to allow it to be submitted to the severest test of this kind ; and while he did right thus to challenge investigation, we, on the other hand, may find evidence in Tristan to confirm us in the belief that he erred when he imagined himself to be asserting the claims of the poet against those of the musician, and again when he ranked the musical-drama so high above all other arts. In the " Zukunftsmusik," after laying it down that operatic subjects should be chosen from the myth, in order that the action, being hindered by a mass of extraneous incident, might develop solely along the lines of inner necessity, he proceeds to trace his artistic progress in this respect from the Dutchman upwards, and finds the culminating point in Tristan. ^ On the relation of Wagner's version of the legend to that of Gottfried von Strassburg and others, see Mr. Chamberlain's Richard Wagner, pp. 307- 310, and his Das Drama Richard Wagner's, pp. 63-67; and M. Gaston Paris' article in the Revue de Paris, 15th April 1894. Tristan and Isolde and Die Meister singer 283 " Here," he writes, " in perfect truthfulness, I plunged into the inner depths of soul-events, and from out this inmost centre of the world I fearlessly built up its outer form. A glance at the volumen of this poem will show you at once that the ex- haustive detail-work which an historical poet is obliged to devote to clearing up the outward bearings of his plot, to the detri- ment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, I now trusted myself to apply to these latter alone. Life and death, the whole import and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul." ^ And with his usual curious misunderstanding of the trend of his own theories, he supposes that the deve- lopment from the Dutchman to Tristan has consisted in the superior place given to the poet, whereas the real truth is that the advance has been in the direction of making the musician the real shaper of the drama — his error once more arising from his supposition that he was altering the psychological relations of poetry and music in opera, when he was only altering the external form which music had there assumed. " In looking through the poems " \i.e. from the Dutchman onward], he wrote, "you will readily notice that I but very gradu- ally grew conscious of the advantage just referred to,^ and but gradually learned to profit by it. Even the outward volumen, increasing with each poem, will afford you evidence of this. You will soon perceive that my initial bias against giving the poem a broader reach sprang chiefly from my keeping at first too much in eye the traditional form of opera-music, which had hitherto made a poem impossible that did not allow of number- less word-repetitions. . . . Perhaps in the execution of this poem [ Tristan\ much will strike you as going too far into subtle (intitne) detail; and even should you concede this tendency as permis- sible to the poet, you yet might wonder how he could dare hand ^ G. S. vii. 122 ; Ellis, iii. 330, 331. ' i.e. the advantage afforded by the use of legendary subjects, whereby the action was simplified externally, and more space given to the development of the " inner springs of action." 284 A Study of Wagner over to the musician all this refinement of minutiae, for carrying out. In this you would be possessed by the same bias as led myself, when drafting the Flying Dutchman, to give its poem nothing but the most general of contours, destined merely to play into the hands of an absolute musical working-out. But in this regard let me at once make one reply to you : whereas the verses were there intended as an underlay for operatic melody, to be stretched to the length demanded by that melody through countless repetitions of words and phrases, in the musical setting of Tristan not a trace of word-repetition is any longer found, but the weft of words and verses foreordains the whole dimensions of the melody, i.e. the structure of that melody is already erected by the poet."i What really suggests itself to the outside mind, on reading these passages, is that Wagner was quite blind to the true circumstances of the case. In the first place, it is altogftther wrong to say that the older opera exacted from the poet " numberless word-repetitions," for an opera could easily be put together, even in the conventional form of aria, recitative, ensemble, and the rest, that would proceed simply and naturally without any repetitions. The operatic aria was, in its typical form, a lyrical outburst, a highly emotional expression of some mood of more than ordinary intensity. In this respect it resembled the modern non-operatic song ; and the finest achievements in the modern song are in no way dependent upon word-repetition for their effect. Grant the supposition that an ordinary opera must contain detached arias, and it does not at all follow that the words need be stupid in matter or conventional in form. We can easily conceive an opera that should take all the strong points of the Wagnerian theory and exhibit them in the older operatic frame ; that is, it might choose a very simple, emotional subject ; it might develop, psychologically, upon the line of " in- ternal " instead of " external " issues ; and, while main- •" G. S. vii. 121, 123 ; Ellis, iii. 329, 331. Tristan and Isolde a.nd Die Meistersinger 285 taining the old plan of division into aria, recitative, and ensemble, might avoid, as Gluck said, "too great a disparity " of emotional pitch between these various parts, and at the same time make their junction easy, fluent, and natural. An opera built up on these lines would make a total impression very little less than that made by one of Wagner's — given, of course, Wagner's rare musical gift in the composer. The world has seen few operas constructed in this way ; but that has been mainly because each successive opera-composer and opera-poet followed blindly the old conventions, instead of thinking out the problem of form and expression anew for himself. It is one more illustration of the fact pointed out in a previous chapter, that Wagner imagined he had discovered a defect in the psycho- logical relations of poetry and music in the ordinary opera, whereas he was only dealing with a historical convention that left the general question of the relations of poetry and music quite untouched. For in the second place, he altogether misses the real significance of the changes in his own manner of writing opera-poems, from the Dutchman to Tristan. There are two ways in which a poet can allow the musician to give the fullest possible expression to a given emotion : he may write a poem of a few lines, and allow the musician to repeat these, or parts of them, again and again, thus exhausting all the emotional possibilities latent within that particular mood ; or he may spread his phrase out in a much thinner medium, allowing the musician to occupy just as much time in the development of his own particular forms of expres- sion, but mating each new phrase of the music with a new phrase of the poem. The former method was that of the Dutchman and of the ordinary opera ; the latter the method of Tristan. The psychological relations of poetry and music remain, however, quite unchanged throughout each of these two modes of combination. It 286 A Study of Wagner is the music that leads and controls ; anything not con- gruous with the nature of music will not be tolerated ; while in the case of any words that can be combined with it, one requires only to grasp so much of the meaning of them as will give a more definite character to the somewhat vague expression of music. So that Wagner's progress from the Dutchman to Tristan was really along two lines. In the first place, he made the mental cur- rent seem more continuous, more organic, by adopting a more continuous and more organic form of expres- sion, by discarding the set divisions of aria, recitative, and ensemble, which exist on different planes of aesthetic psychology, and in the passage from one to another of which the hearer's mind experiences a sense ofc emotional discontinuity. But this development was not a revolt, as Wagner thought, against " absolute-musical working-out " on the part of the musician, but simply an attempt to restore to this form of art a homogeneity of medium that ought never to have been destroyed, that had been destroyed only through the stress of definite historical circumstances, and towards whose restoration every earnest composer had striven. Wagner himself is forced to admit at times that there had been attempts of this kind to give more unbroken continuity to the stream of music in opera.^ On the one side, then, his advance was only a logical development from the best efforts of previous composers, but made consistent and successful by his enormous musical gift and his consciousness of a definite purpose — the two points in which he so greatly surpassed his predecessors. In the ' See, for example, G. S. vii. 133, 134 ; Ellis, iii. 341, 342. "Though the hideous juxtaposition of absolute recitative and absolute aria is retained almost everywhere, preventing any finished style, and everlastingly breaking and barring the musical flow (through the fundamental error of a faulty poem), yet in our great masters' finest Scenas we often find this evil quite overcome ; to the Recitative itself there has been given already the stamp of rhythmic melody, and it opens imperceptibly into the broader structure of the melody proper." Tristan and Isolde and Die Meister singer 287 second place, his librettos, from the Dutchman to Tristan, were becoming more and more musical in quality ; that is, they were more adapted for being set to music. The climax was reached in the poem of Tristan, where, as we saw in a previous chapter, the words can no longer be described as poetry, but merely as "words intended for music." Wagner might have spared himself and us much elaborate discussion had he recognised that music is the controlling factor in opera, determining what shall and what shall not be said in the course of the so-called " drama." He could only arrive at a conclu- sion coinciding with this in substance, though differing from it in appearance, by the circuitous path of an analysis of the myth. His attempt to diminish the rdle of external circumstance in the opera was due to the perception that the ideal nature of music debarred it from participation in anything but the broadest of dramatic motives. His own handling of the Tristan legend for the purposes of opera shows at once the peculiar strength and the peculiar weakness of the musical drama. On points where poetry and music can unite in the one expression, the power of the musician must enormously exceed that of the poet ; in the love-duet of the 2nd Act, for example, and the terrible delirium of the sick man in the 3rd Act, the musician's power to move us is a thousand times greater than anything the poet could achieve. But on the other hand, precisely because music has this power of intensifying a particular emotion and dwelling upon it far beyond the point where the poet would have wearied us, it is incapacitated for taking part in the drama as we ordinarily conceive it, where a greater number of moods are generated, each being dwelt on a much smaller time than in opera. No one will question that Tristan is an almost ideal poem for music -drama — at any rate the finest specimen that musical literature possesses ; but for that reason it is 288 A Study of Wagner only in the minutest degree a drama. M. Lichtenberger opines that Tristan is "the somewhat paradoxical type of the Wagnerian drama," inasmuch as it is "a subject entirely interior, entirely musical." ^ Quite so ; but pre- cisely on that account it is a musical drama and not a drama — -a distinction which Wagner was incapable of making, but which is fatal to his pretension that the drama as he conceived it was the supreme summation of all the arts. Thus Tristan is in some respects the most instruc- tive of all Wagner's works in the light it throws upon his theories ; and it certainly bears out the analysis of a previous chapter, wherein it was shown that the musical stream of thought is the most important factor •in opera, and that given a satisfaction of the aesthetic sense in this respect, the poem may for the most part go hang. After the great stress that Wagnerians have laid on "the restoration of the poet to the supreme place in musical drama," it is certainly refreshing to meet with their naive admissions that not only is Tristan — the work which Wagner himself regarded as the incarnation of his theories — built up on the poetical side simply to suit the exigencies of the music, but that in many passages the words might just as well be non- existent. "As the interior action of the drama," says M. Lichtenberger, " is essentially musical and based on feeling, and poetry is, by its very essence, incapable of revealing the intimate nature of the emotions which agitate a human soul, to note the supreme ecstasies of love and despair, it cedes at every instant the first place to the music. There are in Tristan long passages where the verse is resolved, so to speak, in the music ; where it is reduced to being merely the support, almost indifferent by itself, of the chanted melody ; where the poet, conscious of his impotence to express in clear and logical ideas the pure sentiment that ^ Wagner, Poite et Pensew, p. 329. Tristan and Isolde and T)ie Meister singer 289 sings through his melodies, replaces the regular phrase by a series of broken interjections, exclamations with scarcely a link between them, and offering to the intelligence only a sense extremely vague." ^ Well, that is precisely what has been contended for in the present volume as the main argument against Wagner's claim that the drama must be resolved into the musical drama ; the great objection is that though music has an intenser life than words, its range is far more limited ; that more complex arts than music have come into existence simply because the human brain has grown more complex since the day when man's first vague emotion found outlet in a cry ; and that for the satisfaction of our more specialised needs we must have recourse to more specialised forms of art. We can imagine no musical drama more beautiful, more terrible, more profoundly moving than Tristan/ only when one compares it with Ghosts, or Hamlet! Wagner may have been so constructed that poetry, as poetry, had little charm for him ; but are we to surrender our intellectual delights on that account ? The poem, says the French critic just quoted, "shocks the taste ... by the obscurity of a most elliptical form of speech, which exasperates in general both philologists and men of letters, and in which it is almost impossible, indeed, to discover the least charm as soon as the poetical expression is separated from the musical." ^ ' Wagner, Poite et Penseur, pp. 330, 331. ^ Ibid., p. 331. Mr. Finck, however, tells us that Tristan is "a poem for poets" (Wagner and his Works, ii. 144). He goes on to the effect that " although poetic imagery is less essential in a musical drama than in a literary drama, because there the music supplies the appeal to the feelings for which a poet usually resorts to similes, Wagner's Tristan poem, never- theless, is full of exquisite imagery which alone would put him in the front rank of German poets." To praise a libretto for being full of the very things that are not essential to a libretto seems rather contradictory. Most people, however, who have read the poem of Tristan would have some compunction about placing Wagner " in the front rank of German poets." T 290 A Study of Wagner On these lines it is difficult to see the force of the favourite Wagnerian contention that the musical drama combines each of the arts just at the point where its own expression fails, and demands the assistance of the other. Test the theory by the poetry and music of Tristan. Besides the lines I have already quoted in a previous chapter, look at a few others : — " sie zu suchen, sie zu sehen, sie zu finden, in der einzig zu vergehen, zu entschwinden Tristan ist vergonnt." " O siisse Nacht ! Ew'ge Nacht ! Hehr erhab'ne, Liebes-Nacht ! Wen du umfangen, wem du gelacht, wie — war' ohne Bangen aus dir er je erwacht ? Nun banne das Bangen, holder Tod, sehnend verlangter Liebes-Tod ! In deinen Armen, dir geweiht, ur-heilig Erwarmen, von Erwachens Noth befreit. Wie es fassen ? Wie sie lassen, diese Wonne, fern der Sonne, fern der Tage Trennungs-Klage ? Tristan and Isolde and Die Meister singer 291 Ohne Wahnen sanftes Sehnen, ohne Bangen siiss Verlangen ; ohne Wehen hehr Vergehen, ohne Schmachten hold Umnachten ; ohne Scheiden, ohne Meiden, traut allein ewig heim, in ungemess'nen Raumen ubersel'ges Traumen. Du Isolde, Tristan ich, nicht mehr Tristan, nicht Isolde; ohne Nennen, ohne Trennen, neu Erkennen, neu Entbrennen ; endlos ewig ein-bewusst : heiss ergluhter Brust hochste Liebes-Lust ! " Now let any one remember that these words are from the duet in the 2nd Act, and that they are set to some of the most beautiful music in the whole opera, and it will at once be evident that the musical drama does not consist in a union of poetry and music just at the point where each demands the aid of the other in order to extend the field of its own expression. The music in Tristan is in many respects the most complex, the most subtle, the most modern, that we possess ; three centuries of development were neces- sary before music could attain to such depth of imagi- nation and such control of form. Compare with this 292 A Study of Wagner music the " poetry " to which it has been set — verse that deliberately casts away almost every literary beauty which poets have been slowly developing through century after century. It has nothing but the most banal rhythm, rhymes irritating in their closeness and their frequency, and a terseness that is generally fatal to any poetical beauty whatever. And this jargon, this bald prose chopped up into lines and adorned with the most obvious rhymes, this is what Wagner would have us regard as poetry developed so far that the expressive power of words can no further go, poetry that in its dire need for completion calls imperatively for the helping hand of music 1 Such a union as this of the two arts may perhaps have seemed to Wagner one in which poetry and music met on equal terms, neither attaining expression at the expense of the other ; but to the outside mind the reconciliation seems to be of the kind attained when the lamb lies down inside the lion. Can there be any doubt that Wagner's brain was, in nine-tenths of its structure, the brain of a musician pure and simple ; and that although there was in his musical imagination an infusion of more concrete impressions than usually go to the making of music, he was not a poet in any but the vaguest sense of the word, having neither the verbal, the rhythmical, nor the imaginative gifts that make the poet as distinguished from the mere versifier ? Poems he did not write ; what he wrote was simply words for music.^ Tristan is indeed for the most part simply a huge achievement of the musical imagination, to ^yhich the words have contributed in a very slight degree. As has already been pointed out, Wagnerians themselves ^ Mr. Chamberlain tells us that he " has been able to study the very first sketches of Lohengrin ; they furnish documentary proof that all the principal motives of the drama formed themselves in Wagner's mind simultaneously, while the poem was still an unfinished sketch" {Richard Wagner, p. 288, note). That is precisely what we should have expected. Tristan and Isolde and I)ie Meister singer 293 have admitted that in long stretches of the opera the poem is altogether "resolved into the music." Even Mr. Chamberlain, who regards Wagner's theory as a very important contribution to musical aesthetics, appears to the non- Wagnerian mind to surrender the case entirely. Wagner felt, he writes, "that for the complete realisation of his poetic intent he must make use of every means of expression, that he could no more do without the ' indispensable foundation ' of language than with- out the ' realising aid ' of music." ^ Observe the confusion and contradiction of terms even within the limits of this short sentence ; because a musician employs words to which to set his music, he must be credited with a " poetic intent " — as if music could not be, and as if Wagner's music frequently was not, set to the merest prose. The " poetic intent " which looms so largely before Mr. Chamberlain's vision is simply what plain people would call the story of the opera, not necessarily poetical either in conception or in form. " When we are dealing with the creative soul," continues Mr. Chamberlain, "the distinction between poet and musician is purely artificial ; the musician is ' the poet revealing his purpose in its deepest meaning'; the poet can only grasp this purpose (that of directly representing so deeply emotional a subject- matter) in so far as and because he is in the depth of his heart a musician. And the more he attains perfection in his art, the more impossible it becomes to draw a line and to say, here ends the work of the poet, here begins that of the musician. In con- ception, in the main lines of the words, a poem like that of Tristan has sprung as truly from music as Aphrodite, the goddess of perfect beauty, has sprung from the waves of the sea. Whether therefore we consider the pastoral play of his boyhood, or the master-works of his mature age, we shall always find ' word-poet ' and ' tone-poet ' to be one and the same person in Wagner." ^ ^ Richard Wagner, p. 243. ^ Ibid., p. 243. 294 A Study of Wagner Was there ever such a chaos of fallacy and self-con- tradiction in so limited a space ? Mr. Chamberlain first of all contends that in Wagner's mind there was a poetic picture to be realised, which could only be realised by calling in the aid of musical expression. In the next breath it appears that there is no such division of imagination as this ; that, in fact, " the distinction between poet and musician is purely arti- ficial" — that is, if words mean anything, in Tristan we should be unable to say, "This is the part of the poet, this the part of the musician," which is precisely what Mr. Chamberlain has been saying all along. Then, when we have arrived at the proposition that we cannot draw a line, and say, " Here ends the work of the poet, here begins that of the musician," we are suddenly told that the poem of Tristan {i.e. the part which is indistinguishable in separation from the music), has sprung from the music {i.e. the part which is merely the realisation of the poem), as Aphrodite has sprung from the waves of the sea. And all this mass of absurdity, this perpetual see-saw from one opinion to another, is due to neither Wagner nor his disciples having perceived that there is no poem, in the true sense of the word, in Tristan; that there are, as I have already remarked, simply a number of words for music. The proper phrasing of the Wagnerian theory that the poem of Tristan is born from the music, is simply that Wagner, having his mind filled with the musical ex- pression of certain great emotions, and needing a sub- stratum of words in order to give definiteness and coherence to the music, set the music to a simple old story told in the smallest possible number of words. A story of some kind is indispensable to an opera, but if the mere fact of there being a story is to lead to the composer being credited with a "poetic intent," there is no limit to the fallacy that lies open before us. We have simply to substitute " verbal " for " poetic," Tristan and Isolde and Die Meister singer 295 " verse " for " poetry," " versifier " for " word-poet," in all cases where these terms are used by Wagner, in order to see the real aesthetic bearings of the relation of poetry to music in opera. Mr. Chamberlain him- self has admitted that in one portion of the opera — the warning uttered by Brangaena from the tower, in the 2nd Act — the words are necessarily indistinguish- able, by reason mainly of the long-drawn notes to which they are set, the turmoil of the orchestral accom- paniment, and the fact that the singer is not, properly speaking, on the stage at all ; here, he admits, the human voice comes to us simply in the form of a cry, a vague lamentation.^ Well, to that Wagnerian admission there require to be added the further facts, (i) that in many other parts of the opera the intel- lectual signification of the words is absolutely sunk in the musical expression, and (2) that in still other cases the words are quite superfluous, the music being all that the mind cares to take in.