CHAPTER V.

THE RICHARD WAGNER CULT.

WE have seen in a previous chapter that the whole mystic movement of

the period has its roots in romanticism, and hence originally emanates

from Germany. In England German romanticism was metamorphosed into

pre-Raphaelitism, in France the latter engendered, with the last

remains of its procreative strength, the abortions of symbolism and

neo-Catholicism, and these Siamese twins contracted with Tolstoism a

mountebank marriage such as might take place between the cripple of

a fair and the wonder of a show-booth. While the descendants of the

emigrant (who on his departure from his German home already carried

in him all the germs of subsequent tumefactions and disfigurements),

so changed as to be almost unrecognisable, grew up in different

countries, and set about returning to their native land to attempt the

renewal of family ties with their home-staying connections, Germany

gave birth to a new prodigy, who was in truth only reared with great

trouble to manhood, and for long years received but little notice

or appreciation, but who finally obtained an incomparably mightier

attractive force over the great fools’ fair of the present time than

all his fellow-competitors. This prodigy is ‘Wagnerism.’ It is the

German contribution to modern mysticism, and far outweighs all that

the other nations combined have supplied to that movement. For Germany

is powerful in everything, in evil as in good, and the magnitude of

its elementary force manifests itself in a crushing manner in its

degenerate, as well as in its ennobling, efforts.

Richard Wagner is in himself alone charged with a greater abundance of

degeneration than all the degenerates put together with whom we have

hitherto become acquainted. The stigmata of this morbid condition are

united in him in the most complete and most luxuriant development.

He displays in the general constitution of his mind the persecution

mania, megalomania and mysticism; in his instincts vague philanthropy,

anarchism, a craving for revolt and contradiction; in his writings all

the signs of graphomania, namely, incoherence, fugitive ideation, and a

tendency to idiotic punning, and, as the groundwork of his being, the

characteristic emotionalism of a colour at once erotic and religiously

enthusiastic.

For Wagner’s persecution mania, we have the testimony of his most

recent biographer and friend, Ferdinand Praeger, who relates that for

years Wagner was convinced that the Jews had conspired to prevent

the representation of his operas--a delirium inspired by his furious

anti-Semitism. His megalomania is so well known through his writings,

his verbal utterances, and the whole course of his life, that a bare

reference to it is sufficient. It is to be admitted that this mania was

essentially increased by the crazy procedure of those who surrounded

Wagner. A much firmer equilibrium than that which obtained in Wagner’s

mind would have been infallibly disturbed by the nauseous idolatry of

which Bayreuth was the shrine. The _Bayreuther Blätter_ is a unique

phenomenon. To me, at least, no other instance is known of a newspaper

which was founded exclusively for the deification of a living man, and

in every number of which, through long years, the appointed priests of

the temple have burned incense to their household god, with the savage

fanaticism of howling and dancing dervishes, bent the knee, prostrated

themselves before him, and immolated all opponents as sacrificial

victims.

We will take a closer view of the graphomaniac Wagner. His _Collected

Writings and Poems_ form ten large thick volumes, and among the 4,500

pages which they approximately contain there is hardly a single

one which will not puzzle the unbiased reader, either through some

nonsensical thought or some impossible mode of expression. Of his prose

works (his poems will be treated of further on), the most important

is decidedly _The Art-work of the Future_.[186] The thoughts therein

expressed--so far as the wavering shadows of ideas in a mystically

emotional degenerate subject may be so called--occupied Wagner during

his whole life, and were again and again propounded by him in ever new

terms and phraseology. _The Opera and the Drama_, _Judaism in Music_,

_On the State and Religion_, _The Vocation of the Opera_, _Religion

and Art_, are nothing more than amplifications of single passages of

_The Art-work of the Future_. This restless repetition of one and

the same strain of thought is itself characteristic in the highest

degree. The clear, mentally sane author, who feels himself impelled

to say something, will once for all express himself as distinctly

and impressively as it is possible for him to do, and have done with

it. He may, perhaps, return to the subject, in order to clear up

misconceptions, repel attacks, and fill up lacunæ; but he will never

wish to rewrite his book, wholly or in part, two or three times in

slightly different words, not even if in later years he attains to

the insight that he has not succeeded in finding for it an adequate

form. The crazed graphomaniac, on the contrary, cannot recognise in

his book, as it lies finished before him, the satisfying expression of

his thoughts, and he will always be tempted to begin his work afresh,

a task which is endless, because it must consist in giving a fixed

linguistic form to ideas which are formless.

The fundamental thought of the _Art-work of the Future_ is this: The

first and most original of the arts was that of dancing; its peculiar

essence is rhythm, and this has developed into music; music, consisting

of rhythm and tone, has raised (Wagner says ‘condensed’) its phonetic

element to speech, and produced the art of poetry; the highest form of

poetry is the drama, which for the purpose of stage-construction, and

to imitate the natural scene of human action, has associated itself

with architecture and painting respectively; finally, sculpture is

nothing but the giving permanence to the appearance of the actor in

a dead rigid form, while acting is real sculpture in living, flowing

movement. Thus all the arts group themselves around the drama, and the

latter should unite them naturally. Nevertheless they appear at present

in isolation, to the great injury of each and of art in general.

This reciprocal estrangement and isolation of the different arts is

an unnatural and decadent condition, and the effort of true artists

must be to win them back to their natural and necessary conjunction

with each other. The mutual penetration and fusion of all arts into

a single art will produce the genuine work of art. Hence the work

of art of the future is a drama with music and dance, which unrolls

itself in a landscape painting, has for a frame a masterly creation

of architectural art designed for the poetico-musical end, and is

represented by actors who are really sculptors, but who realize their

plastic inspirations by means of their own bodily appearance.

In this way Wagner has set forth for himself the evolution of art. His

system calls for criticism in every part. The historical filiation

of the arts which he attempts to establish is false. If the original

reciprocal connections of song, dance and poetry be granted, the

development of architecture, painting and sculpture is certainly

independent of poetry in its dramatic form. That the theatre employs

all the arts is true, but it is one of those truths which are so

self-evident that it is generally unnecessary to mention them, and

least of all with profound prophetic mien and the grand priestly

gestures of one proclaiming surprising revelations. Everyone knows from

experience that the stage is in a theatrical building, that it displays

painted decorations which represent landscapes or buildings, and that

on it there is speaking, singing and acting. Wagner secretly feels that

he makes himself ridiculous when he strains himself to expound this

trite matter of first experience in the Pythian mode, with an enormous

outlay of gush and exaltation ...; hence he exaggerates it to such a

degree as to turn it into an absurdity. He not only asseverates that in

the drama (more correctly speaking, the opera, or the musical drama, as

Wagner prefers to call it) different arts co-operate, but he asserts

that it is only through this co-operation that each individual art is

advanced to its highest capacity of expression, and that the individual

arts must and will surrender their independence as an unnatural error,

in order to continue to exist only as collaborators of the musical

drama.

The first asseveration is at least doubtful. In the cathedral of

Cologne architecture produces an impression without the representation

of a drama; the accompaniment of music would add nothing whatever to

the beauty and depth of Faust and Hamlet; Goethe’s lyric poetry and the

_Divina Commedia_ need no landscape-painting as a frame and background;

Michael Angelo’s _Moses_ would hardly produce a deeper impression

surrounded by dancers and singers; and the _Pastoral Symphony_ does

not require the accompaniment of words in order to exercise its full

charm. Schopenhauer, although Wagner admired him as the greatest

thinker of all time, expresses himself very decidedly on this point.