^ If in the face of these facts the Wagnerian still refuses to admit that in Wag- ner, just as in other composers, the music is the domi- nant factor from first to last in opera — though Wagner avoids some of the technical errors of his predecessors — one can only rejoin that to these aestheticians the > Das Drama Richard Wagner^, pp. 80, 81. ° For example, in the following passage from the love-duet : Du Isolde, Tristan ich, nicht mehr Tristan, nicht Isolde ; ohne Nennen, ohne Trennen, neu Erkennen, neu Entbrennen ; endlos ewig ein-bewusst ; heiss erglUhter Brust hochste Liebes-Lust. Let any one recall the fact that these are the concluding words of the duet, and are set to the most passionate of music, and he will realise how entirely superfluous they are. 296 A Study of Wagner terms under discussion must mean something very different from what they mean to the rest of the world. II When one comes to the discussion of the music itself, however, the voice of criticism is almost silenced. The opera was written at one of the most feverish epochs of Wagner's life, when his brain was vibrating to all sorts of new impressions, emotional and intel- lectual ; and the passion of his mental Hfe at that time is plainly reflected in the music of Tristan. It would perhaps be incorrect to say that there is no other of his operas in which the inspiration is so continuous, for there are scenes in Lohengrin, in the Meister singer, and here and there in the Ring, that are perfectly con- ceived and perfectly executed, models of artistic syn- thesis, and of a beauty that is homogeneous throughout ; but none of the other operas are quite equal in ensemble to Tristan. Here the fever of the man's soul seems 1.0 have burnt its way into almost all his feeling and all his thought, fusing the strands into one glowing mass ; and upon this molten material the plastic hand of the intellectual craftsman has been laid, casting it into mould after mould of the clearest and most vivid form, complex in the highest degree, yet sane and orderly and lucidly synthetic throughout. To ex- amine some of the scenes, first iri separation and then with an eye to their relation to the whole, is to stand amazed at the genius of the man who could bring the thematic elaboration of dramatic music to so high a pitch of perfection. The use of the leading-motive is of course not carried to such proportions as in the Ring; here the simplicity of the action, minimising as it does the threads of psychology the musician has to keep in hand, allows of a more continuous texture of the music, and at the same time of a synthesis of the Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger 297 motives that might be called symphonic in its complete- ness and its grasp, were not that word too impotent to convey a notion of the intellectual coherence of almost every part of Tristan. As we listen to the opera, parallel with the line of imagination along which we follow up the motives in their more obvious dramatic and emotional significance, there runs a line of appre- ciation of the formal structure of the work — an ap- preciation musical in its essence, but made curiously complex and subtle by the perpetual sense that the endlessly changing beauty of the thematic picture is only the outward symbol of some vast drama of the emotions, that complicates and vitalises the purely musical sensation with suggestions of wider issues. Take, as an example, the strangely melancholy motive first heard at the beginning of the 3rd Act, and after- wards wrought so subtly into the texture of the vocal and orchestral material during Tristan's monologue. One can realise how other composers would have treated this scene ; and to realise that is to see at a flash the enormous superiority of Wagner to other operatic writers, not only in sheer musical power — the power of emotional representation — but in the vital quality of brain that enables him to bend everything to the imperious will of the creative dramatic artist, to the concrete, plastic realisation of the inward vision. He plays with his theme as the symphonic composer plays with his "subjects," but yet in a manner that is peculiarly his own. To no other musician has it been given at once to realise all the aspects of a given emotion, and to light intuitively upon so perfect a medium for the exhibition of every change in it. As we Hsten to the moan of that strange phrase inter- twining itself with the plaint of the wounded man, the mind feels that not only is a consummate musical artist casting his magic over the phrase, manoeuvring it with an eye to showing all the varied musical beauty 298 A Study of Wagner of which it is capable, but with each new hght in which the phrase is presented there comes a suggestion of some new phase of the man's psychology. One feels in a case of this kind the rare value of Wagner's method, and its vast superiority over the merely absolute-musical method of his operatic predecessors. With them the mere interest of the moment was pre- dominant, and with its passing away there vanished also the significance of all that had previously been said. With Wagner the state of mind in which indi- vidual musical pieces are written for themselves alone has given place to the state in which a whole scene or a whole act is conceived organically, the artist's mind looking before and after, so that not only is each phrase comprehensible only by association with the rest, but each raises the other to a potency it could never attain to alone. Considered in detail, of course, Tristan, like ^e Ring, exhibits one or two lapses of the artist's mind, particularly in the misuse of the leading-motives. It has always seemed to me, for example, that there was no adequate preparation for the use of the motive signifying the love-potion, at the juncture when Isolde and Tristan pledge each other in what is thought to be the cup of death. Immediately after the draining of the goblet, the well-known phrase is heard in the orchestra : ^ — , Lento. ^ Vocal score, p. 74. Tristan and Isolde 2ind Die Meister singer 299 Now how are we to learn from this phrase that what Tristan and Isolde are really drinking is the love- draught, and not, as Isolde supposes, a draught of poison ? Where has it been heard before ? It occurs, of course, at the beginning of the prelude, where, how- ever, there cannot possibly be any indication of what 'is symbolised by it. Its next appearance is in the scene between Isolde and Brangaena, where it may seem to some that the clue is given to its meaning, although it appears to me that this is only read into it afterwards, when the drama has been completed, and that were it not for this after-knowledge we should be in ignorance of what was signified by the phrase. Isolde has just remarked that she must in future live near Tristan, and "loveless ever languish." Brangaena rejoins, "What's this, my lady ? Loveless thou ? Where lives there a man who would not love thee ? Who could see Isolde and not sink at once into bondage blest ? And even if it could be any were cold, did any magic draw him thence, I'd bring the false one back to bondage, and bind him in links of love." There then resounds in the orchestra the following broken phrase : — i &^ -I — I ^ filT ! I liifc^ :#*= w^ 4f*= ±3: lia f :j]p t!«5 r=^ &c. ±^ tfi:^ -V^ itzzia =fct And Brangaena continues, " Mindest thou not thy mother's arts ? Think you that she who had mastered these would have sent me o'er the sea without assistance for thee ? " — the accompaniment being based on the phrases of the first fourteen bars of the prelude. When, 300 A Study of Wagner after some intervening words, Isolde bids Brangaena bring the casket, the maid sings, " It holds a balm for thee. Thy mother placed inside it her subtle magic potions ; there's salve for sickness or for wounds, and antidotes for deadly drugs ; the helpfullest draught I hold it here " — the orchestra again recapitulating certain phrases of the prelude.^ It has never seemed to me that the symbolisation here is quite as lucid as it should have been. No one, I think, coming to the work for the first or second time, would be able to grasp from the music, the words, or the action, the fact that Brangaena possessed a potion having the power to create love in all who drank it. Later on in the same scene, when Brangaena recoils with horror from Isolde's command to mix the draught of poison, Isolde cries, " Pity thou me, false-hearted maid ! Mindest thou not my mother's arts ? Think you that she who had mastered these would have sent thee o'er the sea with no assistance for me ? A salve for sickness doth she offer, and antidotes for deadly drugs : for deepest grief and woe supreme gave she the draught of death." ^ To the first half of this the accompaniment is again founded on the potion-motive, the musician's purpose being apparently to indicate that though Isolde is meditating on the cup of death, Brangaena's " assist- ance " will take the form of the love-draught that is destined to bring Isolde and Tristan together. Whether Wagner was justified in the belief that the hearer would read all this significance into this particular scene, whether it does not fail as a true psychological pre- paration for the scene where the potion is quaffed, and whether those who believe the psychological preparation to be quite adequate are not unconsciously reading into it their later experience of the opera — these are ques- tions it is impossible to settle positively. Each student ^ Vocal score, pp. 42-45. 2 Ibid., pp. S4-S5. Tristan and Isolde and Die Meisfersinger 301 must resolve them for himself ; to me at any rate it has always seemed that here Wagner's use of the leading- motive broke down just on the very verge of success — when a little more clearness in the preliminary indica- tion would have justified it beyond dispute. It must be remembered that Wagner's claim for his form of drama was that it made an immediate appeal to the unsophis- ticated intelligence, and that the use of the leading- motives made quite clear the organic connection of all parts of the work. It is obvious that if the motives are not properly prepared for, the hearer will be practically no better off than if the system of leading-motives were discarded altogether. To take an example from my own experience, I had had ten years' intimate acquaintance with the score of Tristan without it ever having struck me that there was any peculiar significance in the phrase that accompanies the entry of Tristan, in the fifth scene of the ist Act. What then was my astonishment to learn from Mr. Krehbiel that at the beginning of this scene, " the entrance of Tristan is proclaimed in a manner that leaves no doubt as to the meaning of the first of the two phrases [from the prelude] now under investigation. The melody there appears extended, in augmentation, as the musicians say. It stands for the hero of the tragedy." ^ Now the phrase in question appears, in the prelude, in this form : — 1 Krehbiel, Studies in the Wagnerian Drama, p. 49. 302 A Study of Wagner And I would like to take a census of opinion among a number of people who are listening to the opera for the first time, with the object of discovering whether they can spontaneously correlate the music at the beginning of scene 5, Act i. with this phrase from the prelude. Even now that I am informed that the music at Tris- tan's entry is based upon the phrase just quoted, I cannot quite see it, although the 12th and 13th bars of scene 5 reproduce bars 22 nd and 23 rd of the pre- lude — which is quite another matter. Altogether, one arrives at the conclusion that the true Wagnerian, in his dealings with the question of the leading-motive, is gifted with an internal vision that is denied to other men. In this same scene, for example, Mr. Krehbiel finds an orchestral proclamation of Tristan in his character as a fully developed tragic hero — this, be it observed, almost before any suggestion of the coming tragedy has been thrown out. How is this done ? " Observe," says Mr. Krehbiel, " how by augmenting the simple phrase, the orchestra increases the stature of the knight ; but also how, though he looms up in Isolde's doorway like a demi-god clad in steel and brass, a knight capable of overthrowing the choicest spirits of Arthur's round table, and scattering thirty of King Marke's knights, the fateful harmonies in their chromatic descent (which have their model in the melody of the wounded Tristan), published his doom with a prophetic forcefulness that cannot be misunderstood." ^ Well, the mere outsider can only say that the down- ward chromatic passage is no more like the melody of the wounded Tristan than it is like any other downward series of chromatics ; while the mind that can see in it a foretelling of the doom of Tristan must really be gifted with a power of vision denied to ordinary mortals — unless, indeed, the association of these passages with the future course of the drama comes not from what ' Krehbiel, Studies in the Wagnerian Drama, p. 59. Tristan and Isolde and Die Meister singer 303 has gone before but from the memory of what has come after, the "prophecy" thus being nothing more than a philosophising after the event, as prophecy generally turns out to be upon examination. There can surely be no unwisdom in frankly re- cognising that the great master of the leading-motive could sometimes blunder in its use. We must re- member that to Wagner, with the picture of the whole past, present, and future of the dramatic action in his mind, a certain phrase would mean a great deal more than it can possibly mean to us, who have no internal picture of the drama to begin with, and who have to piece together the action out of the fragments into which the dramatist has dispersed it. We have only to ask ourselves the simple question, "What is the use of a Wagnerian overture ? " in order to realise this. Let any one, for example, listen to the prelude to Tristan for the first time, without any knowledge of the opera to which it forms the commencement, and then compare his impressions of it with those of one who knows the whole of the music of the opera, and who, as he looks back upon the prelude, sees it in the light of this ampler knowledge. What can the prelude signify to the first of these men ? It will indeed tell him to prepare himself for a tragedy and not for a comedy, but that is all. The man with an experience of the opera itself, on the other hand, sees all kinds of dramatic significances in the prelude ; when he hears the draught-motive, for example, it rouses in him a mental picture of the scene on the ship and all that follows from it ; while the merely vague awe that the uninstructed hearer feels is made definite by its association with particular scenes and particular words in the opera. And as the hearer who knows the opera can see more things in the prelude than are really there, so Wagner, in the composition of the opera, would imagine certain thematic indications 304 A Study of Wagner to be far clearer to the auditor's mind than they really are, their logical connection being quite evident to him, but insufficiently made evident to us.^ Certain of his uses of the leading-motive are, of course, as in the Ring, models of subtle dramatic suggestion, such as the quiet rising from the orchestra of the tones of the potion-motive, as sole reply to King Marke's mournful query, " The unexplained and hidden cause of all my woes, who will to us disclose ? " In the 3rd Act, again, Kurvenal is bending over the wounded man, and, in reply to Tristan's question, tells him of all that happened since Melot dealt him the blow in Cornwall. "Thy wound was heavy ; how to heal it ? Thy simple servant then bethought that she who once closed Morold's wound, with ease the hurt could heal thee that Melot's sword did deal thee. I found the best of leeches there ; to Cornwall have I sent for her." Here the first words are accompanied in the orchestra by the phrase that accompanied Isolde's recital, in the ist Act, of her previous nursing of Tristan in Ireland — thus furnishing a beautiful anticipation, be- fore Kurvenal can complete this story, of the news that he has sent for Isolde. Again, when in his death-agony he hears her voice without, and his failing brain reverts to the scene of the garden-meeting, the orchestra pours out a reminiscence ^ of the exquisite phrase that sang throughout the beginning of the 2nd Act, when it was Isolde who was waiting for the beloved one^ — but now altered in its harmonies, with all its former placid rapture turned to bitterness. These are indeed the points that show forth Wagner's genius ' One of the most refreshing little bits of unconscious humour in Opera and Drama is the passage in which Wagner tells us that " every man of common sense must know that these tone-pieces \i.e. the modern operatic overtures] should have been performed after the drama, instead of before it, if they were meant to be understood." It never occurred to him that a tu quoque was possible. ^ Vocal score, p. 237. ^ Ibid, p. 91. Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger 305 so triumphantly. Unthinking critics have objected to his incessant repetition of certain phrases, and have imagined that it indicated nothing but the poverty of his mind, and his inabihty to invent new musical utterances. Had their knowledge of Wagner been a little more profound, they might have seen that his repetitions are an essential part of his scheme for giving organic coherence to the dramatic action, and that by the ever varied forms in which the motives are repeated he throws ever new light on his charac- ters and situations. The astonishing art with which he can present a motive in a form that enables us to recognise the occasions of its previous use, and yet alter it in harmony and in rhythm in such a way as to change entirely the mental mood it arouses in us, can only be realised by those who have studied the thematic texture of his greatest works. If the phrase " musical painting " is ever justifiable it is surely here, for one really has a series of pictures made almost objective in their definiteness by the exhibition of the same musical phrase in a score of forms. On the whole, Tristan is perhaps the finest example of Wagner's art, the action being simple, the unmusical portions reduced to a minimum, and the musical por- tions of extraordinary beauty. There are, perhaps, one or two dramatic and psychological flaws in the opera. Into the much-debated question of the love- potion I do not propose to enter in great detail. Some critics have maintained that no true intellectual tra- gedy can be based upon an action in which the evil springs from the mere drinking of a magic potion — the love of the fated pair being thus, as some one has expressed it, shown as a purely chemical product. To this it has been rejoined that in Wagner's version of the story Tristan and Isolde really love each other before the opera commences, and that the love-draught is not the cause of their love, but simply the element u 3o6 A Study of Wagner that makes the scales fall from their eyes, so that they realise their situation and confess their love. There is a little to be said for both views of the matter ; and perhaps one may say, without prejudice, that the use of the love-potion is a slight flaw in the composi- tion of the work, even after every argument has been brought up in its favour. Mr. Krehbiel's view that "the love exists before the dreadful drinking, and the potion is less a maker of uncontrollable passion than a drink which causes the lovers to forget duty, honour, and the respect due to the laws of society " ^ — seems to suggest that the troubles of the ill-fated pair came about through their being under the in- fluence of drink. "It is a favourite idea of Wagner's," continues Mr. Krehbielj " that the hero of tragedy should be a tjrpe of humanity freed from all the bonds of conventionality. It is unquestionable in my mind that in his scheme we are to accept the love-potion as merely the agency with which Wagner struck from his hero the shackles of convention." But falling in love with another man's wife or bride is surely the most conventional of all proceedings, and if this is to be the passport to dramatic im- mortality a good many of us might figure as "types of humanity." The truth of the matter seems to be that we object to the love - potion episode simply because here, as in the Ring, the interposition of the element of mediaeval magic disturbs our more modern psychology ; we cannot look at the tragedy of two human souls in the same homogeneous frame of mind if the misfortune that should come from purely human actions and passions comes partly from the drinking of a magic potion. We do not object to the love- philter in the old story, because the manner in which ^ Studies in the Wagnerian Drama, p. 70. Tristan and Isolde and Die Meister singer 307 it is spoken of there is congruous with the whole psychological scheme of the story ; but to preserve it in all seriousness in a work that is entirely modern in every other respect is to break the force of the purely human tragedy. From the purely theatrical side, again, it must be conceded that the popular sense is right in its objection to the long speech of King Marke at the end of the 2nd Act. The music is singularly noble and beautiful, and all that is said by the King is not only essential to the comprehension of the drama, but presents him in a better light than in any of the older versions of the story — Wagner's alteration of the legend at this point being one of the finest fea- tures of his work. But the pit objects to the length of the recital, and the pit is mainly right. It is bad policy to keep the spectators' attention occupied at all after the frenzy of the culminating passages of the love-duet ; for sheer physiological reasons the scene ought to end then or shortly after. The sense of contrast is usually grateful, but here the contrast is not sufficiently strong to rouse a fresh interest at all comparable to that with which for half-an-hour we have listened to that delicious duet ; besides which, the length of the Marke-recital and the subsequent passages given to Tristan and Isolde increase the feel- ing of anti-climax. The whole conclusion of the 2nd Act is from the dramatic standpoint at once justifiable and unjustifiable ; upon the intellectual side it is neces- sary to complete our knowledge of the action of the drama, while upon the musical side it palls upon us, in spite of its purely musical beauty, through the physiological reaction ensuing upon the love-duet. If Wagner could have found some means to end this Act with the musical excitement at its height, as he has ended the ist and 3rd Acts of Tristan and the ist and 3rd Acts of the Valkyrie, our final sensations 3o8 A Study of Wagner would have been somewhat happier. As it is, the pleasure given us, when we read the score, by all that follows the termination of the love-duet gives way to weariness when witnessing a stage-representation — the actual strain upon the hearer's system during the duet being greater when the voice and orchestra are heard instead of being imagined, and the subsequent reaction being correspondingly greater. It was pro- bably a miscalculation of this kind of the purely physical effect of the scene that led Wagner into his error of anti-climax. In the same way, though in a slighter degree, a feeling of weariness comes now and again upon us during all that ensues between the death of Tristan and the final lyric outburst of Isolde. Here again all that happens is essential to the dramatic structure of the work, and one little stroke in parti- cular — the participation of the " chorus " in the scene without their uttering a word — shows in its quiet way the superiority of Wagner over the ordinary opera- composer as a dramatic thinker.^ But in its own way this scene also is felt as a slight anti-climax, though the memory of it is quickly forgotten in the death- song of Isolde that terminates the opera. Into the question of the supposed influence of Schopenhauer upon Wagner's thought at the time he was writing Tristan, and the correspondence between the " philosophy " of the opera and that of Schopen- ^ It is probably the consideration of passages of this kind in which Wagner has avoided some of the absurd conventionalities of structure of the older opera, that has betrayed him and his disciples into the error of supposing that with him " the drama " is the paramount consideration. What is really fore' most in his thought, however, as I have tried to show, is not the drama, but the drama as modified by viusic. The spirit of music determines what the drama shall be — determines its ranges of character, of action and psychology ; though of course within these limits Wagner tries, as in the above-cited^case, to avoid anything that would be dramatically inappropriate or absurd. See, in this connection, Wagner's own account of how he came to give up the set operatic forms, in the Communication to my Friends, G. S. iv. 321, 322 ; EUis, i. 368. Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger 309 hauer, I do not wish to enter. Those whose taste is for intellectual diversions of this kind need assuredly be in no lack of material wherewith to gratify it, for no Wagnerian has ever written on Tristan without adding something to the discussion — the degree of light thrown upon the question ranging from something almost approaching candlelight to the "trebly cataphractic invisible." Perhaps we may be allowed to anticipate the action of posterity in sweeping aside all considera- tions of whether Tristan does or does not embody the philosophy of Schopenhauer. It is quite certain, let me repeat, that had Wagner written no letters and no prose-works, and had we been left to discover the "philosophy" of Tristan as best we could from the poem and the music, there would have been no pro- found treatises written showing the connection between the opera and The World as Will and Idea. Of course, if you are on the lookout for " correspondences " of this kind you can very easily find them anywhere ; and I for one am prepared to maintain that the schoolboy's lines, " The reason why I cannot tell, But I don't like thee, Doctor Fell ! " are the incarnation of a philosophy of fatalism, and that profound philosophic and economic lessons may be drawn from the story of Old Mother Hubbard. But if you wish to discover these things you must bring them with you ; and I am constrained to believe that the Wagnerians who saw Schopenhauerism in Tristan also brought it with them, and that had they had the poem only to draw upon we would have been spared a goodly number of pseudo-philosophical treatises. Posterity will probably say that it cares little what dull metaphysician is supposed to have inspired the poem of the opera, so long as the music is beautiful and the passion human. Even a sane Wagnerian like 310 A Study of Wagner M. Lichtenberger can be found to tell us that the passion of the lovers " discloses to them the fact that its true domain is not life, the daylight— ox, to bonrow the formulas of Schopenhauer, the world of phenomena, of sensible appearances, the world of plurality, where the Will appears split up into innumerable individualities — but rather death, the night — or, in philosophical language, the domain of the absolute, the unconscious, the one." ^ Alas that men should ever have thought it necessary to see in Tristan anything more than a superb musical drama : that they should have thought it necessary to mar the divine beauty of that great duet by associating it with these uninteresting tags of pseudo-philosophy ! If when Tristan sings, "Those who death's dark night boldly survey, those who have studied her secret way, the daylight's falsehoods, rank and fame, honour and all at which men aim, to them are no more matter than dust which sunbeams scatter," we are not moved by the beauty of the music, we are hardly likely to have our interest retained by the fact that these lines can be tortured into a resemblance to the philosophy of Nirvana. There is tenfold more philosophy, in the proper sense of the word, in Schumann's Faust than in Tristan; yet it will hardly be disputed that what we return again and again to Schumann's great work for is its exquisite expression of certain deep human emotions, not the fact of the musician having chosen a few philo- sophical commonplaces as the medium through which to make his music reach us. Tristan must finally stand or fall without Schopenhauer's help or hindrance, as a piece of musical artistry ; and on these lines there is no reason to fear the verdict of posterity. If in the Valhalla of musicians there be a system of rewards and punishments, and if one good deed may be ^ Wagiur, Polte et Penseur, p. 338. Tristan and Isolde and Die Meister singer 311 allowed to wipe out the memory of a number of bad ones, the composition of Tristan will surely be held to absolve Wagner from the crime of having written so much prose that was foolish and so much more that was dull. Ill Though the Meistersinger, as we have seen, was composed during the same epoch of frustration and misery as Tristan, it has throughout a peculiar serenity that would in itself lead us to think it the product of the happiest period of Wagner's life. When he first sketched it out in 1845 it was intended as the comic pendant to Tannhduser, somewhat in the manner of the "jovial Satyr-play" that at Athens followed the tragedy. Having drawn out the scheme of the opera, however, he gave up it in obedience to the more urgent need to compose Lohengrin. The reason of this surrender of the opera was, according to his own later account, his sudden sense that " the cheerful mood which sought to vent itself in the conception of the Meistersinger . . . took alone the shape of Irony, and, as such, was busied more with the purely formal side of my artistic views and aims than with that core of Art whereof the roots lie hid in Ufa itself."! His object was to criticise life mirthfully but not ironically, and finding himself incapable at that time of the objectivity necessary for this, he laid his would- be Satyr-play aside. By a curious irony of fate, he was destined to take it up again when the outward circumstances of his life were much more unfavour- able to mirth than they were in 1 845 ; and the tone of the Meistersinger as we now have it is a testimony to the artist's wonderful power of self-detachment. It 1 A Communication to my Friends, G. S. iv. 286, 287; Ellis, i. 331. 312 A Study of Wagner is the most delightful piece of work that ever came from Wagner's pen — delightful both in its ease and mastery of workmanship and its pervading colour of gemiithlichkeit. Written, as we have seen, in the prime of his musical powers, and therefore exhibiting on the purely formal side the rare command of technique that is seen in Tristan and in Siegfried, all its enormous musical strength seems to be made delightful to us by its good-natured association with the smiling mask of comedy. We have the matured genius that went to the making of Tristan, but with breeze and sunlight and open meadow in place of the storm and darkness and elemental fury of the earlier work ; and one some- times wishes that, appropriate as Parsifal is in many ways to be the final work of Wagner, he could have given his last message to the world in the Meistersinger, where we have him at his best and wisest, and with all his strenuous emotions turned to serene and lofty kindliness. Had it been the final work of his life we could have regarded it as we do Shakespeare's Tempest, as the last word of the great artist who has risen superior to the shocks of fortune, and looks towards the end in a mood of calmest peace, thrilled with the sense of deep-lying kinship with all created things. Not only do genial wisdom and broad tolerance breathe through every line of the poem, but the music also is at once noble and sweet as no other music is. With the experience of the years after 1845, Wagner came to see that his first sketch of the comedy had several serious defects ; and the changes he effected in it were all in the direction of making Sachs the centre of the play. As we have it now, not Walther, as is popularly supposed, but Sachs is the real hero of the drama ; and Wagner has " internalised " the action, according to his own principles of music-drama, by making all its essentials take place in the heart of Sachs, who himself loves Eva, and who surrenders Tristan and Isolde and Die Meister singer 3 1 3 her in favour of the younger man. It goes without saying, of course, that Wagner tries to achieve by use of the leading-motive more than can possibly be done by its means. The best example of this failure in the Meistersinger is the prelude to the 3rd Act, about which so much has been written, and which Wagnerians have put forward as a marvellous example of Wagner's power to make clear the inner action of his drama by means of music. And this particular passage, by its clearness and its isolation and the use that has been made of it by Wagner and his disciples, may serve as an excellent text upon which to base a sermon. Let us transcribe Wagner's own analysis of it : — "In the third stanza of the cobbling-song in the and Act there is first heard the motive given out by the strings ; there it expresses the bitter moan of the resigned man, who presents to the world a strong and serene countenance. Eva had under- stood this secret lament; and so deeply had her heart been pierced by it that she wished to fly from him, in order not to hear any more of this song that in outward appearance is so cheerful. Now, in the prelude to the 3rd Act, this motive is sounded and developed by itself, dying away in resignation ; but at the same time, and, as it were, from a distance, the horns give out the solemn chant with which Hans Sachs greets Luther and the Reformation, and which has won unparalleled popu- larity for the poet. After the first strophe the strings take up again, very tenderly and in a long-drawn-out manner, a single snatch of the true cobbler's song, as if the man had turned his eyes upward, away from his daily toil, and lost himself in sweet and tender dreams. Then the horns, with greater fulness of tone, continue the master's hymn, with which Hans Sachs, upon his entering on the scene of the Festival, is greeted by the whole of the people of Nuremberg in a unanimous and thunderous outburst. Next enters again the first motive of the strings, with its large expression of the emotions that move a profoundly thoughtful soul ; now, calmed and appeased, it attains the extreme serenity of a tender and holy resignation." ^ ^ Wagner, Entwiirfe, Gedanken, Fragmente, pp. 104, 105. 314 A Study of Wagner Now with all respect to Wagner and those who have followed him in his view of this matter, the Vorspiel to the 3rd Act cannot possibly, by itself, express all this. The curtain has not risen, and the orchestra is playing the Vorspiel. How, in the first place, is any one to know that this Vorspiel, if it has any connection at all with one of the characters of the drama, is to be understood as being associated with Sachs ? In the second place, how are we to know that the first theme — ^^ -s=^ &c. gEfep^^^^ represents "the bitter moan of the resigned man, who presents to the world a strong and serene counte- nance " ? We are informed that we can understand this by the fact of its occurrence in the 2nd Act, in the third stanza of Sachs' song. But even if the phrase itself, heard there, could inform us exactly what it meant, or what Wagner intended it to mean — which is pure assumption — how many people can even dis- tinguish the theme in its place in the 2nd Act ? It is a mere contrapuntal episode of a few bars in the heart of a complex score ; ^ and the fact that Klein- michel, who reduced the full score, has not been able to show the theme in the voice-and-piano arrangement, shows how small are the chances of the hearer even dis- tinguishing the theme at the movement of its apparition, to say nothing of grasping its psychological significance and carrying it in the memory, out of all the complex music of the 2nd Act, to the beginning of the 3rd.^ ' The theme is given out by the oboes, clarionets, and horns, while the strings and brass maintain the cobbler-song. ^ As a matter of fact, we first realise the meaning of this phrase in the Vorspiel later on in the 3rd Act, in Sachs' celebrated monologue Wahn, Wahn, uberall Wahn, where the words give the key to the music. Tristan and Isolde and Die Meister singer 3 1 5 In the third place, how are we to grasp the meaning of the next phrase — P 3^ i i 1-^^ ^- ^1 ^ E g T??tv ^^ 3S; ^^?^ g -s^ u i: i fe: &C. &C. ^-^ J= ^^ ^ Si r (• ^- r Wagner tells us that this is " the solemn chant with which Hans Sachs greets Luther and the Refor- mation," and which is sung by the populace at the entry of Hans Sachs at the end of the 3rd Act. But until it is sung there, and some indication given us that the people are singing in Sachs' honour one of his own songs, how are we to know that this phrase in the prelude signifies, according to Mr. Chamberlain, that the lament has given way to " the thought of his own artistic creations ... as if the eternal part of a great human breast were striving against the temporal " ? ^ And of course it goes without saying that the further uses of these themes in the prelude cannot possibly signify to the unilluminated intelligence ' Richard Wagner, p. 285. 3i6 A Study of Wagner what Wagner intended them to signify. What can we say then except that the Vorspiel is a gigantic blunder frona the standpoint of the very criticism to which Wagner would wish it to be submitted, a pathetic example of his failure to see that the in- definite character of music makes it impossible for any one else to discover, from the music alone, the mental picture of which Wagner meant it to be a transcript ? One might listen to it for years, and, if one is ignorant of the rest of the 3rd Act, never have the slightest suspicion even that Wagner in- tended it to be something more than just a very beautiful piece of music. Of course when we know what it is supposed to symbolise, and, as each phrase floats upward from the orchestra, conjure up before us Sachs in meditation, and imagine the fluctuating currents of his thought, the Vorspiel becomes even more beautiful to us, and expressive in a way that we had never realised before. But I reiterate that the meaning of it cannot be fathomed merely from itself, and that it must be held to fail entirely as a revelation of Sachs' thoughts preparatory to the 3rd Act. We should probably have more light thrown on this and other questions of Wagner's use of lead- ing-motives, if Wagnerian writers, instead of chattering after each other the old legend as they had it from the composer's prose, would only ask themselves whether they could have arrived at this interpreta- tion of the Vorspiel if_ they had not had the master's prose to guide them. The question, let us remember, is not one of merely declaring Wagner right or wrong ; it really goes much deeper than that, and is concerned with a problem of cesthetic psychology. As we saw in the Ring, and again in Tristan, one cause of Wagner's failure was the fact that while we have to take the music in the order in which it comes to us, and construct the total drama from all its fragments, Tristan and Isolde and Die Meister singer 317 moving, as it were, from points in the periphery to the centre, he conceived the drama centrally in the first place, and worked, with this central conception in his brain, to the periphery. Thus when writing the Vorspiel he would have the whole course of events in the 3rd Act in his mind — would see all the circumstances that attended Sachs throughout the Act, and the moods they generated in him. Wishing to indicate prophetically, in the Vorspiel, that Sachs will find in his art a consolation for his troubled soul, he expressed this by the influx of that grand choral song into the world of pain and dis- couragement represented by the first theme of the prelude, and again by the exquisite softening of this theme in its final form. But he forgot that no one else could possibly interpret the Vorspiel as he would, without the help of a prose explanation, — and on Wagner's own terms, the music ought to be so clear, so definite, so organic in its union of part with part throughout the whole opera, that the hearer ought never to be in doubt as to what were the dramatist's intentions. It is surely evident that, from the dramatic standpoint, the Vorspiel to the 3rd Act of the Meister- singer is a pure superfluity. In spite of whatever faults of this kind that we may find with it, however, the Meistersinger is a stupend- ous work, wonderful alike for the qualities in which Wagner enters into competition with other musicians and for those that are peculiar to himself. As pure music, nothing could surpass such things as the two trial-songs and the prize-song, the prelude to the 3rd Act, the great quintett, Pogner's address, the reading of the Meistersinger rules by Kothner, the exquisite little song — to the words of the historical Hans Sachs — in which the populace greet the old master, and the meditation of Sachs in the third scene of the 2nd Act. Really charming also in its way is Beckmesser's sere- 31 8 A Study of Wagner nade in the 2nd Act — an admirable parody of the Italianised German operatic serenade of Wagner's day, with its fairly obvious melody, the guitar-like strum of the orchestral accompaniment, and the dreadful dis- location of the verbal accent to suit the exigencies of the musical phrase. The opera is full of exceedingly beautiful touches — the persistent recurrence of the warm theme of Walther's first song in the sober medi- tation of Sachs, the quaint old melody of the night- watchman, and the still quainter sound of his oxhorn after the riot in the 2nd Act — a delightful touch of mediaeval crudity ; the moonlit street of the earlier scene, with Sachs' jovial song trolling out, broken every now and then by the passionate accents of Walther and Eva, who are concealed in the shadow ; the scene where Eva and Sachs listen in rapture while Walther pours out his glorious dream ; the soberly philosophical address of Sachs to the folk of Nurem- berg after the success of Walther. In the character- istics, again, in which Wagner stands alone among operatic composers, one easily recognises the technical mastery which appears in all his writings at this time. Particularly beautiful is the accompaniment to the dialogue between Hans Sachs and Eva in the 2nd Act, where the music, to adopt a simile of Wagner's own, courses through the scene like blood through a living body, always fluent, always vital. In the same way he presents in a thousand new lights the phrase, from Walther's first song, that accompanies the comments of the masters upon the performance — the varying dramatic sentiments seeming to float upon the waves of sound as upon the sea. As for the opera as a whole, one need not take it too seriously as a piece of auto- biography, nor as a dissertation upon the relative merits of conservatism and radicalism in art. If it inculcated a moral twice as wrong as its actual one is right, that would not make the slightest difference to our enjoy- Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger 3 1 9 ment of it. I am probably expressing only a personal opinion, but it seems to me that the Meistersinger is after all the loveliest and perhaps the profoundest of Wagner's works — the one to which we go back again and again with undiminished enthusiasm and ever- increasing admiration. There is only Tristan that can be compared with it for intensity and continuousness of inspiration ; and Tristan is at times almost too intense — the emotion seems at times too violent, too disturbing, for art ; seems, as in the 3rd Act, to be a veritable repre- sentation of the agony of real life. One feels now and again, in Tristan, that this music has taught us more of the dreadful capacity of our poor human nature for pain than all our actual experience of life has done ; one feels shattered, cowed ; one realises what a penalty one pays for being human, for being clothed as we are in "this muddy vesture of decay." There is no such strand of nervous or of philosophic pain in the delight with which we listen to the Meistersinger. Wagner was never greater than in this divine music ; and to look out upon the world from the height to which he lifts us is to feel superior to all pain, all doubt, all enmity with life. The old master had grown if not intellectually at least emotionally wise ; and it is this emotional wisdom, this seer-like intuition of the hearts of men, that makes the Meistersinger so broad, so deep, so tolerant, so peace- giving. Even in the saddest moments of the work, as when, during Sachs' monologues, one feels that the man's heart is full almost to bursting, the dominant sensation in us is that curious one of pain tempered by strong philosophy that becomes so strangely uplifting a pleasure. If ever there was music to which the term " philosophical " might be applied, it is the whole score of the Meistersinger. Wagner has here emancipated himself from the tyranny of the strange old legends to which he had been so long enslaved. His subject is one of purely human interest, the joys and griefs of 320 A Study of Wagner men merely as men, not as symbols or personified abstractions ; and the humanism of the dramatic action and motives is reproduced in the humanism of the music. No better example could be given than the ex- quisite scene in which Walther tells Sachs of the lovely dream that has come to him. Note how the atmos- phere of delicious languor that steals upon the scene with Walther's opening words spreads itself over the majestic theme of Sachs, as the old shoemaker pro- ceeds to read the young man that tender little sermon on art and life and tolerance of the frailties of human nature. " In words I scarce dare touch its theme," says Walther, in reply to Sachs' request that he will relate the dream, " for fear it all should fade away." " My friend," rejoins Sachs, "that is just the poet's art — to give life and shape to dreams. Believe me, the best ideas of men come to them in dreams ; all poetry is nothing but the truth of dreams made manifest." Here is a situation, here a thought, nearer to us and more beautiful than the primeval world of the Ring or Lohengrin; and Wagner has rendered them into music that deepens the sweetv and gentle philosophy of the words, emotionalises it, makes it truer and more lovely than mere words can do. Well might the master lay stress upon the fact that the centre of the dramatic action of the Meistersinger was the heart of Sachs. There is no more definitely drawn character in the whole range of musical drama, nor any in all Wagner's work so beautiful and so human. TherCi can be set beside him only the grand and tragic figure of Wotan, who is also a conception not only remote) from those of all other dramatists, but possible only in music such as Wagner's. But the plain old cobbler of Ntirnberg is nearer and dearer to us than the All-father of the grey old North. He touches warmer springs of feeling in us ; he does not tend, like Wotan, to become at times only a philosophical abstraction ; he is human, and Tristan and Isolde a.nd Die Meistersinger 321 more universal even than the god. Alas, that Wagner should have been so blind to the possibilities that lay within the art of which he was so unapproachable a master ! One sometimes feels, as one compares the Meistersinger with the Ring — as one sees, in the latter work, the heroic struggle of music to breathe the breath of life into that huge mass of inartistic matter, and, in the former, the perfect marriage of music with so much that is beautiful, and wise, and noble in the hearts of men — one feels that had Wagner made all his dramas as " purely human " as the Meistersinger, he would have been some steps nearer Shakespeare than he is even now. However, there is at least the Meistersinger to be grateful for. If I were confronted with the old question as to which of Wagner's scores I would save from general destruction if only one were allowed to me, I think it would be this. The others would not be sur- rendered without many pangs ; but I would console myself with the reflection that the Meistersinger is after all the most human of all Wagner's works, and there- fore — though perhaps he did not know it— the most Wagnerian ; while all the best qualities of his mind have gone to make the music the noblest, the profoundest, the most philosophical music in the whole range of opera. CHAPTER IX SOME LATER PROSE-WORKS I THE years between i860 and 1870 were about equally apportioned by Wagner between musical and literary composition. Between 1853 and i860, besides working assiduously at the Ring, he had completed Tristan and Isolde, while his literary compositions were comparatively few and un- important. During the next ten years, he almost completed the Ring, as well as producing the Meister- singer, while his literary work comprises the lengthy " Zukunftsmusik," State and Religion, What is German ? Report to his Majesty King Ludwig II., German Art and German Politics, and On Conducting, besides a number of smaller writings. In the following five or six years he composed very little music, his time being occupied partly with the efforts to establish Bayreuth, and partly with literary works, the number and details of which may be seen by reference to the Synthetical Table. It is in the essay on Beethoven (1871), perhaps, that one sees Wagner at his best. It has, it is true, many of the faults of his other prose-writings, being frequently obscure and diffuse, a priori in method, and unduly prone to the besetting sin of Wagner's writing — the tricking-out of a very ordinary piece of reflection in the flowing garments of metaphysic. But it has also many good qualities, prominent among them being the truly admirable insight it shows into the psycho- logical origins of some of Beethoven's work, and the Some Later Prose-Works 323 qualities that