‘The grand opera,’ he says,[187] ‘is, properly speaking, no product of

pure artistic sense, but rather of the somewhat barbaric conception

of elevating æsthetic enjoyment through accumulation of means,

simultaneity of quite different impressions, and intensification of the

effect through the multiplication of the operating masses and forces;

while, on the other hand, music, as the mightiest of all arts, is able

by itself alone completely to occupy the mind which is susceptible to

it; indeed, its loftiest productions, to be appropriately grasped and

enjoyed, demand a mind wholly undivided and undiverted, so that it may

yield itself up to them, and lose itself in them, in order completely

to understand their incredible inwardness of language. Instead of

this, in highly complicated operatic music the mind is besieged at

the same time by way of the eye, by means of the most variegated

pomp, the most fantastic pictures, and the liveliest impressions of

light and colour; while over and above this it is occupied with the

story of the piece.... Strictly speaking, then, one may call opera an

unmusical invention for the benefit of unmusical minds, into which

music must only be smuggled by means of a medium foreign to it, that

is, as a sort of accompaniment to a long spun-out, insipid love-story,

and its poetical thin broth; for the libretto of an opera does not

tolerate concise poetry, full of genius and thought.’ This is an

absolute condemnation of the Wagnerian idea of the musical drama as

the collective art-work of the future. It might seem, it is true,

that certain recent experiments in psychophysics had come to the help

of Wagner’s theory of the reciprocal enhancement of the simultaneous

effects of different arts. Charles Féré[188] has, in fact, shown that

the ear hears more keenly when the eye is simultaneously stimulated

by an agreeable (dynamogenous) colour; but, in the first place, this

phenomenon may also be interpreted thus: that the keenness of hearing

is enhanced not by the visual impression as such, not simply as

sense excitation, but only through its dynamogenous quality, which

arouses the whole nervous system as well to a more lively activity.

And then the question in Féré’s experiments is merely one of simple

sense-perceptions, whereas the musical drama is supposed to awaken

a higher cerebral activity, to produce presentations and thoughts,

together with direct emotions; in which case each of the arts acting

in concert will produce, in consequence of the necessary dispersion of

the attention to it, a more feeble effect than if it appealed by itself

alone to sense and intellect.

Wagner’s second assertion, that the natural evolution of each art

necessarily leads it to the surrender of its independence and to its

fusion with the other arts,[189] contradicts so strongly all experience

and all the laws of evolution, that it can at once be characterized

as delirious. Natural development always proceeds from the simple to

the complex--not inversely; progress consists in differentiation,

_i.e._, in the evolution of originally similar parts into special

organs of different structure and independent functions, and not in

the retrogression of differentiated beings of rich specialization to a

protoplasm without physiognomy.

The arts have not arisen accidentally; their differentiation is the

consequence of organic necessity; once they have attained independence,

they will never surrender it. They can degenerate, they can even die

out, but they can never again shrink back into the germ from which

they have sprung. The effort to return to beginnings is, however, a

peculiarity of degeneration, and founded in its deepest essence. The

degenerate subject is himself on the downward road from the height

of organic development which our species has reached; his imperfect

brain is incapable of the highest and most refined operations of

thought; he has therefore a strong desire to lighten them, to simplify

the multifariousness of phenomena and make them easier to survey;

to drag everything animate and inanimate down to lower and older

stages of existence, in order to make them more easy of access to

his comprehension. We have seen that the French Symbolists, with

their colour-hearing, wished to degrade man to the indifferentiated

sense-perceptions of the pholas or oyster. Wagner’s fusion of the

arts is a pendant to this notion. His _Art-work of the Future_ is

the art-work of times long past. What he takes for evolution is

retrogression, and a return to a primeval human, nay, to a pre-human

stage.