distinguish this work from that of his predecessors. Even here one may not feel inclined altogether to agree with Wagner, for to many of us it seems that he finally makes a very good piece of culture- criticism go to the estabHshing of a somewhat weak theory of music and the drama ; but on the whole the article gives the student of Wagner's prose-works more pleasure than anything that came from his pen. Apart from the aesthetic criticism of Beethoven's work, the main object of the essay is to enlist Schopen- hauer's philosophy, together with Shakespeare's plays and Beethoven's music, into the service of Wagner's own theory of musical drama. According to Schopen- hauer, whereas the other arts only give us presenta- tions of the " Ideas " of the world, music gives us at first hand the world-Idea itself, "since he who could entirely translate it into abstract concepts would have found withal a philosophy to explain the world itself." Our consciousness is to be regarded as having two sides — the one turned outward to external things, the other turned inward towards one's own self. The plastic arts, dealing with external objects and their relations, never succeed in depicting more than phenomenal appearances ; music alone, taking its origin from the inward-facing side of consciousness, expresses the thing-in-itself, because the character of the thing-in- itself is one with our own Will. Thus "the individual will, silenced in the plastic artist through pure behold- ing, awakes in the musician as the universal will, and — above and beyond all power of vision — now recognises itself as such in full self-consciousness " ; the musician's state being similar to the internal ecstasy of the saint. For this reason music is not to be judged by the canons of plastic art ; that is, it is not the function of music merely to generate pleasure in beautiful forms. The only category by which it can be judged is that of the sublime. Whereas plastic art merely effects "the 324 A Study of Wagner [temporary] liberation of the intellect from service to the individual will through our discarding all relations of the object contemplated to that will," music effects this freeing of the will at her first entry, " inasmuch as she withdraws us at once from any concern with the relation of things outside us, and — as pure Form set free from Matter — shuts us off from the outer world, as it were, to let us gaze into the inmost essence of ourselves and all things." The peculiar power of Beethoven comes from this quality in his music ; it stands to the more external music of other men some- what in the relation that Religion stands to the Church. And since music does not, like the other arts, portray "the Ideas inherent in the world's phenomena, but is itself an idea of the world — it naturally includes the Drama in itself." Music towers above every other art just as the Drama towers above every form of poetry ; and as a drama "does not depict human characters, but lets them display their immediate selves, so a piece of music gives us in its motives the character of all the world's appearances according to their inmost essence. Not only are the movements, interchange, and evolution of these motives analogous to nothing but the Drama, but a drama representing the [world's] Idea can be understood with perfect clearness through nothing but those moving, evolv- ing, and alternating motives of Music's. We consequently should not go far astray, if we defined Music as man's qualification a- priori for fashioning the Drama." ^ If we compare Shakespeare's world of shapes with Beethoven's, we feel that each contains the other. Beethoven's Coriolanus overture, for example, sets be- ' G. S. ix. 106 ; Ellis, v. 106. The reader will observe how this bears out the psychological analysis of the preceding chapters. Nothing could more clearly show how Wagner tended to cognise musical phrases merely as symbols of concrete things ; which accounts both for his passion for reading these concrete things into certain musical compositions, and for his insensitive- ness to much beautiful music that did not happen to stimulate these centres of symbolical associations. Some Later Prose -Works 325 fore us the inmost essence of the drama as vividly as does Shakespeare's play. The perfect art-form, then, must take its rise from the point where the spheres of Shakespeare and Beethoven meet. As in dreams a stimulus may be transmitted from the brain to the sense-organs (in the opposite direction to the ordinary manner of transmission, during waking life, from sense- organs to brain), thus giving the effect of externality to what is really internal, so the musician can pass from the realm of sound to that of light — the shapes that are born of music thus becoming visible in the form of dramatic motives and actions. Thus will be effected the union of Beethoven and Shakespeare in the most perfect Drama. It is not the verses of a text-writer that can determine Music. " Drama alone can do that ; and not the dramatic poem, but the drama that moves before our very eyes, the visible counterpart of Music, where word and speech belong no more to the poet's thought, but solely to the action." The peculiar theory of aesthetics here put forward has already beeii criticised in another connection. Here it is only necessary to point out how completely Wagner's statement of his aesthetics in the Beethoven enforces the argument of the previous chapters, that so far from the drama — as other men understand it — being made by him the dominating factor of his art- work, it is really music that shapes the drama. For the sake of clearness it may be well to recall the points, (i) that in arguing for the claims of "the drama," Wagner is unconsciously using that word simply to denote the only kind of drama he could conceive — namely, the musical drama; (2) that for him to tell us this is the true drama is a mere begging of the question, since there are scores of psychological points of interest in the literary drama which music cannot possibly attain to ; (3) that Wagner thought the musical drama the true drama merely because he 326 A Study of Wagner was a musician of gigantic power and enormous com- prehensiveness, all his thought running spontaneously into the mould of music ; (4) that consequently this fact has to be allowed for in estimating his theories, his claim that the musical drama towers above every other form of art being met by the majority of men with a simple flat denial; and (5) that no matter how much he may have theorised as to the subordination of poetry and the drama to music in the earlier opera, everything — from the choice of subject to the treatment of it — is in his own dramas planned, consciously or unconsciously, in accordance with the demands of the musical imagination, and to suit the expressive powers of music. It is no rebuttal of this argument to point out that Wagner states, in so many words, that he is not setting a text to music, but expressing a dramatic concept in music. The fact remains that there are innumerable moods, all of deep dramatic interest, that are quite incapable of a musical setting, and for the expression of which we must look to the other arts— the assertion that the musical drama " stands high above the work of poetry '' being thus seen to be an exaggera- tion.^ Moreover, since only the broader and more generalised emotions can be expressed in music,^ only a ' He speaks in the Destiny of Opera of the "musically-conceived drama.'' It never seems to have occurred to him that a drama conceived in terms of music was necessarily a drama only in a very small degree, and an opera in a very large degree. ^ In the Destiny of Opera, again, he argued that Shakespeare's art was so lifelike because it was a ' ' fixed mimetic improvisation of the highest poetic work " ; that is, the true dramatic author, ' ' mapping out a plan of action for the improvising mime," ought to stand "in much the same relation to him as the author of an operatic text to the musician." Following upon this, he remarks that Shakespeare "gives us a glimpse into the nature, and more especially the method, of the genuine dramatist. Mysterious as we found the most part of this matter too, yet we saw that the poet was here entirely at one with the art of the mime ; so that we may now call this mimetic art the life- dew wherein the poetic aim was to be steeped, to enable it, as in a magic transformation, to appear as the mirror of life. And if every action, each humblest incident of life displays itself, when reproduced by mimicry, in the Some Later Prose -Works 327 man whose own mental constitution was built up of these emotions could for a moment think that music could supply " the perfect art-work." Wagner was such a man ; but to tell us others in all seriousness that a simple old myth turned to the purposes of third-rate metaphysic and set to music, can satisfy the aspirations of modern men for the drama, would be an insult to our intelligence, did we not perceive the psychological limitations that account for Wagner's theory. Nor does the case stand much better with the other portions of the essay on Beethoven. Even with all the goodwill in the world, one finds it difficult to take Wagner quite seriously in his metaphysical moments, and some of his more enthusiastic admirers would really be doing his memory a service if they laid rather less stress upon his contributions to meta- physic. Even a student of opposite tendencies can still read Kant with respect — though the fallacies seem to stare him in the face at every turn — because Kant's was at any rate an individual and original perform- ance, and because no one can question the dialectical power that is embodied in it ; but when one comes to Kant's greatest error as made worse by Schopen- hauer, and then to Schopenhauer's mixed metaphysic, transfiguring light and with the objective effect of a mirror-image . . . in further course we shall have to avow that this mirror-image, again, displays itself in the transfiguration of purest Ideality so soon as it is dipped in the magic spring of music and held up to us as nothing but pure form, so to say, set free from all the realism of Matter" (G. S. ix. 146; Ellis, v. 146, 147). It is hardly necessary to point out that this is an absolute non sequitur. Wagner is right in saying that where two ideas can be expressed either in music or speech, the musical setting will affect us the more powerfully ; but he forgets that the range of expression of music is necessarily much smaller than that of words. Hence music cannot possibly produce a drama so com- prehensive as he would wish. To expect, as he did, that in the new art-work "the sublimest inspirations" of Shakespeare and Beethoven "should live with an undying life, as the essence of the world displayed with clearness past all measure in the mirror of the world itself" (G. S. ix. 149 ; Ellis, v. 150) is to exhibit a very imperfect comprehension of other men's notions of what constitutes " the essence of the world." 328 A Study of Wagner blind assumption, and verbal blundering, utilised as the basis of Wagner's philosophy of music and the drama — one really feels slightly prejudiced against the Beet- hoven at the outset. There is, alas ! nothing very wise in saying that music expresses the essence of things, nor is there anything very original in it. It is a platitude, in no way illuminative, and not even new. Ever since men began to try to give voice to the extraordinary rapture into which music threw them, they have looked upon the art as revealing the very secret of the universe. They did not know what they meant by that very high-sounding phrase, any more than Schopenhauer or Wagner, or any of their per- fervid disciples, knew what they meant when they said that music expresses the essence of things ; they merely felt that any phrase but the biggest of all was quite incompetent to do justice to the power of sound. The phrase, or the mood that gives birth to the phrase, is as old as Socrates at any rate : and Schopenhauer and Wagner simply take their place with Schelling, with Carrifere, with Lamennais, with Vischer, and with every other aesthetician who has talked of music re- vealing a secret that is only partially made known to us by the world of concrete objects. The phrase, I repeat, is sonorous, but it is meaningless ; however charm- ing it may be in the mouth of a poet, the philosopher is not much assisted by it in his quest for a true philosophy of music. In any case, no matter what justness of idea a man may sometimes attain to even when dealing with merely platitudinous phrases, very little can be expected from a philosophy such as that of Schopenhauer, with its sometimes grotesque non- sense about the Idea, its unscientific handling of Time and Space, its arbitrary division of our consciousness into two sides — "in part a consciousness of one's own self, which is the will ; in part a consciousness of other things, and chiefly then a visual knowledge of the Some Later Prose-Works 329 outer world, the apprehension of objects " — and its always primitive jargon about the will, a relic from the days of prescientific psychology. Schopenhauer is, perhaps, the most readable of all German philo- sophers, a fact that has probably gained him a greater vogue than the intrinsic merit of his work would have done ; but in the history of philosophy he is certainly a negligeable quantity.^ Yet, just as Wagner himself occasionally arrives at a truth in a most extraordinary and roundabout way of his own, so there is in Schopenhauer's theory something that really does bear upon the philosophy of music, though not exactly in the way he intended. To make clear the following criticism upon his theory and upon Wagner's use of it, it will be as well to lay before the reader the briefest possible statement of that theory in Wagner's own words :— "It was Schopenhauer who first defined the position of music among the fine arts with philosophic clearness, ascribing to it a totally different nature from that of either plastic or poetic art. He starts from wonder at Music's speaking a language immediately intelligible by every one, since it needs no whit of intermediation through abstract concepts {Begriffe) ; which completely distinguishes it from Poetry, in the first place, whose sole material consists of concepts, employed by it to visualise the Idea. For according to this philosopher's so luminous definition, it is the Ideas of the world and of its essential phenomena, in the sense of Plato, that constitute the ' object ' of the fine arts ; whereas, however, the poet interprets these Ideas to the visual consciousness [dem anschauenden 1 Professor Sully, in his undeservedly neglected book On Pessimism, easily disposes of Schopenhauer by the simple process of making him define his terms. Professor William Wallace in his Life of Schopenhauer (pp. 122, 123) admits that " the absolute antithesis which he insists upon between will and intellect can hardly be maintained." But on these terms Schopenhauer's whole doctrine must go by the board. The distinction between will and intellect is the essence of his theory. 33° A Study of Wagner Bewusstsein) through an employment of strictly rationalistic concepts in a manner quite peculiar to his art, Schopenhauer believes he must recognise in Music itself an Idea of the world, since he who could entirely translate it into abstract concepts would have found withal a philosophy to explain the world itself.^ ... In making use of this material supplied us by the philosopher, I fancy I shall do best to begin with a remark in which Schopenhauer declines to accept the Idea derived from a knowledge of ' relations ' as the essence of the Thing-in-itself, but regards it merely as expressing the objective character of things, and therefore as still concerned with their phenomenal appearance. 'And we should not understand this character itself — so Schopenhauer goes on to say— 'were not the inner essence of things confessed to us elsewise, dimly at least and in our feeling.' For that essence cannot be gathered from the Ideas, nor understood through any mere objective knowledge; wherefore it would ever remain a mystery had we not access to it from quite another side. Only inasmuch as every observer is an Individual withal, and thereby part of Nature, stands there open to him in his own self-consciousness the adit to Nature's innermost ; and there forthwith, and most immediately, it makes itself known to him as Willi' If we couple with this what Schopenhauer postulates as the condition for entry of an Idea into our consciousness — namely, a temporary preponderance of intellect over will, or, to put it physiologically, a strong excitation of the sensory faculty of the brain without the smallest excitation of the passions or desires, we have only further to pay close heed to the elucidation which directly follows it — namely, that our consciousness has two sides : in part it is a consciousness of one's own self which is the Will ; in part a consciousness of other things, and chiefly then a visual knowledge of the outer ' I need hardly point out that this sentence is quite meaningless. It looks like an argument, but is really pure assertion. The "since," for example, has no value whatever. All that comes after "since" is simply a repetition, in another form, of what goes before it ; and there is only the appearance of reasoning. To say that Music is an Idea of the world because if translated into concepts it would provide a philosophy of the world, is simply to say that Music is an Idea of the world because it is. Like the bulk of Schopenhauer's philosophising, the sentence is simply a piece of pompous dogmatism, and without any meaning at that. Some Later Prose -Works 331 world, the apprehension of objects. 'The more the one side of the aggregate consciousness comes to the front, the more does the other retreat.' After well weighing these extracts from Schopenhauer's principal work, it must be obvious to us that musical conception, as it has nothing in common with the seizure of an Idea (for the latter is absolutely bound to physical perception of the world), can have its origin nowhere but upon that side of consciousness which Schopenhauer defines as facing inwards. ... If this consciousness, however, is the conscious- ness of one's own self — i.e. of the Will, we must take it that its repression is indispensable, indeed, for purity of the outward- facing consciousness, but that the nature of the Thing-in-itself — inconceivable by that physical [or visual] mode of knowledge — ^would only be revealed to this inward-facing consciousness when it had attained the faculty of seeing within as clearly as that other side of consciousness is able in its seizure of Ideas to see without "1 Wagner then proceeds to correlate with this Schopen- hauer's dream-theory, according to which, "as the world of dreams can only come to vision through a special operation of the brain, so music enters our consciousness through a kindred operation." Into the fallacies of Schopenhauer's metaphysical theory I do not propose to enter in detail. It is enough to point out that the talk about "The Thing- in-itself " and " The inner Essence of Things " is merely verbal wandering ; that it is an error to divide consciousness into an inner and an outer ; and that Wagner goes astray in separating musical conception from the objective world, because, forsooth, sound is not perceived by sight. Consciousness is one and homogeneous, and the philosopher who bases an aesthetic theory upon an arbitrary division into inner and outer is not to be seriously argued with at this ' G. S. ix. 66-68 ; Ellis, v. 65-67. 332 A Study of Wagner time of day.^ But what I chiefly desire to call atten- tion to is the fact that whatever truth there is in the Schopenhauer-Wagner theory can be accounted for on simpler and less metaphysical lines than theirs ; and that along with this explanation goes the further explanation of what some people call the paradox of Beethoven — the paradox consisting in the union of the highest genius and the utmost artistic conscien- tiousness with so strange an incapacity for ordinary mundane life. To begin with, Wagner is right in calling atten- tion to the facts of the clairvoyant condition of the musician's brain in the act of composition, and the paralysis of vision that comes upon us when we are listening to music that affects us profoundly. The two facts are correlated, and have really the same explanation ; not a metaphysical explanation, however, but a physiological one. There is no need to talk sonorous nonsense about the essence of things, or about the inner and the outer consciousness. The explanation of the fact that during the performance of fine music we fail to see many things that would obtrude themselves upon our attention at other times — such as the antics of the conductor and of the instrumentalists — is that consciousness is momentarily abstracted from the visual organs. It is not the eye that sees but the brain — as any one can understand who has 1 When this argument appeared in the Musician, a critic called me to book for this sentence, and quoted Professor Croom Robertson to the effect that there is such a thing as outer consciousness — as when we look at a scene — and such a thing as inner consciousness — as when we close our eyes and imagine the scene. No one disputes that ; and it was hardly necessary to call up the ghost of Croom Robertson to tell us so self-evident a truth. My point is not that there is no distinction of this kind between inner and outer consciousness, but that all our "inner" mental pictures are derived from "outer" ones— as, indeed, is apparent from the very passage cited by my critic. To support the theories of Wagner and Schopenhauer, one has to believe that the inner mental life is something distinct, in nature and in origin, from the outer ; which position, I repeat, is not to be seriously argued against. Some Later Prose-Works 333 looked at his watch and not noticed the time ; and if anything occurs to divert the energies of the corre- lated brain-centres, impressions are not registered by the peripheral sense-organs. Any strong mental dis- turbance will suffice to effect this ; the callousness of martyrs or of hypnotised persons to pain, indeed, being due to the consciousness being wholly occupied in other directions, so that no message can pass be- tween a brain-centre and a particular limb. Without drawing at all upon any metaphysical theory, then, it is easy to understand the temporary paralysis that falls upon our visual organs during the performance of great music.^ A somewhat similar explanation will apply to the other fact, that during composition the musician is in a state similar to that of the clairvoyant, with the vision blind to the outer world, but with an intense life surging and palpitating within the brain. To begin with, neither Wagner nor Schopenhauer need have assumed a "dream-organ" for the production of dreams. "As dreams must have brought to every one's experience," writes Wagner, " besides the world envisaged by the functions of the waking brain there dwells a second, distinct as is itself, no less a world displayed to vision ; since this second world can in no case be an object lying outside us, it therefore must be brought to our cognisance by an inward function of the brain; and this form of the brain's perception Schopenhauer here calls the dream-organ." This is merely obscuring the case quite needlessly. There is no concept in the brain during sleep that has not been generated therein during previous waking hours, by contact with the external world ; and the ^ Sensuous pleasure, especially if rhythmical in character, has always this tendency to close up the outward-turned faculties. The sending of a baby to sleep by the rocking of a cradle, and the closing of the eyes in a cat or dog when it is stroked, are familiar examples. 334 A Study of Wagner brain, being almost entirely an automatic organ, can produce at any moment pictures of its past experience in response to a stimulus. Here particularly Wagner • goes astray in supposing that "as the dream-organ cannot be roused into action by outer impressions, against which the brain is now fast locked, this must take place through happenings in the inner organism that our waking consciousness merely feels as vague sensations." Any one's experience will tell him that the "dream- organ " can be roused into action by outer impressions ; for a noise, a light, a touch, will be sufficient to start a dream in the sleeper's brain. And the so-called "inner" impressions are really one in nature with the " outer " impressions, for all are external to the brain itself. A disturbance of the digestive organs, for example, or an accelerated or retarded beat of the heart, may stimulate the brain to dreams — the impression in this case being as really " external " to the brain as a sound in the ear or a touch on the hand. Wagner and Schopenhauer, in fact, are so painfully anxious to drag in the theory that the " inner " life of man answers to the " inner " life of nature — whatever that piece of vague metaphysic may mean — that they quite unnecessarily exaggerate the sig- nificance of one of the commonest of phenomena. The object of the exaggeration appears in the next sentence : " But it is this inner life through which we are directly allied with the whole of Nature, and thus are brought into a relation with the essence of things that eludes the forms of outer know- ledge, Time and Space. . . ." ^ 1 This sensation of being " allied with the whole of Nature " is explicable by the fact that music deals with emotion in its vaguest and most generalised form. It may be somewhat fanciful, but I have always thought it stands in somewhat the same relation to the other arts as a " law of Nature " stands to science. Mr. Karl Pearson puts it that what we call a law of nature is just a conceptual symbol of things, a kind of shorthand summary of a great Some Later Prose -Works 335 I repeat that this is simply meaningless ; nothing is easier than to philosophise in this inexpensive manner, the jungle of metaphysic being indeed malodorous with these dead flowers of rhetoric. One must just sweep all such vague platitudes aside, and come down to the fundamental fact that in the dreamer, the clairvoyant, and the somnambulist, the mental life seems for the moment to be greatly increased both in power and in liberty, many of the fetters of waking life being struck away, and the spirit apparently endowed with wings. Now this plainly comes from the fact that in the dream or clairvoyant condition the sense-organs that open out upon the world are momentarily sealed up, thus allowing freer play to the synthetising inner centres of the brain. The true state of the case can be most easily seen by looking at some of the phenomena of hypnotism. The rationale of hypno- tism seems to be that while certain centres of the brain are momentarily laid to sleep, other centres are stimulated into abnormal activity ; the energy liberated from the former probably overflowing into the latter. Thus many men become better actors in the hyp- notic state than they could possibly be in the waking state ; a man who is told he is the great Napoleon, for instance, going through a whole series of correlated movements in a manner that would be beyond him in his normal condition.^ Evidently the abstraction of consciousness from certain centres gives temporarily an added energy to the others ; and further, no inhibiting messages coming from the outside organs, the whole of the brain is given up to the idea of the moment. This accounts for all the cases in which the brain, in the hypnotic or somnambulistic conditions, performs prodi- many existences and impressions (see his Grammar of Science) ; hence its universality. We may similarly regard music as the rapid summary of many emotions, in which the more individual features of our emotional life are •passed over, and the more fundamental features are generalised. ^ See Moll, Hypnotism, for examples of this kind. 336 A Study of Wagner gies that would be impossible to it in the waking state^ — as when a mathematician solves in his sleep a problem that had baffled him when awake, or a somnambulist walks in safety over a narrow ledge. We have only to apply this to the case of the musician to see that the same explanation holds there also. The composer sinks into the clairvoyant condition, not because while in that condition his inner life becomes "one with the essence of things," but because while in that condition his whole brain, undistracted by external impressions, can work harmoniously in the one direction upon the one material. All artists exhibit the same pheno- menon, the musician being simply the extreme of all the other cases. The practical, active man is one whose brain is instantaneously alive to every external impression : his dreaming, imaginative, artistic powers being therefore at a minimum. The opposite order of mind is that of the artist, wherein external facts have not the same value, and which, by its faculty of self-hypnotisation, can make all the cerebral forces co-operate towards the one imaginative end. Among prose-writers the same antithesis may be observed ; there standing at one side a Spencer, with his quick mental readjustments following upon every stimulus, and at the other side an Amiel, whose brain was in a chronic hypnosis, and in whom, consequently, while the imaginative life was luxuriant and the imaginative vision at times superb, the faculty of will, which is pre-eminently concerned with the external world, was utterly paralysed. A recourse to the ordinary phenomena of physiology and psychology suffices, then, to explain the " clair- voyant" state of the musician without indulging in empty verbalising about "the essence of things." And the very fact that artists are so frequently unfit for the ^ See a collection of phenomena of this kind in J. A. Symond's Miscellanies (1871), and Dr. Andrew Wilson's Life and Sense. Some Later Prose- Works 337 daily commerce of life is an added proof of the fact that their brain runs along a hypnotic groove, insulated from the real facts of the world. They can only pay for their strength in one direction, indeed, by lacking strength in another. In Wagner himself, for example, while the musical faculty was at least equal to any- thing the human brain has ever contained, the faculty for cool, persistent, impartial thought was extremely meagre. And in the case of Beethoven, so far from our being surprised that, as Wagner says, his mind on any other subject than music was of the ordinary bourgeois order, there would have been reason for surprise had the case been different. The hypnotic faculty for artistic dreaming and the logical faculty for clear cut-and-thrust comprehension of the world can, from the very nature of things, be only in the very rarest cases united in the same organism.^ So that poor Beethoven's failure as an ordinary social being was really of service to him as an artist. That he was so brusque and so lacking in tact in his relations with men, came from the circumstance that his clairvoyant brain did not properly respond, as other men's brains have to do, to the innumerable stimuli of the outer world. Thereby he had so much more mental energy to devote to his imaginative work ; and his music consequently became richer and deeper. Great art comes from great suffering ; and it may well be that the unreasoning anger of Beethoven at the most trivial things may have generated in his organism such storms of passion and despair as come to other men through the real blows of fortune. His art was fed in this way as other men's art might be by sterner troubles. And then, when the real troubles came, with the grim, pathetic mockery of that deafness, and the anguish caused him by the unworthy nephew, his soul had surely the deepest well of sorrow to draw upon. ^ See the final chapter of the present volume. Y 338 A Study of Wagner Everything threw him inward upon himself, making the inner work of the brain so much the easier from the fact that the outer universe made so little demand upon it. If the President of the Immortals had wished to torture that divine soul into the noblest expression that art had ever witnessed, he could not have chosen a surer method than this of depriving it of all the qualities that help to make the lives of average men comfortable and full of ease. II The prose-works that immediately follow the Beet- hoven are not of very great interest, either in them- selves or for the aid to the study of Wagner. The exceedingly stupid pseudo-satire A Capitulation scarcely deserves mention, and should not be reprinted by admirers of Wagner ; not because it reflects on the musician's character, but because it reflects on his intelligence — which is a far more serious matter.^ On the other hand, such writings as The Destiny of Opera, Actors and Singers, Letter to an Actor, and A Glance at the German Operatic Stage of To-day, do not call for special discussion in a volume like the present. We see running through them all Wagner's strong predilection for his own art, and his strange belief that humanity was somehow or other to find redemption in opera. His insusceptibility to other forms of art, and his in- competence to see the real relation of these to actual life, are shown in his remark that though the opera is accountable for the downfall of the theatre, "yet . . . by it alone can our theatre be raised again." The dramatic stage has undergone no deterioration through the follies of opera, except in so far as dramatic genius ^ Mr. Ellis, in the note prefixed to his translation of the dreadfiil thing, opines that it "reminds one very forcibly of the grim humour of Aristophanes." It does — in the same degree as a Christy Minstrel interlocutor reminds us of Congreve. Some Later Prose -Works 339 has been unable to get a hearing from a public too much inclined to cheap music ; while the modern revival of the stage under Ibsen and the realists owes about as much to opera, or even to the Wagnerian music-drama, as it does to the man in the moon. Wagner of course would say that Ibsen's was not real dramatic art — that he shows man under " State-historical conditions '' instead of in the guise of the purely-human ; but this kind of aesthetic is not very impressive. More- over, whenever Wagner discusses his own theory of the drama we see the truth of the facts already so much insisted on in the preceding chapters, that his notion of drama corresponded to what we would call merely the musical drama ; that instead of making the drama determine the music, as he thought, he was really allowing music to determine the drama ; and that although he was so constituted as to see in music- drama a sufficient embodiment of all the arts, other men regard it simply as one art among the rest. He himself, arguing for a certain phase of his own theory, admits in one place that " there is a side of the world, and a side that concerns us most seriously, whose terrible lessons can be brought home to our minds on none but a field of observation where music has to hold her tongue." ^ That is true in a far larger sense than Wagner ever thought ; and not only would all other men regard painting and sculpture, as well as poetry, as satisfying a thousand needs which music or poetry and music cannot minister to, but they would object to Wagner's view that in opera ^ you can get a union of "the Beethovenian music and the Shakespearian drama." He would hold that so much of the Shakespearian mode 1 The Destiny of Opera, G. S. ix. 153 ; Ellis, v. 153. 2 It may be necessary for me to say that in this, as in a number of other cases, I include under the term " opera " Wagner's own work. 34° A Study of Wagner of conception as was incompatible with the spirit of Beethoven's music was somewhat inessential ; other people are inclined to tell him that if he really thought this he may have known a great deal about Beethoven, but really knew very little about Shakespeare or the drama in general. At a later date he wrote that by the efforts of the great German musicians " we have arrived at uniting Music so completely with the Drama's action that this very marriage enables the action itself to gain that ideal freedom — i.e. release from all necessity of appealing to abstract reflection — which our great poets sought on many a road, to fall at last a-pondering on the selfsame possibility of attaining it through Music." ^ What Wagner conceives as " abstract reflection " is the very essence of other men's appreciation of poetry ; and that absurdly depreciatory term simply proves how little he knew of other modes of aesthetic appreciation than his own. When, in the same paper, he spoke of reading " in guise of a bare dramatic poem a work that owes its origin to nothing but the feasibility of carrying it out completely in Music," he was expressing the true facts of the case, and throwing a light on the limitations of opera by which his followers, if not himself, might have profited. He believed he " might submit it as a play in dialogue to the same judgment we are wont to invoke with a piece indited for the Spoken Play." Technically he is right ; that is, in his poem, instead of there being the conventional operatic divisions of aria, recitative, duet, and so forth, the dialogue runs continuously through it as in the spoken drama ; but if he imagined that this technical similarity between ' Prologue to a Reading of the " Gotterddmmerung" before a Select Audience in Berlin; G. S. ix. 309 ; Ellis, v. 305, 306. Some Later Prose -Works 341 the poetical and the musical drama brought his poem upon anything like the same psychological level as the former, he was grievously deluded. Ill The still later prose-works have an interest of their own quite independent of their actual contents ; they exhibit the decadence that from this time until his death was going on in Wagner's purely intellectual faculties — a decadence that was correlative with an increased sensitiveness upon the side of music pure and simple. Weak as are the philosophical writings of his earliest period, those of his last years are de- cidedly weaker ; the man was plainly losing even the little grasp he ever had upon the plain facts of the world and their logical connection, while at the same time his purely intellectual concepts were dissolving into emotion. His system was slowly settling into the precise pathological form necessary for the writing of Parsifal; his humanitarian impulses were as strong as ever, but his outlook upon the world and his actual proposals for reform were becoming more and more phantasmal, the exhaustion of his nervous tissue that accounts for this fact accounting also for the corre- lative strengthening of the artistic expression of these humanitarian feelings. Throughout all his prose-work there runs a strong vein of sympathy with suffering ; in his last epoch this takes a less militant, a more submissive form, culminating in the " pity " that is so exquisitely expressed in Parsifal. It was only to be expected that as his life advanced and his brain became more rigid, he should exhibit all the intellectual vices and all the limitations of his earlier years in a more pronounced form. Thus while, as we shall presently see, his latest writings on his own form of opera are among the most interesting things 342 A Study of Wagner that ever came from his pen, full of the clearest per- ceptions of what his own system was and what it exacted of the musician, his outlook upon the other arts was even more astonishingly restricted than it had been at the beginning of his career. Setting out, in Religion and Art (1880), with the most a priori theories as to the dependence of art upon religion, he can see nothing but degeneration in the history of painting since the time when, under the great Italians, the Christian religion was the source of the artist's inspiration. "Now,'' he writes, "in respect of plastic art it is palpable that its ideally creative force diminished in exact proportion as it withdrew from contact with religion. Betwixt those sublimest revelations of religious art, in the godlike birth of the Redeemer and the last fulfilment of the work of the Judge of the world, the saddest of all pictures, that of the Saviour suffering on the cross, had likewise attained to its height of perfection ; and this remained the archetype of the countless representations of martyred saints, their agonies illumined by the bliss of transport. Here the portrayal of bodily pain, with the instruments of torture and their wielders, already led the artists down to the common actual world, whose types of human wickedness and cruelty surrounded them beyond escape. And then came ' Characteristique,' with its multiple attraction for the artist ; the consummate ' portrait ' of even the vulgarest criminal, such as might be found among the temporal and spiritual princes of that remarkable time, became the painter's most rewarding task ; as, on the other hand, he had early enough taken his motives for the Beautiful from the physical charms of the women in his voluptuous surroundings." 1 One can understand a man, for purely religious reasons, ranking religious art very high ; but when he regards as mere degeneration the passage from the conven- tional types of portraiture in Italian religious paintings to the vitalised study of human character in individual ' Religion and Art, G. S. ix. 220; Ellis, vi. 221, 222. Some Later Prose -Works 343 portraits, it becomes evident that he can have very little appreciation and very little knowledge of the art he is discussing. "Sufifice it to say," continues Wagner, "that that art which was destined to reach its apogee in its affinity with religion, completely severing itself from this communion — as no one can deny — has fallen into utter ruin." The statement that the plastic arts have fallen into utter ruin must read very curiously to those who recall the wonderful beauty of so much modern sculpture, and reflect that painting is the art that seems to have the greatest future before it, inasmuch as it is really more virgin soil than any of the other arts ; there being to-day a thousand fresh problems of form and colour awaiting their artistic solution. It is amusing, too, to reflect that the Miinich in which Wagner hoped to found a music-school for the study of the musical drama as the art of life,^ is now the home of a school of young artists who are occupied with problems of how to make their art vital and true, and who work with an energy and an intelligent seri- ousness that are extremely rare among contemporary musicians. The plain truth is that Wagner knew nothing of painting, and was as incompetent to pass an opinion upon that as upon so many other ques- tions. In one's first moment of irritation at these wild and foolish generalisations of his, one is tempted to call them mere literary impertinences. It is only when we try to regard the man as a whole that we see their dependence upon the very qualities of brain that make him so titanic in other respects. He believed he was preaching a gospel of pressing importance to men ; and the very strength of his innate prepossessions hindered him from seeing how ^ See his paper on A Music-School far Munich ; G. S. viii. ; Ellis, iv. 344 A Study of Wagner grotesque are the majority of his views upon art and life. His power of calm thinking, never very great, was indeed becoming weaker and weaker as he advanced in years. His brain was filled with a medley of ill-assorted and half-digested ideas ; any theory that seemed to him to help out his own peculiar notions was something to be written about in his own distorted way ; while his excursions into metaphysics sometimes became posi- tively ludicrous. In The Public in Time and Space, for example, where he is arguing that while the birth of great minds is governed by mysterious, hidden laws, they are tragically dependent during life upon the laws of time and place, we get such a gem as the following : — "For us, our first concern must be to trace the tragedy of that relation" \i.e. the relation of genius to its surroundings] "to the individual's subjection to the rules of time and place ; where- by we may find those two factors assuming so strong a semblance of reality as almost to upset the ' Criticism of Pure Reason,' which ascribes to Time and Space no existence but in our brain." ^ The unconscious humour of this gem of metaphysic is something too delightful for words ; one remembers nothing that can even approach it except the passage on Moses in Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge. Verily, what little philosophical capacity Wagner ever had was fast becoming exhausted when he could seriously pen such sentences as these. The failure of- the intelligence upon the purely intellectual side may be seen again in any of the later writings that concern themselves with positive and practical matters. He was very strong on vegetarianism at this time, and therefore has no difficulty in attributing the decline of modern nations to their having adopted a flesh diet. He is not very clear as to what constitutes a decline of nations, ^ G. S. X. 92 ; Ellis, vi. 86. See also pp. 91, 92. Some Later Prose -Works 345 nor as to the beneficent results of vegetarian and male- ficent results of animal food ; but he is quite positive, for all that, that the modern world is in a state of decline, and that flesh food is the main cause of the de- generation. Correlative with this failure of his faculties in the spheres of calm thought and accurate knowledge, was his habit of prolix declamation against everybody and everything associated with pursuits that were dis- tasteful to him. Thus we have him telling us that "the world soon managed to abolish sin entirely, and believers now look for redemption from evil to Physics and Chemistry." And again — " It certainly may be right to charge this purblind dulness of our public spirit to a vitiation of our blood — not only by departure from the natural food of man, but above all by the tainting of the hero-blood of noblest races with that of former cannibals now trained to be the business-agents of society " ^and much more vapid nonsense of the sort. Throughout all the work of this epoch, to even a greater extent than in the earlier work, there run that irritating assumption of knowledge and that fatal ten- dency to empty philosophising that have earned for him in certain quarters the reputation of a great thinker. In Hero-dom and Christianity, for example, he quotes with admiration a perfect specimen of Schopenhauer's most hopeless apriorism, and proceeds to impress it into the service of his own theories. "From what blood, then," he writes, "could the ever more consciously suffering genius of mankind bring forth a saviour, seeing that the blood of the white race was manifestly paling and congealing? — For the origin of natural Man our Schopenhauer propounds an hypothesis of well-nigh convincing power : going back to the physical law [Mariotti's] of increase of force under compression, he explains the unusual frequency of births of twins after abnormal periods of mortality as if the vital force were doubling its exertions under pressure of a pestilence that 346 A Study of Wagner threatened to exterminate the species ; which leads him to the theory that the procreative force in a given type of animals, threatened with extinction by opposing forces through some inherent defect in its organism, may have become so abnormally augmented in one mated pair that not merely does a more highly organised- individual issue from the mother's womb, but in that individual a quite new species. The blood in the Redeemer's veins might thus have flowed, as divine sublimate of the species itself, from the redemptive Will's supreme endeavour to save mankind at death-throes in its noblest races." ^ There is no limit to the possibilities of nonsense of this kind, inasmuch as the writer, dealing as he is in pure speculation, cannot be brought up by any conflict with facts. There is a certain air of factitious plausibility about theories of this sort ; yet they concern us no more, and are no more interesting to us, than what Huxley used to call " lunar poHtics." Let it not be thought that I am merely trying to discredit Wagner as a thinker by dragging into light a few of the more absurd of his utterances. His works are full of fatuities of this kind ; and the point I am urging is that they prove him quite incapable of rational philosophising. No man with any sense of reality or any gift of reasoning could seriously think there was anything in these half- digested scraps of second-hand knowledge, these random flashes of crude intuition, these misty theories of life and art that evade all the problems of the one and do but touch the fringe of the other. Yet, as I have said, while his brain was thus fail- ing in its grasp of concrete issues, the purely ima- ginative life continued almost unimpaired. Parsifal, of course, exhibits no faUing off either in technical power or artistic beauty ; while the treatises On Poetry and Composition, On Operatic Poetry and Composition, and ^ G. S. X. 282 ; Ellis, vi. 282. The passages to which Wagner is referring occur in Schopenhauer's Zur Philosophie und Wissenschaft der Natur, sec. 91 in Parerga und Paralipomena, ii. 1 66- 170. Some Later Prose -Works 347 0« the Application of Music to the Drama, are extremely lucid and thoughtful. Perhaps the last-named work is the most valuable of the three, by reason of the fact that Wagner is there dealing with a problem peculiarly his own. He points out how Beethoven's dramatic writing was vitiated by his adherence to symphonic form ; how, for example, after "feeling impelled to introduce an actual stage-efTect in the middle of his Leonora overture, he still repeated the first section of the tone-piece, with