Still more extraordinary than the fundamental idea of the book is its

linguistic form. For example, let us estimate the following remarks

on musical art (p. 68): ‘The sea separates and unites countries; thus

musical art separates and unites the two extreme poles of human art,

dancing and poetry. It is the heart of man; the blood which takes its

circulation from it gives to the outward flesh its warm living colour;

but it nourishes with an undulating, elastic force the nerves of the

brain which are directed inward’ [!!]. ‘Without the activity of the

heart, the activity of the brain would become a piece of mechanical

skill [!], the activity of the external limbs an equally mechanical,

emotionless procedure.’ ‘By means of the heart the intellect feels

itself related to the entire body [!]; the mere sensuous man rises

to intellectual activity’ [!]. ‘Now, the organ of the heart [!] is

_sound_, and its artistic language is music.’ What here floated before

the mind of Wagner was a comparison, in itself senseless, between the

function of music as the medium of expression for the feelings, and

the function of the blood as the vehicle of nutritive materials for

the organism. But as his mystically-disposed brain was not capable

of clearly grasping the various parts of this intricate idea, and of

arranging them in parallel lines, he entangled himself in the absurdity

of an ‘activity of the brain without activity of the heart’; of a

‘relation between the intellect and the whole body through the heart,’

etc., and finally attains to the pure twaddle of calling ‘sound’ the

‘organ of the heart.’

He wishes to express the very simple thought that music cannot

communicate definite images and judgments, but merely feelings of

a general character; and for this purpose devises the following

rigmarole (p. 88): ‘It is never able ... of itself alone to bring

the human individual, determined as to sensation and morals, to an

exactly perceptible, distinctive representation; it is in its infinite

involution always and only feeling; it appears as an _accompaniment_

of the moral deed, not as the _deed itself_; it can place feelings

and dispositions side by side, not develop in necessary sequence one

disposition from another; it is lacking in _moral will_’ [!].

Let the reader further bury himself in this passage (p. 159): ‘It

is only and exactly in the degree to which the woman of perfected

womanliness, in her love for the man, and through her absorption into

his being, shall have developed the masculine element as well as this

womanliness, and brought it with the purely womanly element in herself

to a complete consummation; in other words, in the degree in which she

is not only the man’s mistress, but also his friend, is the man able to

find perfect satisfaction in a woman’s love.’

Wagner’s admirers asseverate that they understand this string of words

thrown together at random. Indeed, they find them remarkably clear!

This, however, should not surprise us. Readers who through weakness

of mind or flightiness of thought are incapable of attention always

understand everything. For them there exists neither obscurity nor

nonsense. They seek in the words over which their absent gaze flits

superficially, not the author’s thoughts, but a reflection of their own

rambling dreams. Those who have lived lovingly observant in children’s

nurseries must have frequently seen the game in which a child takes

a book, or printed paper, and, holding it before his face, generally

upside down, begins gravely to read aloud, often the story told him

by his mamma yesterday before he dropped asleep, or, more frequently,

the fancies which at the moment are buzzing in his little head. This

is somewhat the procedure of these blessed readers who understand

everything. They do not read what is in the books, but what they put

into them; and as far as the process and result of this mental activity

are concerned, it is certainly very much a matter of indifference what

the author has actually thought and said.

The incoherence of Wagner’s thought, determined as it is by the

excitations of the moment, manifests itself in his constant

contradictions. At one time (p. 187) he asserts, ‘The highest aim of

mankind is the artistic; the most highly artistic is the drama;’ and in

a foot-note (p. 194) he exclaims, ‘These easy-going creatures are fain

to see and hear everything, except _the real, undisfigured human being_

who stands exhorting at the exit of their dreams. _But it is exactly

this very human being whom we must now place in the foreground._’ It is

evident that one of these affirmations is diametrically opposed to the

other. The ‘artistic’ ‘dramatic’ man is not the ‘real’ man, and it will

be impossible for him, who looks upon it as his task to occupy himself

with the real man, to recognise art as ‘the highest aim of man,’ and to

regard his ‘dreams’ as the most distinguished of his activities.

In one passage (p. 206) he says: ‘Who, therefore, will be _the artist

of the future_? Unquestionably the poet. But _who_ will be the poet?