the customary change of key, exactly as in a symphonic movement — heedless that the dramatic excitement of the middle section, reserved for thematic working-out, had already led us to expect the denouement." After Beethoven, according to Wagner's well-known theory, absolute music degenerated into mere note- spinning ; while the correlative rise of programme- music was an indication that composers were aiming, in a tentative way, at giving dramatic reality to music. Of this order were Berlioz and Liszt, whose error lay in supposing that the dramatic picture they desired to portray could be achieved by means of music alone. They, however, have helped to reveal to us the real problem of the application of music to the drama — that is, to a definite presentation of human life and action. One law of formal technique is of prime importance ; there must be the same organic unity of structure in the musical drama as in the symphony. This, however, cannot be attained in the former by the mere importation of the rules of the latter ; the unity of dramatic form is only to be attained by the music spreading itself over the whole drama in one continuous living tissue, by means of "root-themes pervading all the drama, themes which contrast, complete, re-shape, divorce and intertwine with one another as in the symphonic movement; only that here the needs of the 348 A Study of Wagner dramatic action dictate the laws of parting and combining, which were there originally borrowed from the motions of the dance." He then proceeds to show that given this funda- mental unity of musical conception, the music of the drama must no longer aim at effect for its own sake, but must be guided in every one of its developments by the necessities of the dramatic action. There is to be no turn of melody, no effect of harmony or instrumen- tation, employed simply to please the ear as it would in a symphonic composition ; each effect is to be merely the outward and visible sign of a change in the thoughts of the characters or in the aspect of their surroundings. Thus the young men who brought Wagner their operatic scores and showed him truly "Wagnerian effects," received nothing but well-deserved censure. How could these " effects for effect's sake " please him, who had always shown the utmost restraint in his own scores ? " In the instrumental introduction to Rheingold, for instance," he writes, "it was impossible for me to quit the fundamental note, simply because I had no reason for changing it ; ^ a great part of the not unanimated scene that follows for the Rhine-daughters and Alberich would only permit of modulation to keys the very nearest of kin, as Passion here is still in the most primitive naivete of its expression." I have already remarked that the imaginative mood that prompted Wagner's musical conceptions must have been very different in character from the moods of other composers, especially of those whose cast of imagination was purely symphonic. We can see this by comparing the orchestral preludes to some of Wagner's scenes with the overtures of other men ; 1 The reader will remember that the prelude to the Rheingold is built upon E flat, the one chord being simply repeated, in slightly different forms, through 135 bars. Some Later Prose -Works 349 while the latter are for the most part "self-justified successions of tones," appealing to the purely musical faculty, the former appeal to a more complex and less homogeneous faculty, and are justified only in terms of some concrete picture which they are intended to suggest. Wagner himself indicates this, pointing out how, for example, the simple cry with which the Rhine- daughters greet the gold is put through a hundred metamorphoses in the course of the drama, each being the tonal correlative of a new shade of psychological significance. " One would have to follow this uncommonly simple theme," he writes, — "recurring in manifold alliance with almost every other motive of the Drama's widespread movement — through all the changes it receives from the diverse character of its resummoning, to see what type of variations the Drama can engender; and how completely the character of these varia- tions departs from that of those figured, rhythmic, or harmonic alterations of a theme which our masters ranged in immediate sequence to build up pictures of an often intoxicatingly kaleido- scopic effect. . . . But neither a mere play of counterpoint, nor the most fantastic art of figuration and most inventive harmonising, either could or should transform a theme so characteristically, and present it with such manifold and entirely changed expression — yet leaving it always recognisable — as true dramatic art can do quite naturally. Hardly anything could afford a plainer proof of this, than a pursuit of that simple motive of the Rhine-daughters through all the changing passions of the four-part drama down to Hagen's watch-song in the ist Act of the Gdtterddmmerung, where it certainly takes on a form which — to me at least — makes it inconceivable as theme of a symphonic movement, albeit it still is governed by the laws of harmony and thematism, though purely in their application to the Drama. To attempt to apply the results of such a method to the symphony, however, must lead to the latter's utter ruin ; for here would appear as a far-fetched effect what follows there from well-found motives." ^ 1 G. S. X. 189, 190; Ellis, vi. 187, 188. 350 A Study of Wagner This is quite true ; the only pity is that the quality of mind that made Wagner so great in his own depart- ment, and gave him such clearness of insight into his own manner of working, should have also made him partially blind to the psychological processes of musicians of a different type. I have already sought to prove that he was curiously insusceptible to a great deal of musical pleasure to which other people are acutely sensitive, the reason being that he was only moved by music that either contained a dramatic motive, like his own work, or suggested a dramatic motive to him like some of the later works of Beethoven.^ His mind was quite sui generis; and in view of the fact that so many of his young followers thought to write like him by merely using some of his effects, it is refreshing to note that he himself saw very clearly the danger of writing music like his where it was not plainly called forth by a dramatic need. In his earlier years he had seen, though perhaps not quite so comprehensively as he might have done, the evil of importing the symphonic modes of procedure into opera. He now points out the equal folly of putting into the symphony a kind of music that is only suited to the drama, illustrating his point by the music given to Elsa upon her entrance in the ist Act of Lohengrin, where the modulation that is a psychological revelation when viewed in concert with the living motions and gestures of the character, would be merely bewildering if it 1 Readers of his prose-works will recall the judgments he pronounced upon musicians ; others will be found in Mr. Dannreuther's article in Grove's Dictionary. He assuredly had a small appreciation of certain great composers, while on the other hand he ranked Liszt higher than the majority of people would feel inclined to do. He once "spoke to Johann Svendsen very un- favourably of Schumann ; when closely pressed, he confessed that he was not at all well acquainted with Schumann's greater works." (See Mr. Arthur Friedheim's article on "Past and Present," in the Musician, November 3, 1897.) The explanation probably is that Schumann's order of imagination being congenitally antipathetic to him, he would never go back to the music in order to correct his first impressions. Some Later Prose -Works 351 occurred in the slow movement of a symphony. All through this paper On the Application of Music to the Drama, indeed, there is the most admirable sense of the difference between his own ideals and those of other men. The only pity is that he did not, all through his life, give a little more time to writing on a subject in which he was thoroughly at home, and a little less to recording opinions that only showed how defective he was in certain aesthetic nerves that other men prize highly. CHAPTER X PARSIFAL IN - the preceding chapter we have seen that while Wagner's purely artistic gift was quite unimpaired even to the last, his brain was certainly failing upon the intellectual side — his thought, which was always at the mercy of his sensations and emotions, now being simply dissolved in feeHng. This diagnosis is important both for the matter and the manner of Parsifal — for the ethical motive he strove to incor- porate in that drama, and for the music he wrote for it. He was always a man of ardent sympathy, but with little sense of the practical reality of things, and in his later years the decay of his practical sense, as exhibited in his last prose-works, was accompanied by an increasing warmth of his sympathetic nature. In this connection his Open Letter [on Vivisection] to Herr Ernst von Weber has an interest to which its own arguments do not entitle it. It may easily be guessed what is Wagner's treatment of so complex a subject as this : one is used to the outcry against vivisection from well-meaning men whose affection for domestic animals solves, for them, the whole prob- lem. Wagner's Letter is of this order ; there is not the slightest sense of the complexity of the question as a whole, nor of the many points that the vivi- sectionist can urge against his opponent ; there is nothing but the usual stupid sneers at men of science, and an impassioned expression of sympathy with animals. Yet in spite of all its defects and all its banalities, one cannot help feeling impressed by Parsifal 353 Wagner's Letter. It moves us as the spectacle of a man labouring under strong and sincere emotion always will move us. The tremor of the man is so intense as he speaks of our duties towards the dumb world of animals, that we vibrate emotionally with him even while we are intellectually conscious of the flaws in his argument. It is worth noting that while every concrete subject which Wagner touches at this epoch — except that of his own music — is treated with the utmost dulness and with hopelessly un illuminative re- sults, he rarely fails to impress and to move us when he plays simply upon our feelings. We may be intel- lectually out of sympathy with him ; but he has only to use his sensitive organism as an emotional instru- ment, and he can play upon it in a way that holds us for the moment against our better judgment. It is herein that lies whatever strength the Letter on Vivisection has for non-partisan minds ; the warm humanitarian emotion of the man impresses us. We see him, as we read on through these closing works, becoming ever more and more sensitive to the suffer- ing of living things, and ever more inclined to base all morals upon pity. Suffering is lauded because pity is its outcome. Guided by Schopenhauer, he sees in pity the final stage of a great cosmic struggle ; and though the philosophising is not remarkably clear or very noteworthy, one catches the vibration of the sensitive artist's soul through it. "To feel that horror at himself so needful for his last re- demption," he writes in Religion and Art, " this Man was qualified by just that knowledge, to wit the recognition of him- self in every manifestment of the one great Will ; and the guide to evolution of this faculty was given him by Suffering, since he alone can feel it in the requisite degree. If we voluntarily conceive of the Divine as a sphere where Suffering is impossible, that conception ever rests on the desire of something for which we can find no positive, but merely a negative expression. So z 354 -A. Study of Wagner long as we have to fulfil the work of the Will, that Will which is ourselves, there in truth is nothing for us but the spirit of negation, the spirit of our own will that, blind and hungering, can only plainly see itself in its un-will toward whatsoever crosses it as obstacle or disappointment. Yet that which crosses it is but itself again ; so that its rage expresses nothing save its self- negation : and this self-knowledge can be gained at last by Pity born of suffering — which, cancelling the Will, expresses the negation of a negative; and that, by every rule of logic, amounts to Affirmation." ^ From the purely philosophical standpoint this is of course quite unilluminative ; it is only a verbal quasi- solution of a cosmic and ethical problem. But the general tone of the thought, so different as it is from Wagner's earlier tone, is very significant. We see clearly the collapse of his more militant qualities, the softening of his nature, and that certain sign of nervous weakness — the tendency of the sufferer to glorify suffering. Nietzsche has expressed it that " Wagner sank down, helpless and disjointed, at the foot of the Christian cross " ; and that in these latter days hatred of life got the upper hand in him. That of course is only partially true, being almost as unphilosophical as Wagner's own philosophising. A man does not necessarily show hatred of life in singing psalms to pity and suffering ; he is merely seeking self-expression — which is the formula for the affirmation, not the negation of life — in his own way. But upon the main point there can be no dispute. Wagner's nature towards the end was becoming ever more emotional and less intellectual ; and the physiological death of his old spirit of revolt forced him into those quieter by-paths, where the sufferer seeks consolation in the thought that he is better for his pain. It was an attitude possible to few men so easily as to Wagner, by virtue not only of the reaction after his ^ G. S. X. 244 ; Ellis, vi. 244. Parsifal 355 years of frenzied struggle,^ but of his constitutional bias to flood every one of his thoughts with strong emotion. Moreover, this mood of his last period was one peculiarly suited for musical expression ; one cannot imagine any utterance of tenderness, of pity, or of pain, that will not be far more thrilling, far more poignant, in music than in poetry. So that upon this side everything was favourable to his new music-drama, the great drama of suffering and balm and consolation. The point has hardly been sufficiently emphasised that Parsifal is a purely Wagnerian subject, quite im- possible to any one else. Almost all his works are of course individual, and represent an original outlook upon human life ; but his last work is " Wagnerian " beyond any of the earlier ones. One has only to consider the action and the characters of the drama apart from the music in order to realise this. Look- ing at that strange group of beings, the like of which have scarcely been seen upon the stage before or since, one becomes vividly conscious of the genius of the man who could breathe musical life into them, and of the immense superiority of his dramatic gift to that of any other musician. The work is a verit- able tour de force. To take these shadowy characters and give them dramatic life, to set before us this half-metaphysical poem of sin and redemption, with its current of ethical psychology so remote from that of many of us, and yet to hold us as we are held by perhaps no other work of Wagner's, to make us feel that Parsifal is in many ways the most wonderful and impressive thing ever done in music — this is surely genius of the highest and rarest kind. The birth of the work from the peculiar mental world to which we owe Wagner's later prose-works, 1 The cardiac trouble from which he suffered would help to lower his vitality, and so affect his attitude towards life. 356 A Study of Wagner becomes clear upon a mere reading of the poem. The quiver with which he speaks of the sufferings of animals in his Open Letter to Herr Ernst von Weber is perceptible once more in the long homily which Gurnemanz de- livers to Parsifal after the slaying of the swan, where a scene that would otherwise tend to make us smile becomes strangely impressive by the thrilling sincerity of Wagner's treatment of it. Again, we have a recru- descence in the drama of one of Wagner's favourite metaphysical speculations, in the passage at the end of the ist Act, where Parsifal and Gurnemanz are supposed to be travelling from the wood to the hall of the Grail. The change is skilfully effected, like the similar one in the Rheingold, by means of a progression of painted scenes, that leads the spectator to imagine the char- acters on the stage are themselves moving. "I scarcely move," says Parsifal, " and yet we already seem to have gone far ; " to which Gurnemanz replies, " Thou seest, my son, time here becomes space '' — a piece of meta- physical crudity not only fatuous in itself, but doubly absurd as the accompaniment to a mere trick of scene- shifting. Wagner must have been very serious indeed over his Kant and his Schopenhauer to fail to see how ludicrous this passage is to the unhypnotised mind. And once more, we light upon a correspondence be- tween Parsifal and the prose-works of the last epoch in the conception of Herzeleide (Heart's sorrow) as the mother of Parsifal — by which Wagner wishes to suggest his favourite thesis that pity is born of suffering — and in the strange figure of Kundry, who seems at times to be symbolical of the world under what theologians call "the old dispensation," waiting for the redeemer to come. Altogether, just as Tristan and the Ring are the dramatic embodiments of Wagner's social and ethical theories of earlier years, so Parsifal is the dramatic embodiment of his latest theories of sin and pity and redemption, the last fruit from an old tree. Parsifal 357 The magic of the artist is shown not only in the fact that he has compelled our attention to so strange and untoward a subject, but that hearers of all schools of thought are equally held spell-bound by a music- drama which, viewed on its intellectual side, is an extremely partisan piece of ethical dogmatism. Even those of us who, had the poem alone been presented to us, would have been stimulated to only faint interest, or would probably have turned aside from it as an ethical treatise whose artistic merits did not compensate for its too patent didacticism, are enslaved by Wag- ner's work almost as completely as the greatest pietist could be. The truth is that Wagner the musician was so incomparably greater than Wagner the thinker, that the purely personal character of his philosophising is lost in the universal appeal of his music ; he uncon- sciously builded wiser than he knew. Hence it seems to me a limitation of the value of his work to attempt to interpret it in terms of some mere passing philosophy of the day. One able and sympathetic critic has told us that "As Titurel represents the golden age of loving faith, and Amfortas the present iron age of loveless doubt, so Parsifal is a type of the coming Utopia, in which a new generation, born of sorrow, and therefore shielded from pain and sin, shall learn through fellow-feeling the secret of redeeming love, and shall restore the symbols of faith to those from whom they have been stolen and withheld. "^ The objection to this form of interpretation of Parsifal or any other work is that it aims at an unwarrantable limitation of the artistic effect to those who hold by certain current formulas of thought. We have seen in the case of the Ring how the weakness and frequent puerility of the ethical scheme did not prevent many 1 See Mr. C. T. Gatty's book on The Sacred Festival- Drama of Parsifal. 358 A Study of Wagner of us, who think nothing of that scheme, from being profoundly moved by the music of the drama ; and in Parsifal, as in the Ring, Wagner's art, if left to speak for itself, probes much more deeply than his common- place philosophy could ever do. We may be Christians or Buddhists or Positivists in the second place, but in the first place we are human beings. The quality of great art is that its appeal is universal instead of sectarian ; that it plays upon the intellectualised emo- tions of men purely as men, as sentient, joying, suffer- ing, thinking human beings, not as mere seekers for confirmation in this or that poor creed that must die like every other creed the sun has looked down upon. Nay, not only can the great artist move us without our sharing his views upon life and death, without our agreeing with him in his valuations of good and evil, but he can hold us in the hollow of his hand all the time that our reason is crying out against him. What makes religious art survive is not the religion in it but the beauty ; and no poem or picture that is not beauti- ful, that does not thrill our senses and our imagination independently of its subject, can become a permanent possession of the race. If it can do this, if it can give us exquisite artistic emotions^ it is sure of the gift of immortality even from the hands of those who are no more affected by its actual philosophy than by the superstitions of a Hottentot. It is in this way that Tennyson's In Memoriam thrills countless numbers who have no sympathy with Tennyson's religious creed, and that the fine image in Maud in which he expresses his longing for war is admired by many who loathe and despise that barbaric longing. And if the appeal of poetry is thus to us in our quality of artistic beings, not in our quality of ethical or social or philosophical sectarians, much, more is it in this way that music must appeal to us. There are thousands who lay no store by the philosophy of Parsifal, who yet are moved by the Parsifal 359 work as nothing else can move them. They regard the ethical subject with no more than the faintest interest ; they feel that this philosophy of sin and redemption is only for bruised and broken souls, or for those whose fight has brought them little else but grievous wounds, not for those who love to live hght in the spring ; and they feel inclined to say of Wagner what Renan said of the similarly self-tortured Amiel — " He speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption, and con- version, as if these things were realities." The robust sense of the world declares that these things are not real ; that our terrible problems of life and society are not to be solved by the melancholy dreamers with their mere dream-formulas ; that these are only phantasms that beset the path of highly-strung men, not the real shapes to which we owe our strife and suffering. Yet the artistic sense must pass over these defects in the artist's philosophy, so long as the more dynamic quality of his art can shake us to our foundations. It is in this that the power of Parsifal can be seen to lie. That heartrending wail of Amfortas, that seems to express the quintessence of agony, moves us not because we are particularly interested in him as a type of one order of sin, but because we feel for him as a human being. It is superfluous to urge that to look at the drama in this way is to fly in the face of Wagner's obvious purpose ; that he meant the drama to be a religious and Christian one, and that admirers are therefore justified in reading into it precisely that philosophy which Wagner intended it should carry. That attitude would be correct enough were we dealing merely with an argumentative treatise upon Christianity. But we are not ; we are dealing with a work of art that appeals to thousands of human beings who have no sympathy with the religious philo- sophy embodied in it. If this Christian drama touches those who are not Christians as well as those who are, the explanation can only be that its emotional appeal to 360 A Study of Wagner us as human beings is infinitely stronger than its appeal to us as religious sectaries.-^ For, in the last resort, the ethical world of Parsifal is as alien to healthy modern minds as that of Lohen- grin, Wagner was interested in these mediaeval legends because they presented him, as it were, with a shell of dramatic substance, which he could fill with his own peculiar philosophy of life and the world. But to us — or to a great many of us — this philosophy is some- thing entirely foreign. We cannot see eye to eye with Wagner in this department ; and so we are left coldly critical in presence of the resuscitated mediaevalism of the story, the characters, and the motives. Here, as in the Ring, it is the humanism of the music that holds our attention, while we are unable to regard the central character of the drama quite as Wagner regarded him. The most vivid picture that is burnt upon our brain is that of the suffering Amfortas. Here the music speaks directly to us, and we need no initiation into Wagnerian or Schopenhauerian metaphysics in order to be pene- trated by Amfortas' cry of anguish. But to think out the character of Parsifal, and to attempt to understand it as it was conceived by Wagner, is to realise the sharp distinction between his view of ethics and ours. Parsifal, of course, is the redeemer ; and following the ^ One little point may be worth noting. Having expressed views similar to the above in a review of Mr. Gatty's book on Parsifal, I was taken to task by Mr. Gatty, and reminded that in reading Christianity into the drama he was only taking out of it what Wagner had already put into it. This, of course, I should not try to dispute, although, as will be seen from the argument above, it somewhat misses my point. But the amusing part of the matter was that Mr. Gatty was in turn attacked by Mr. David Irvine for reading the wrong kind of Christianity into Parsifal, and for saying that the drama " pre- supposes notions of a personal God." So that here are two Christians agreeing that Wagner meant Parsifal to be a religious work, and yet unable to agree as to what the religion is — or rather as to the precise shade of it. The outsider, on the other hand, cries a plague on both their parties. Yet these three men are equal admirers of Parsifal! What conclusion is possible, except that from the artistic standpoint the particular philosophy of the drama is quite immaterial ? Parsifal 361 lines of the old legends, Wagner has depicted him, at his first appearance, as being as innocent of knowledge as he is of guile. He is the "pure fool," to whom enlightenment can only come through pity for others. Now whatever interest we may take in the guileless youths of the mediaeval legends is, to speak paradoxi- cally, of a quite disinterested kind ; that is, we watch them in their adventures in the most placid and objec- tive of moods, since their psychology is purely fictive — something plausible enough and coherent enough on the lines of old romance, but altogether unconnected with our own life and thought, and therefore unsuited for serious modern treatment. As I have already ex- pressed it in the case of Tristan, the lovers, as lovers, are perennially interesting figures ; while the magic potion is a feature in the old story that, if treated seriously in a modern stage-version, breaks the continuity of our modern ethical judgments upon the tragedy, and dis- turbs our artistic interest much in the same way as would the use of barbaric colour upon the face of a marble statue. If it is impossible for a cultured modern mind to think itself back into the mediaeval frame of thought, as incarnated in the stories of innocent and unworldly youths, it is also impossible for it to enter with full sympathy into Wagner's conception of Parsifal as the youth who knows nothing of either good or evil, and who finally " redeems " others when enlightenment comes to him through pity. What, let us ask ourselves, does it all mean ? What conception can we have of this youth in terms of our modern dramatic psycho- logy ? What is the meaning of redemption — not the meaning it had for the men of centuries bygone, living in a different world from ours, but its meaning for us in the nineteenth century, with our changed outlook upon the problems of Hfe ? Who will maintain that, if the musical drama must concern itself with abstract questions of ethics, the proper course of the dramatist 362 A Study of Wagner is to serve up before us these mystical, old-world prob- lems of sin and redemption ? Can his art not touch our modern life more closely, more searchingly, than this ? The truth is that Parsifal fails as an ethical drama because the ethical scheme is incoherent, dis- continuous with our modern conception of life. We may not, perhaps, find too much difficulty in realis- ing Wagner's meaning in the kiss of Kundry that "enlightens" Parsifal — the surge of carnal passion in him making him intuitively comprehend the agony of Amfortas and its cause. But when we are told, as by Mr. Alfred Nutt for example, that "the strength of the new-born knowledge enables him to resist sensual longing, and thereby to release both Kundry and Amfortas," one feels compelled to ask the meaning of the words one is listening to. How are they " released " ? What strange world is this we are moving in ? what mystical abstractions are these that file before us in so shadowy and unreal a procession ? What is the moral problem that is symbolised in this " redemption " of Amfortas and Kundry by the ascetic resolve of another human being ? We are sent back to mediaeval and lower than mediaeval concepts ; and the modern imagination may well resent the attempt to decoy it into this old net of ethical barbarism.^ To Wagner, of course, the moral situation was intensely real, because his own mental life, on the intellectual side, was lived among theorems that the modern world has long ago rejected. Just as he was unable to pro- pose any but the most abstract and ideal solutions of ' some of our great social difficulties, because he had no perception of the actual forces that are set in battle against us, so his imagination could only conceive the dark and complex problems of the moral life in the abstract terms of the ignorant generations of the past. 1 For a thoroughly mystical reading of Parsifal and its ethics, see Mme. E. de Morsier's Parsifal, ou I'IcUe de la Redemption (Paris, 1893). Parsifal 363 He attempted to solve the difficulty of the clash between the desires of the individual and those of society by the facile conception of his Siegfried, the " free individual " who " annuls the State " ; he thinks to heal the moral diseases of men by a resuscitation of prehistoric notions of salvation and redemption, of men and women set free from sensualism by the ascetic renunciation of a redeemer. These concepts have no place in modern thought, and should have none in modern art. They are as truly things of the past as the blood-sacrifices that accompanied them among the poor savages who gave birth to them, and who, in their sad ignorance, knew no other way of escape from the moral burdens the world was beginning to feel. Parsifal is then as unsatisfactory in its intellectual message as we found the Ring to be. Here, as there, what saves the drama is the music, that unapproachable music the peculiar colour of which was never seen before, even in the work of Wagner. The collapse of his intellectual life, to which I have already referred, undoubtedly had its compensations. It is to the in- surgence of the emotional flood upon the nervous system, to the dissolution of the more purely intel- lectual processes into vibrations of feeling, that we owe the peculiar quality of the music of Parsifal, its power to heal us even while it wounds. Wagner's nervous system was too old at that time for pessimistic revolt against the hardness of human life. Suffering came to him now in the light not of an anomaly, an alien strand of darkness in the joyous web of human life, but of a sad inevitable necessity, something inwrought into the very constitution of the universe, and pointing out to us its own way of alleviation by the pity that is born of it. Hence the music to which he is inspired by contemplation of this suffering is no longer frenzied, insurgent, crying in the face of heaven, as it is in the 3rd Act of Tristan, but tender, resigned, compassionate, 364 A Study of Wagner sweet and consolatory through all its sadness. The emotional peace that Wagner found in the strange philosophical conception of suffering that quietened his latter days, descends upon us as we listen to these accents of sorrow, pouring oil upon our wounds. Even in that long cry of Amfortas — surely the last word of human pain, where the music seems to voice the anguish of all the life that has suffered since the foundations of the world were laid — even here we feel no such laceration of the heart as during the delirium of Tristan ; we seem to realise that this grief is too large, too solemn, for our personal pain and terror to have any place in it ; that the cry comes not from a mere individual but from the travail of all organic nature, and that this sense of universality brings a strange balm with it. On the other hand, the scenes in which joy and peace are predominant have a calm beauty that is quite unexampled in music. In the wonderful Charfreitagszauber of the 3rd Act we have perhaps the most perfect evidence of the physiological change that I have referred to as characteristic of Wagner's last years. It needed a quite unusual state of the emotional life to write music so exquisite, so subtle, so imaginative as this, where the strange har- monic strife of the parts, resolving itself as it does into the most tender and consolatory harmony, seems sym- bolical of that philosophy of Wagner's wherein suffering found its completion and its anodyne in pity. Most remarkable of all is the way in which some of the earlier themes, such as that of the lament of Amfortas, are woven into the picture in a new form, softened and made tender, so that the memory of the former pain seems dissolved in benediction. In everything, in fact, that concerns the more imaginative side of his art, Wagner's touch in Parsifal is quite unerring. The less imaginative portions are at times uninteresting, mainly because of a strange monotony of cadence in the Parsifal 365 "recitative," that ultimately strikes us as merely con- ventional.^ But the purely musical portions of the work are beyond criticism. Wagner's perfect absorp- tion in his own emotional world of phantasms is no- where made more evident than in this wonderful series of tone-pictures, that have a veracity to which no other dramatic musician could ever have attained. Once more I may reiterate that whatever strength, whatever beauty there is in Wagner's work from first to last, is due to the fact that before all things he was a musi- cian, with an unrivalled power of conceiving life and character in terms of music. Such figures as Parsifal, Kundry, and Amfortas are representable in no medium but that of sound, and within the scope of no musi- cian's brain but Wagner's. They are the projection into objective life of a seething world of thought and emotion that does not exist in the purely "musical" musician. The standing wonder is how Wagner has been able to seize these dim and abstract conceptions, and give them forth again in the guise of living music. One of the most precious qualities of Wagner's mind was its power of persistent musical thought — his power to follow up in sound all the phases and all the muta- tions of a thought or of a feeling, as a logician follows up a proposition from its premisses to its uttermost conclusion. In Parsifal, by reason of the shadowy nature of the story and the characters, not only the emotional but the dramatic nexus of moment with moment has to be sought in the music. With what success that is done can only be discovered from the music itself ; it lies beyond the power of speech to express. ' In the recitals of Gurnemanz, in particular, a very monotonous and irritating effect is produced by an unmeaning fall of the voice at the end of almost every verbal phrase. See, for example, pages 32, 33 of the vocal CHAPTER XI GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS WAGNER stands quite alone among musicians in respect of the manner in which he touched upon life on other sides than that of music. There have, of course, been " intellectual " musicians before and since his time ; but none of them has quite the interest which Wagner has for the student of psychology as a whole. Not that his brain worked with equal ease in the more concrete fields of thought. " Compulsion alone forced me to become an author," he wrote to one of his friends ; -^ and he made, as we have seen, the further avowal that though he was compelled, in some of his investigations into the nature of music, to concern himself with philo- sophical subjects, his gift for philosophy was only slight. I have tried to show, indeed, in the foregoing pages, how singularly little light he threw upon any of the great questions which he undertook to discuss. On matters connected with the practical side of his own art — as in his treatise On Conducting and his notes on the manner of performance of certain musical works- — he is of course always interesting, illumina- tive, and original. But off his own special domain he rarely rose above the commonplace ; nor do the in- tense earnestness and the obvious sincerity of the man compensate for the general mediocrity of the thought. He was always too ready to undertake in- tellectual labours for which he had neither the logical capacity nor the special training ; and the inevitable ^ Letters to Roeckel, p. 55. 366 General Considerations 367 result was a wild mass of a priori dogmatism that at times repels the student, and forces him into unsym- pathetic opposition. He seems to have clung, like Schopenhauer, to a certain number of what for him were unquestionable truths, and to have made every fact and every fancy square with these. His acquaint- ance with certain departments of belles lettres seems to have been tolerably extensive ; but all his judgments upon literature were flawed by his prepossessions, which made him distort every impression in the effort to prove some favourite thesis. In social and political matters he was but a preacher crying in the wilderness, more successful, as the preacher always is, in cursing than in diffusing new light. We have seen, too, that even in matters of musical philosophy — as in his Beethoven — he really had no grasp of the psychological problem, and could hit upon no solution but one of verbose platitude and sonorous commonplace. It will hardly be disputed, then, that along with his great musical gift there went a quite distressing mediocrity in most other directions. The total mental energy must have been enormous ; but on every other issue than that of sheer musical imagination the brain did not work sanely, broadly, or penetratingly. What seems to have set him wi-iting on many subjects was some sudden wave of impulse, some breath of intuition, some artistic vision within him, some humanitarian emotion striving to justify itself in words. There was no corresponding development of the calmer, more objective qualities of the mind, no adequate training of the faculties in the patient accumulation and sifting of evidence ; and so his flashes remained nothing more than flashes, his intuitions never got beyond the stage of intuition, never clothed themselves in forms sufficiently universal to command the assent of others. Thus one can always see the first vague 368 A Study of Wagner picture that set his mind working, at the same time that one notes his utter faikire to purify his mere spontaneous intuition, to correlate it with others, and so to make it coherent. So that although he touched upon life at many points, he has rarely handled any subject in a way that really illuminates it. On the question of racial gifts and " destinies," on the development of nations, on the qualities of Greek art, on the history of music, on the aesthetic psychology of music and poetry, on the signi- ficance of politics and religion, on the future of civili- sation, on vivisection, on vegetarianism — on all these questions he has said a great deal without adding very much to our comprehension of them. Although there appears here and there in his prose-work something of the vast synthetic power of his musical imagination — such a work as Opera and Drama, for instance, finally compelling our admiration for its tenacity of purpose and the breadth of vision that sweeps so far before and after — the prose-works as a whole do no more than take up purely personal positions, for maintaining which he can give no adequate grounds. And in this respect his disciples have easily outdone him. I know no more distressing literary phenomenon than the abject prostration of the average Wagnerian before the opinions of Wagner. Being, as a rule, men of little critical ability themselves, they have abased themselves before even the most absurd of his theories in a way that would make us think the ages of scholasticism were with us again. One of the most considerable of his worshippers, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, has recently given us a work that really surpasses all previous manifestations of uncritical servility. One point alone may serve as an example of whither Wagner-worship may carry a man. It is well known that in his later years the composer became a vege- tarian. There was really no reason for this except the General Considerations 369 purely individual reason that Wagner's physical system, racked as it was with years of nervous and digestive derangement, found a partially vegetarian diet most suitable to him. But flying immediately, as was the custom with him, from the particular to the universal, he must needs elevate his own peculiarity into a law of hfe for the whole civilised world. Because, as we have seen, he himself was so dramatically musical that other orders of music hardly appealed to him, he thought it the duty of all humanity to strive for the extinction of instrumental music wherever it was not tending towards the drama ; and now that he finds himself in better health under a vegetable than under a flesh diet, it immediately becomes the duty of all mankind to go to any length in order to be com- pletely vegetarian ; and since he is compelled to admit that animal food may be necessary in our northern climates, he thinks that "the nobler races should undertake a migration, ' rationally organised,' into other parts of the world." Even Wagner, though he seri- ously puts this proposition forward, partly recognises the absurdity of it— recognises that this suggestion, like many more, belongs to the domain of "phantasms." But Mr. Chamberlain, not content with admitting the impracticability of such an idea, not content even with admitting that Wagner is wrong upon every historical argument by which he attempts to uphold his vege- tarianism, must needs exhort us in the most solemn of tones to still give ear to the prophet. Since Wagner is everywhere wrong upon the question, we have to be told that "Wagner's theories of vegetable diet are a much weaker argument than his own conviction " ; as if Wagner's "conviction" was of any greater value than that of any other constitutionally hasty and ill-trained intelligence. And further — "These remarks are not brought as criticism" — for you must never criticise Wagner as you would other men — "but 2 A 37° A Study of Wagner in order to indicate a striking characteristic of Wagner's doctrine of regeneration, namely that just in the empiric or imaterial portions the ' phantasms ' everywhere predominate. And it might easily happen that too concrete a conception of things which are valuable only as arguments, as pictures, would give quite a wrong impression of the truth which lies at the bottom of them, but which neither history nor experiment can prove." 1 That is, though Wagner can give no adequate reasons why you should follow him, you are to follow him unquestioningly ; you are to surrender your own judg- ment, and believe in the theory of the regeneration of the human race through vegetarianism and other things, because the theory comes from the musician who wrote Tristan and Parsifal. Mr. Chamberlain's notion apparently is that any one is at liberty to sing paeans to Wagner, but no one must raise his voice in opposition to him. Being Wagner, he must be listened to in reverent silence. " It does not follow," remarks his biographer, "that because we can often form no distinct logical conception of Wagner's teachings . . . they may not still express a truth." Of course not ; and if any reader of Wagner's " phantasms " is inclined to remark that Wagner is treating of problems of civilisation which he has neither the innate ability nor the scientific training to understand, he must follow the advice of Mr. Chamberlain, and "trust himself un- reservedly to the leading of [Wagner's] great and lofty mind." ' 1 Richard Wagner, pp. 179, 180. I may remark, in passing, that though Mr. Chamberlain is so anxious that we should not "criticise" Wagner, he himself has no scruple as to criticising the composer's opponents, going so far as to apply the term "barbarians" to some of them, and to compare the attitude of one educated man, who admired Wagner's music but declined to swallow his theories, to that of a savage listening to something far beyond his comprehension. Thus does Wagner-worship make for " the truly human." ^ Work cited, p. 21. General Considerations 371 A paralysis of the intellect such as is exhibited in fetish-worship of this kind is really something more than a literary phenomenon. It is safe to say that the standard of musical literature is at present many degrees below that of all other literature; and the reason seems to be that less brains being required to appreciate music than to work in any other department of art or literature, the profession of musical criticism attracts a number of intellectual derelicts whose faculties would be of little value to them in other fields of thought. A biography of Shakespeare or Goethe, for example, if planned on the lines of the average book on Wagner, would be quickly laughed out of existence. It all seems to point to the fact borne in upon us by so many other considerations — by the great effect of music upon the savage mind, by the susceptibility of animals to its influence,^ by the existence of musical prodigies, who, at an age when Shakespeare or Shelley would be perfectly unintelligible to them, can play Mozart and Beethoven, and even compose for them- selves — that music is really the least intellectual of all the arts, and requires both in the composer and the hearer less intellectual processes than are necessary in the other arts. And this is certainly an ironic reflec- tion upon the claims Wagner made for the musical drama ; it certainly cuts away most of its assumed title to be the drama, the universal art that is to be the summation of all the arts, the expression of all that is "truly human." The objections to this view of the musical drama have been already developed at some length in the preceding pages, and there is no occasion to recapitulate them here. It is sufficient to observe how congruous this view of music is with the facts of Wagner's psychology as they must present ' See, on this question, the extremely interesting evidence given by Mr. Cornish, in the chapters entitled Orpheus at the Zoo, in his book Life at the Zoo, 372 A Study of Wagner themselves to any unprejudiced student. It may not, perhaps, be any real disparagement of music to call it the least intellectual of the arts, to point out that its conception in the mind of the composer and its sway over the minds of the hearers depend on the less specialised faculties of the brain.^ As to its enormous power over us, there can be no question, whatever faculties in us it may appeal to. But if there be any truth in the theory that music springs not from the higher and more speciaHsed portions of the brain, but from the lower centres that are concerned with the more primitive organic sensibilities of the organism ; and if the undisputed hypnosis of the musician in the act of composition is seen to be the result of the higher controlling tracts of the brain being quiescent, while the whole mental energy goes into the lower tracts ; then it is evident that only in the very rarest of cases can a brain of enormous musical capacity, of enormous power of dreaming, go along with an intelligence quick to grasp all the issues of concrete fact, quick to check one stream of thought by the impact of another. A priori one cannot say that such a brain will never exist, but we can certainly say that it has never yet been seen. Broadly speaking, as I have pointed out in an earlier chapter, the two types of mind are anti- thetical, giving us the customary contrast between the inspired artist with no sense of the practical value or meaning of external things, and the analytic scientist, whose power of grappling with reality, with the hidden resemblances and distinctions of things, is in excess of his power to soar into the empyrean on the wings of artistic imagination. The two types, of course, shade into each other imperceptibly in actual life, many scientists having great appreciation of art, and many artists being able to reason acutely on certain ^ See the preceding section on Wagner's Beethoven, and a paper by the author on Walter Pater on Music, in the Musician, 29th Sept. 1897. General Considerations 373 subjects.