Incontestably the _interpreter_. Again, however, _who_ will be the

interpreter? Necessarily the _association of all artists_.’ If this

has any sense at all, it can only be that in the future the people

will jointly write and act their dramas; and that Wagner really meant

this he proves in the passage (p. 225) where he meets the objection

he anticipated, that therefore the mob is to be the creator of the

art-work of the future, with the words, ‘Bear in mind that this mob

is in no way a normal product of real human nature, but rather the

artificial result of your unnatural civilization; that all the devices

and abominations which disgust you in this mob are only the desperate

movements of the fight which real human nature is carrying on against

its cruel oppressor, modern civilization.’ Let us contrast with

these expressions the following passage from the treatise, _What is

German?_[190]: ‘The fact that from the bosom of the German race there

have sprung Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven, too easily

seduces the greater number of persons of mediocre gifts into regarding

these great minds as belonging by right to them, and to attempt, with

the complacency of a demagogue, to persuade the masses that they

themselves are Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven.’ But who, if

not Wagner himself, has thus persuaded the masses, proclaiming them to

be the ‘artists of the future’? And this very madness, which he himself

recognises as such in the remark quoted, has made a great impression

on the multitude. They have taken literally what Wagner, with the

‘complacency of a demagogue,’ has persuasively said to them. They have

really imagined themselves to be the ‘artists of the future,’ and we

have lived to see societies formed in many places in Germany who wanted

to build theatres of the future, and themselves to perform works of the

future in them! And these societies were joined not only by students

or young commercial employés in whom a certain propensity for acting

plays comes as a malady of adolescence, and who persuade themselves

that they are serving the ‘ideal’ when with childish vanity and in

grotesque theatrical costume they gesticulate and declaim before their

touched and admiring relatives and acquaintances. Nay, old burgesses,

bald and bulky, abandoned their sacred _skat_, and even the thrice-holy

morning tankard, and prepared themselves devoutly for noble dramatic

achievements! Since the memorable occasion on which Quince, Snug,

Bottom, Flute, Snout, and Starveling rehearsed their admirable _Pyramus

and Thisbe_, the world has seen no similar spectacle. Emotional

shopkeepers and enthusiastic counter-jumpers got Wagner’s absurdities

on the brain, and the provincials and Philistines whom his joyful

message had reached actually set about with their united strength to

carry on the work of Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven.

In the passages quoted, in which, in the most used-up style of

Rousseau, he glorifies the masses, speaks of ‘unnatural culture,’ and

calls ‘modern civilization’ ‘the cruel oppressor of human nature,’

Wagner betrays that mental condition which the degenerate share with

enlightened reformers, born criminals with the martyrs of human

progress, namely, deep, devouring discontent with existing facts. This

certainly shows itself otherwise in the degenerate than in reformers.

The latter grow angry over real evils only, and make rational proposals

for their remedy which are in advance of the time: these remedies may

presuppose a better and wiser humanity than actually exists, but, at

least, they are capable of being defended on reasonable grounds. The

degenerate subject, on the other hand, selects among the arrangements

of civilization such as are either immaterial or distinctly suitable,

in order to rebel against them. His fury has either ridiculously

insignificant aims or simply beats the air. He either gives no earnest

thought to improvement, or hatches astoundingly mad projects for making

the world happy. His fundamental frame of mind is persistent rage

against everything and everyone, which he displays in venomous phrases,

savage threats, and the destructive mania of wild beasts. Wagner is a

good specimen of this species. He would like to crush ‘political and

criminal civilization,’ as he expresses it. In what, however, does

the corruption of society and the untenableness of the condition of

everything reveal themselves to him? In the fact that operas are played

with tripping airs, and ballets are performed! And how shall humanity

attain its salvation! By performing the musical drama of the future! It

is to be hoped that no criticism of this universal plan of salvation

will be demanded of me.

Wagner is a declared anarchist. He distinctly develops the teaching

of this faction in the _Art-work of the Future_ (p. 217): ‘_All_ men

have but _one_ common _need_ ... the need of _living_ and _being

happy_. Herein lies the natural bond between all men.... It is only

the special needs which, according to time, place, and individuality,

make themselves known and increase, which in the rational condition

of future humanity can serve as a basis for special associations....