^ But in the very nature of things the combi- nation of extreme clairvoyant imagination in the world of the ideal with perfect grasp of the world of the concrete, must be the rarest of phenomena. Certainly musicians, who represent the pyschological extreme of the hypnotic state which is at the bottom of all artistic imagination, and in whom, therefore, one would expect to find the strictly reasoning faculties least developed, have never shown any great signs of what we are accustomed broadly to call intellectual power. Beethoven, whose concentration upon his music and whose hopeless lack of all sense of the practicable in actual life mark him out as the perfect example of artistic hypnosis, certainly seems to me to have exhibited none of the marks of great intellect with which he is confusedly credited by some of his biographers. He had copied out the following sen- tences, which he had framed and kept always before him upon his writing-table : — " I am that which is. "I am all that is, that was, and that shall he. No mortal man hath lifted my veil. " He is alone by Himself, and to Him alone do all things owe their being." One really cannot with any justice think very highly of the concrete intelligence of the man who made, as it were, a fetish of such commonplace stuff as this. That he thought it wonderfully profound is evident ; and one sees in his admiration for it exactly what we saw in Wagner's admiration for Schopenhauer — an utter failure of the philosophic, critical, reasoning ^ Imagination is, of course, an important factor in scientific discovery and scientific theory. See Mr. Herbert Spencer's article on Tyndall in the Fortnightly Review, Feb. 1894 ; and on the point of the presence of analytic power in the artistic mind, see Baudelaire, VArt Romantique, pp. 228, 229. 374 A Study of Wagner sense, an inability to distinguish between really pro- found thought and mere sonorous platitude. The peculiarity of the wholly musical mind — the inward bend of the imagination upon itself, the lack of under- standing of the true relations of things in the world — comes out as clearly here as in the admiration which Beethoven is known to have felt for Plato's Republic, which he considered "the model for all governments to establish in every quarter of the globe ; this was a fixed idea which dominated him ull his life, and on which he would never brook the least contradiction. . . . He was persuaded that Bonaparte, when first consul, had no other intention than to establish the republic of Plato in France." 1 Similarly the biographer records of Mozart that "the relation between what one calls the real world and the ideal world was reversed for him. His real world was art, this was his true and serious life ; while the positive world was a shadow that amused him at times, without ever greatly occupy- ing his attention." ^ There is little need to multiply evidence of this nature, which must be tolerably familiar to all students of musical biography. Wagner shared the common characteristic of the musical mind in being unfitted for most practical affairs, at the same time that, through the very breadth of his nature, his enormous energy of being, and his sympathy with suffering, he was incessantly impelled to utter himself in prose upon a variety of subjects. But in his treatment of almost every question except those connected with ' Oulibicheff, Beethoven, ses Critiques et ses Glossateurs, p. 68. The simplicity of OulibichefTs comments upon this is well worth noting. See p. 69. ^ Oulibicheff, ibid, p. 69, quoting his own Biograp/iie de Mozart. Com- pare the story told of Balzac, in Taine's Nouveaux Essais, p. 95. General Considerations 375 the practical side of music, he exhibits a congenital lack of the sense of reality. It is worth while recall- ing that after the revolutionary troubles of 1848 and 1849, when the authorities were examining certain of the prisoners, Bakunin declared to the Court that he "knew Wagner at once for a visionary."^ He himself declared, in later life, that his sole concern with revo- lutionary politics was from the standpoint of art ; and though there is a touch of pathos in the admis- sion, one is compelled to reiterate the point that not only had he no grasp of the actual forces of politics, but his plans for the regeneration of art suffered from the same overwhelming bent towards unpractical idealism. There can, then, be no ground for gain- saying the fact that Wagner's stupendous musical gifts were the correlative of very mediocre qualities in other departments ; the vast volume of the musical imagination, indeed, being due to the comparative exhaustion of the more logical faculties.^ We may say of him as Goethe said of Byron, " So bald er philo- sophirt, ist er ein Kind!' And just as we saw that the bulk of his prose- work sprang from some sudden nervous impulse of the moment, some spark of intuition kindled by the feverish friction of his nerves, so this excitability of temperament, this hurry of the organic life, accounts for much both of his musical achievement and his daily suffering. There have been few men in whom the torch of life has burned so fiercely. In his early days he seems to have had that gaiety of temperament and that apparently boundless energy which men, in his case as in that of Heine, Nietzsche, Amiel, and others, have wrongly assumed to be the outcome of ^ Hugo Dinger, Richard Wagner's geistige Entwickelung, i. 179. ' It is interesting to recall Wagner's own remarks upon the mediocrity of Beethoven's brain in all other departments than that of music. See G. S. ix., 93, 94 ; Ellis, V. 93, 94 ; and the present volume, Chapter ix. 376 A Study of Wagner harmonious physical and mental health. There is a pathetic deception in the outward lives of so many young men of genius, the bloom being, to the in- structed eye, only the indication of some subtle nervous derangement, only the forerunner of decay. There was clearly the tendency to nervous disorder in Wagner, though his frame was so organically sound in other respects that it was able to bear a half-century of storms that would have annihilated many apparently stronger men. Of the frailty of his nervous and digestive systems there can be no question. His letters during his Swiss exile are full of laments over the broken condition of his health, and accounts of the various cures he tried from time to time. His physical and mental life seems to have been a series of violent oscillations between feverish illness and equally feverish health. " I walk well," he writes to Uhlig in 1852, describing a tour he is making in the Bernese highlands, "and am sound in my legs ; as yet, however, I am not satisfied with my head ; the nerves of the brain are terribly strained ; excitement and lassitude — never true rest ! Shall I really never be much better ? No cure in the world is of any avail where only one thing would help — viz. if I were different from what I am."i "I am glad to be able to tell you,'' he had written on a previous occasion, " that I have discovered the nature of my illness : it was, to a great extent, melancholy; at any rate a strained state of mind has brought my constitution into the present dangerous and excited condition." ^ His nervous" system is constantly breaking down : — " I am somewhat knocked up, and am suffering from extreme nervous exhaustion." ^ " From this letter you will get an idea of my health. — Splendid ! — feeble, full of pain, and unable to sleep ! " * " My health is better ; however, as yet I have no ' Letters to Ukligj pp. 242, 243. "^ Ibid., p. 34^ ' Ibid., p. 28. * Ibid., p. 29. General Considerations 377 real strength, and feel, for the most part, very tired; but the nervous complaint has much abated. Ah ! let us above all things get healthy." 1 "I have nothing to complain of with regard to my bodily functions ; but — my nerves ! I grant that, of late, I have over-exerted myself with the cure. The mis- fortune was that I had no doctor in whom I placed confidence : my lively mood was principally the result cff the over-excitement of my vital powers, for in spite of the liveliness, my agitation was intense. . . . Reaction naturally set in."^ "I can only write to you to-day if I make up my mind to be brief. I am so fearfully overwrought and unnerved that the least bit of writing is a torture to me."^ "You must not discuss theory with me any more ; it drives me clean crazy to have to do with such matters. The nerves of my brain ! — there's the bother ! I have cruelly taxed them : it is possible I may yet one day go mad."* "If only my head were in a better state! I have done for myself again with that cursed pamphlet, which I rushed through in order to get everything finished in hot haste. A sharp knife often cuts into the nerves of my brain; besides which I am weak and feverish in all my limbs. But if my head recovers, then I feel better at once. On it — on this laboratory of the imagination — everything depends."^ "Your dispassionate tem- perament preserves you, in the contact with your manner of life and occupation, from violent convulsive attacks, such as I from time to time am subject to."* "With me, for example, everything points to a death by wasting of the nerves : my special and characteristic mode of life consists, to a certain extent, in avoiding the necessity of this wasting. " '^ To Roeckel he writes in the same strain : — " My health is not of the best, and though physically I appear sufiSciently robust, my nervous system is in a very depressed state, gradually growing worse — the result of my self-abandonment to that feverish and excessive sensitiveness, in virtue of which I am the artistic being that I am. The nerves of my brain especi- ally have been so worked upon by this constant dwelhng in a ^ Letters to Uhlig, p. 57. " Ibid., p. 170. ^ Ibid., p. 219. * Ibid., p. 253. = /^« 211 "Art- work of the Future,'' 53, 58, 61-66, 74, 78, 180, 204, 208 Arteaga, 138, 140-147 "Artists of the Future," 58 Athenaeus, 171 ». Authority and reason, 206 n. "Autobiographical Sketch," 53, 175, 382 B Baker, Thbodor, 168, 170 Bakunin, 375 Balfour, A. J., 206 n. Balzac, 263 »., 374 ». Baudelaire, 14, 215, 373 «., 390 Beaumarchais, 198 n. Beauquier, Charles, 173, 187 Beethoven, 3, 6, 7, 14, 17, 25, 65, 85, 86, 96, 108, 114 »., 143-149, 153. 1SS-161, 176, 261, 263, 269, 273 «., 322, 340, 347, 350, 371, 373. 374, 37S »• " Beethoven," 112 «., 119 »., 138 «., 148 «., 182 «., 27s «., 322-338, 367, 372 n. Bellini, 167, 261, 263 Bennett, Joseph, 2 Benvenuto Cellini, 17, 132 n. Berkeley, 344 Berlioz, 12, 17, 85, 103, 130-132, 347 Bitter, 200 n. Bodmer, 274 Bosanquet, 240 n. Boy^, 174 n. Brendel, 154 Bricqueville, E. de, 4 »., 107 »., 19s n. Bridges, R., 184 «. Brown, Dr., 168 n., 171 n. John, 138, :88 Byron, 375 Caccini, 195 " Capitulation, A," I «., 338 Carlyle, 19 «., SS, 262 Carpenter, W. B., 166 n. Carriere, 328 Cecil, H. M., 206 n. Chamberlain, H. S., 61 n. 62 «., 73. 125 n., 215, 241, 242, 282 «., 292 «., 293-295, 315, 368-370, 382 «., 388 396 Index Cherubini, 17, 82 Chopin, 17, 158 Chorley, H., 2 Clodd, Edward, 34 n. Combarieu, Jules, 107 n., 164, 172 n., 173 K., 174 «. Commentators on the Rin^, 206 «., 207 n., 230 «., 241, 244 «., 251, 252 »., 254 " Communication to my Friends, A," 21, 30 «., 33 «., 35, 36 n., 53, 73 «., 208, 217, 308, 311 n. " Conducting, On," 322, 366 Corder, F., 191 Cornish, 371 Coriolan overture, 144, 147, 148, 324 Cost fan tutte, 83 Coutagne, H., 114 n. D Dannreuther, E., 107 «., 114 «., 120-123, 126 «., 350 n. Dawson, W. H., 384 n. Descartes, 275 n. Desfontaines, S Des Brosses, 136 "Destiny of Opera," 326 «., 338, 339 »■ Dichterliebe, 17 Diderot, 275 Dinger, Hugo, 375 «. Don Giovanni, 80, 83 Donizetti, 17, 167, 263 Dostoievsky, 385, 387 n. Dream-theory of music, 329-338 Du Bos, 164 «., 171 «., 275 ECKERMANN, 274 «• Ellis, Havelock, 384 n., 385 n. W. Ashton, 55 «., 75 «., 338 «., 385 n. Engel, Gustav, 2 "Entwiirfe, Gedar^ken, &c.," 313 «. Ernani, 17 Euripides, 199 «. Euryanthe, 121 " Fairies, The," 16, 263 Faust-Overture, 9 Favorita, 17 F^tis, :2, 7 n. Feuerbach, 55 »., 220, 386 Fidelia, 148 ». Fielding, 275 n. Figaro, 83 Finck, H. T., 2 »., 8, 9 «., 10, 12 »., 234, 263, 289 «., 381 Flaubert, 216, 385 Flying- Dutchman, 12, 13, 16-29, 33, 42, 47, 48, 52, 74 ?«., 120, 205, 251 «., 263, 264, 282-286 Form in music, 5-13 Fouque, 259 Fra Dia-volo, 1 7 Franz, R., 12 Frauenliebe, 17 Frederick Barbarossa, 129 FreischiUz, Der, 84, 187, 262 «. French influence on Germany, 274- 277 Freson, J. G., 102 «., 103 «., 261 n. Friedheim, Arthur, 350 n. Gasperini, A. de, 14, 107 n. Gatty, C. T., 357 «., 360 n. Gautier, Th^ophile, 14 " German Art and German Policy," 260, 273, 322 German development, 258, 273-277 Gervinus, 148 »., 207 " Glance at the German Operatic Stage, A," 338 Glasenapp, 261 «., 381 n. Gluck, 4, 82, 85, 88, 94, 105-107, 113, 114, 120, 126, 130-132, 138, 140, 263, 28s Index 397 Goethe, 19 «., 89, 95, 273, 274, 275, 371, 37S Goldsmith, 275 «. Gdtterddmmerung, 9, 13, 25, 158, 197 «•. 202, 230, 232, 234, 237, 239, 241, 245-247, 254, 280, 349 Gottsched, 274 Gowers, Dr., 169 Greek drama, 56, 90, loi, 171, 199 Gretry, 4, 193 Grosse, E., 168 «. Guillard, 106 Gumprecht, 2, 154 Gurney, E., 5-7, 8, 9, 150, 151 »., 152 «., 164 «., 171, 172, 200 «. H Hadow, W. H., 166 «., 196 Handel, 6, 134 Hans Heiling, 17, 263 Hanslick, 2, 7 »., 14, 164 «., 174 Hartland, S., 34 n. Hauptmann, 2 Haydn, 108 Heine, 18, 263 »., 264 »., 268, 271, 375 Heinse, 261 Heintz, A., 252 n. Helmholtz, 173 Herder, 164 «., 275 " Hero-dom and Christianity,'" 345 Hesiod, 171 «. Hippeau, E., 5 k., 102 «., 132 n. Homer, 171 «. Hueffer, F., 39 «., io8-iio Huguenots, Les, 17, 85 Hullah, John, 2 Huxley, 346 I Ibsen, 14, 124, 339 Irvine, David, 206 «., 207 «., 251 n., 252 »., 360 Iphigenia in Tauris, 106 Italian opera, 17 J Jahn, Otto, 2 "Judaism in Music," 53, 260, 264 K Kant, 327, 356 Keiser, 136 Kidd, B., 77 n. Kleinmichel, 314 Koch, E., 216 K. Kossmaly, 2 Kotzebue, 273 Krafft-Ebing, 382 n. Krehbiel, H., 43«., i66n., 301, 302, 306. 390 Kufferath, M., 41 Lachner, 154 Lafitau, P^re, 168 «., 170 Lamennais, 328 Lamoureux, 11 Lang, Andrew, 34 n. Lanier, Sidney, 184 «. Laprade, V. de, 173 Lassalle, F., 268, 384 n. Lassen, E., 11 Laube, H., 261 Lessing, 87, 275 " Letter to an Actor," 338 Lichtenberger, Henri, 33 «., 129 «., 288, 310 Liebesverbot, Das, 261, 382, 385. (See also Novice of Palermo) Lindau, Paul, 10 «. Liszt, 40, 41 «., 52, S3 n., 71, 73, 107 n., 204, 281, 347, 350 «., 382 «., 390 Lohengrin, 3, 9, 10 n., 11-13, 22, 30, 52, S3, 60, 7S «., 120, 129 «., 205, 217, 228, 229, 280, 296, 311,320, 35°, 360 " Lohengrin "-legend. The, 34 n. Love in Wagner, 384, 385 398 Index Lucia di Lammermoor, 1 7 Lucrezia Borgia, 17 Ludwig II., 54 Luther, 315 M Macfarrbn, 2. Makower, S. V., 175 ». Marcello, 138 Mariotti, 345 Marmonlel, 4, 275 Marschner, 17, 263, 264 n. Marx, A. B., 107 «., 120, 228, 229 Masaniello, 84 Matthew, J. E., 133 «. Maupassant, 385 M^hul, 82 Meisiersinger, Die, 3, 13, 26, 127, 158, 186, 191, 195, 208, 240 «., 279. 321. 322, 379. 390 Mendelssohn, 17, 80, 95, 134, 153, 269, 270 Mend^s, C, 14 Messiah, 134 Metastasio, 81 Meyerbeer, 16, 84, 85, 120, 263 n., 269, 270 Milton, 231 Moliere, 275 Moll, A., 335 n. Monboddo, Lord, 188 n. Monod, G., II, 14 Morgan, Dr., 168 Morlacchi, 263 Morley, John, 275 «• Morsier, E. de, 362 n. Mozart, 4, S, 7, 29, 80, 82, 83, 85, 108, 263, 371, 374 Murray, Gilbert, 199 n. Music and the drama, 46-48, 50, 80-133, 177, 184, 186-200, 23s, 254-256, 282-286, 288-296, 325, 326, 338-340, 347, 351, 371 Music and speech, 63-65, 92-97, 162-167, 175, 196, 197 Music, psychology of, 171-174, 176, 179. 371, 372 Music, sensuous element in, 130-132, 166, 171, 174, 178 " Music School for Munich, A," 343 "Musical Criticism, On," 62 n. Musicians and critics, 3-15 Myrthen, 17 N Napoleon, 137 Nerval, G. de, 14 " Nibelungen-myth arranged as a drama," 202 Nietzsche, 14, 21, 199, 354, 375, 384, 385, 391 Nohl, Ludwig, 200 n., 380 Nordau, 385 Norma, 17 Northcote, O., 385 n. Novice of Palermo, 16. (See also Das Liebesverbot) NoufBard, G., 103-106, 131 «., 132 n. Nutt, A., 362 o CEdipus, 211 Oliphant, J., 198 n. Omond, T. S., 184 «. " On Operatic Poetry and Composi- tion," 185 n., 346 "Open Letter to E. von Weber," 352, 356 Opera, development of, 83-85, 133- 142, 19s "Opera and Drama," 53, 66, 78, 80- 100, III, 116, 141 «., 143, 155, 182, 186, 198, 211, 304, 368, 383 Otello, 51 n., 199 Optimism and Pessimism in Wagner, 33 «■. 223, 311 Oulibicheff, 138 n., 374 n. Paradise and the Peri, 18 Paris, Gaston, 282 n. Parkinson, F., 251 n. Parry, Hubert, 117, 126, 195 n. Index 399 Parsifal, 3, 7 «., 13, 127, 196, 197, 207, 280, 312, 341, 346, 352-365, 370, 384. 385. 387 Pater, Walter, 199, 372 n. Pearson, Karl, 334 n. Pensie mtisicale, La, 164, 166, 168 " Performing of Tannhduser, On the," 217 Peri, Jacopo, 195 " Pilgrimage to Beethoven, A," 53 «., 161 Planelli, 138, 140 Plato, 374 Plutarch, 171 n. Poe, E. A., 152, 184 «., 259, 385 " Poetry and Composition," 346 Poetry and music, 143-154 Pohl, 380 Pontavice de Heussy, Vte. R. du, 386 «. Praeger, R, 55 «., 379 «., 380, 381, 382 «. " Prologue to a Reading of the Gotter- ddmmerung" 193 «., 340 n. "Public in Time and Space, The," 344 R Racine, 187 Rameau, 5 Recitative, 46, 170, 187-197, 364, 365 Reissiger, 263 " Religion and Art," 342, 353 Renan, 359 " Report to King Ludwig II.," 276, 322 Reyer, E., 11-13 Rheingold, 53, 158, 202, 230, 238, 240, 242, 244, 247, 248, 251, 252 «., 254, 280, 348, 356 Richardson, 275 n. Rienzi, 12, 16-29, 49. 120, 262 Rigoletto, 17 Ring of the Nibdung, 3, 9, II, 18, 29, 22, 26, 35, 75 »•■ 141 «•. 202- 258, 271, 272 »., 279, 281, 296, 298, 304, 306, 316, 320, 322, 356- 358, 360, 363, 383. 389 Ritter, Julie, 75 ». Karl, 75 «. Robert the Devil, 17 Robertson, Croom, 332 n. John M., 184 «. Roche, Edmond, 14 Rockstro, W. S., 13 Roe, 184 n. Roeckel, 33 «., 73, 75 n. 204, 219, 22^, 227, 228, 232, 251, 377, 378 Rogers, J. D., 240 «. Rossetti, D. G., 267 W. M.,268«. Rossini, 83, 84 n., 263 Rousseau, 141 »., 164 «., 275, 383 Runciman, J. F., 160 n. Ruskin, 142 Saint-Saens, 9, 164 n. Savage music, 168-171, 178 Schelling, 328 Schiller, 89, 96, 273, 275 SchlUter, 2 Schopenhauer, 131 «., 220-223, 281, 308-310, 323, 327-334, 345 Schroder-Devrient, 261 Schumann, 12, 17, 18, 310, 350 n. Schure, 107 n., 114 «., 125 n., 179 n. Scott, Clement, 14 Scribe, 85 Scudo, 2 Seidl, A., 386 n. Serviferes, G., 2 «., Ii n., izn. Shakespeare, 87, 88, 148 »■, 152, 160, 199, 200, 203, 275, 312, 321, ^23;3S, 326 «., 327 «•. 339-371 Shaw, G. B., 69M., 214 «. Shedlock, J. S., 264 ». Shelley, 40, 153, 371 Siegfried, 59, 129 «., 202, 229, 230, 231 K., 234, 237-239, 241, 243- 247, 250, 251 «., 254, 279, 280, 312 Siegfried's Death, 202, 230 Sime, J., 274 n. 400 Index Socrates, 328 Somnambula, La, 17 Sophocles, 114 »., 199 K., 211 Soret, 274 «. Speech-theory of music, 162, 166 Spencer, Herbert, 162-164, 169 «., 170, 336, 373 «■■ Spohr, 12 Spontini, 82, 83, 120 " State and Religion," 54 »., 55 »., 322 Steele, 184 n. Sterne, 275 n. Strassburg, G. von, 282 «. Strieker, Dr., 165 Svendsen, 350 n. Sully, Professor, 200 «., 329 n. Swift, 275 n. Sylvester, Professor, 184 n. Symonds, J. A., 336 n. John Addington, 184 n. Taine, 374 n. Tancredi, 84 Tannhduser, 2, 6, 7> 9' '2, 13, 30- 52, 60, 120, 205, 217, 218, 263, 279. 3" Tappert, W., 242 Tennyson, 358 Tieck, 88 Tito, 83 Tolstoi, 385 Tristan and Isolde, 6, 7, 11-13, 23, 26, 42, 46, 117, 124 n., 125 «., 126 n., 135, 158, 188, 197, 198, 207, 257 272 n., 279-312, 316, 319, 322, 356. 361, 363. 370, 389 Twining, 171 k. Tyndall, 373 n. U Uhlig, 24, S3 «., 58, 60, 73, 74, 78, 79, 143, 154, 178, 208, 220, 264 «., 376 Valkyrie, The, 10, 70, 127, 167, 197, 202, 230, 237, 240, 243, 24s, 246 K., 250, 252 »., 257, 280, 307, 378 Vampyr, Der, 17, 264 n. Vaterlandsverein speech, 54, 21 1 Verdi, 17, 51 »., 199 Verlaine, 215 Verse, scansion of, 94, 95, 184 k. Villiers de I'lsle Adam, 386 n. Vischer, 328 Voltaire, 99, 141, 198 Von Billow, 7-9 W Wagner, connection between life and works of, 18, 33, 34, 35, 203- 20s, 208-215, 362, 363 contemporary criticisms of, 2, 3 development of, 16, 19, 22- 29, 42, 280, 282-288, 298, 311, 312, 341, 342, 352, 353, 384, 38s and his critics, 3-IS, 36, 72, 227, 228 and the ethical drama, 19, 21, 38-41, 217-219, 357-363 and the French, i, 14 «. and his friends, 72-75 and the German spirit, 77, 258- 278 and the Jews, 264-272 • and the leading-motive, 236- 257. 298-305, 313-317 and the non-dramatic arts, 72, 74, 75, 124, 154, 157, 179, 180, 323. 325. 342, 343 and the theatre, 19, 233 and the re-union of the Arts, 57, 61, 62, 65, 66, 69-72, 200, 201 as dramatist, 23, 39, 42, 49, 52, 224, 230-236, 283-285, 305- 308, 356, 360-363 Index 401 Wa^er as musician, 22, 24-27, 36, 37. 42-52, 68, 124, 125, 129 «., «43. 157-161, I7S, 182, 183, 229, 235. 236, 249, 286, 296, 297, 310, 3". 3«3. 317-321. 357. 363-365. 389. 390 as poet, 22, 25, 26, 46, 52, 117- 120, 125 »., 126, 143, 180, 182, 198, 289-296 as thinker, 33 «., 36, 52, 66, 67, 203, 204, 213-215, 220-222, 226, 272, 277, 327, 32S, 341, 344-346, 354. 357. 367-375 on Tegetaiianism, 368-370 Wagner's character and personal traits, 21, 22, 59, 375-393 idealism, 22, 35 ideas on redemption, 20, 2i musical conception of character, 47. 48. 51. 70, 257 views on ethics, 19, 353, 357-3^0 views on women, 21, 40, 41 social and political ideas, 18, 54-58, 60-63, 66-69, 76, 77. 91. 95, 203, 204, 208-216, 225, 226, 229, 375 Wallace, William, 329 n. Wallaschek, 165, 168 n., 169, 170, 201 Watts, Theodore, 152 Weber, Carl M. von, 17, 83, 84, 120, 121, 126, 175, 185, 187, 188, 262, 263 Dionys, 4 "What is German," 260, 322 Wibelungen, Die, 221, 222 Wieland the Smith, 141 ». William Tell, 17, 84 Wilson, Andrew, 336 n. Winworth, Freda, 230 ». Wolzogen, 239 »., 243, 252 ». Wyzewa, T. de, 382 «. Young Siegfried, 202, 28 1 "Zukunftsmusik," 45 n., 282, 322 Zampa, 17 THE END Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &* Co. Edinburgh &" London 2 C Sj the same Author Gluck and the Opera A Study in Musical History 6s. net. The Times. — "An admirable study, not only of the great musical reformer's career and artistic work, but of the philosophy of musical drama, with more especial reference to its earlier manifestations. The masterpieces of Gluck are carefully and sympathetically analysed in so attractive a manner as to increase every musical reader's desire to see some of them beside Orfeo, on the modern stage ; the writer evidently possesses a remarkable degree of scientific and general culture, and his views on the aesthetics of the art carry conviction. The book is one of those rare achievements in musical literature that are likely to gain a certain amount of recognition from literary people as well as from musicians. It well deserves it, for a more thorough, temperate, and right-minded piece of work has not lately been seen in England." Manchester Guardian. — " Mr. Newman's exceedingly accurate and compre- hensive biography of Gluck fills a place hitherto unoccupied in English musical literature." Manchester City News. — " Mr. Newman's book is undoubtedly the most notable and readable contribution to the literature of music that has emanated from a British press for some time." Academy. — " It contains valuable information, and it is the outcome of wide reading. . . . The book deserves to be read, and a careful perusal of it virill bring both pleasure and profit." Athenaum. — "Although perfect agreement with Mr. Newman's arguments cannot be expressed, we commend bis work to the perusal of students, not only of music, but of art and literature in general." Musical Opinion. — " A thoughtful contribution to musical history in the higher sense." Scotsman. — "Mr. Newman's book is clearly the work of a thinker upon the problems that underlie music and the enjoyment of it ; and even in the risky regions of sesthetics his arguments are, in the main, sensible and convincing, and always suggestive and stimulating." Echo. — ' ' We cannot do justice to the volume before us in this notice. There is not a word too much in it from beginning to end," Daily News. — "Mr. Newman's volume is a thoughtful contribution to the important subject of which it treats, and it will be read with interest not only by professional musicians but by others interested in the history of the early develop- ment of the opera." Weekly Sun. — " Mr. Newman has acquitted himself with considerable credit. He is a trifie self-assertive, perhaps, and over-emphatic ; but his views are always reasonable and suggestive, and he argues well. At times, moreover, he employs a lithe and pliant literary style with more than a touch of distinction about it. His book deserves well of the musical public," Lloyd's Newspaper. — "The volume deserves a place in every musical library." 'Books Published by 'Bertram 'Dobell Two vols. Post 8vo. Price 12s. 6d. The Poetical Works of James Thomson ("Bysshe Vanolis") Edited by Bertram Dobell With a Memoir and Portraits of the Author i6mo, cloth, 3s. 6d. The City of Dreadful Night And other Poems A Selection from the Poems of James Thomson Crown 8vo, pp. 496, cloth extra, 6s. Biographical and Critical Studies By James Thomson (" B. V.") The Original Edition, 8vo, pp. 334, with a Portrait, 7s. 6d. The Life of James Thomson By H. S. Salt Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 4s. 6d. net. Human Documents Character-Sketches of Representative Men and Women of the Time By Arthur Lynch Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 4s, 6d. net. Like Stars that Fall A Story of Music-Hail Life and Character By Geoffrey Mortimer 8vo, pp. 382. Price 7s. 6d. net. lamblichus on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians Translated from the Original Greek by Thomas Taylor