These associations will change, will take another form, dissolve

and reconstitute themselves according as those needs change and

reappear.’[191] He does not conceal the fact that this ‘rational

condition of future humanity’ ‘can be brought about only by force’ (p.

228). ‘Necessity must force us, too, through the Red Sea if we, purged

of our shame, are to reach the Promised Land. We shall not be drowned

in it; it is destructive only to the _Pharaohs_ of this world, who

have once already been swallowed up--man and horse ... the arrogant,

proud Pharaohs who then forgot that once a poor shepherd’s son with his

shrewd advice had saved their land from starvation.’

Together with this anarchistic acerbity, there is another feeling that

controls the entire conscious and unconscious mental life of Wagner,

viz., sexual emotion. He has been throughout his life an erotic (in a

psychiatric sense), and all his ideas revolve about woman. The most

ordinary incitements, even those farthest removed from the province

of the sexual instinct, never fail to awaken in his consciousness

voluptuous images of an erotic character, and the bent of the automatic

association of ideas is in him always directed towards this pole of his

thought. In this connection let this passage be read from the _Art-work

of the Future_ (p. 44), where he seeks to demonstrate the relation

between the art of dancing, music, and poetry: ‘In the contemplation

of this ravishing dance of the most genuine and noblest muses, of the

artistic man [?], we now see the three arm-in-arm lovingly entwined

up to their necks; then this, then that one, detaching herself from

the entwinement, as if to display to the others her beautiful form

in complete separation, touching the hands of the others only with

the extreme tips of her fingers; now the one, entranced by a backward

glance at the twin forms of her closely entwined sisters, bending

towards them; then two, carried away by the allurements of the one

[!] greeting her in homage; finally all, in close embrace, breast to

breast, limb to limb, in an ardent kiss of love, coalescing in one

blissfully living shape. This is the love and life, the joy and wooing

of art,’ etc. (Observe the word-play: _Lieben und Leben, Freuen und

Freien_!) Wagner here visibly loses the thread of his argument; he

neglects what he really wishes to say, and revels in the picture of

the three dancing maidens, who have arisen before his mind’s eye,

following with lascivious longing the outline of their forms and their

seductive movements.

The shameless sensuality which prevails in his dramatic poems has

impressed all his critics. Hanslick[192] speaks of the ‘bestial

sensuality’ in _Rheingold_, and says of _Siegfried_: ‘The feverish

accents, so much beloved by Wagner, of an insatiable sensuality,

blazing to the uttermost limits--this ardent moaning, sighing, crying,

and sinking to the ground, move us with repugnance. The text of these

love-scenes becomes sometimes, in its exuberance, sheer nonsense.’

Compare in the first act of the _Walküre_,[193] in the scene between

Siegmund and Sieglinde, the following stage directions: ‘Hotly

interrupting’; ‘embraces her with fiery passion’; ‘in gentle ecstasy’;

‘she hangs enraptured upon his neck’; ‘close to his eyes’; ‘beside

himself’; ‘in the highest intoxication,’ etc. At the conclusion, it

is said, ‘The curtain falls quickly,’ and frivolous critics have not

failed to perpetrate the cheap witticism, ‘Very necessary, too.’ The

amorous whinings, whimperings and ravings of _Tristan und Isolde_,

the entire second act of _Parsifal_, in the scene between the hero

and the flower-girls, and then between him and Kundry in Klingsor’s

magic garden, are worthy to rank with the above passages. It certainly

redounds to the high honour of German public morality, that Wagner’s

operas could have been publicly performed without arousing the greatest

scandal. How unperverted must wives and maidens be when they are in a

state of mind to witness these pieces without blushing crimson, and

sinking into the earth for shame! How innocent must even husbands and

fathers be who allow their womankind to go to these representations

of ‘lupanar’ incidents! Evidently the German audiences entertain

no misgivings concerning the actions and attitudes of Wagnerian

personages; they seem to have no suspicion of the emotions by which

they are excited, and what intentions their words, gestures and acts

denote; and this explains the peaceful artlessness with which these

audiences follow theatrical scenes during which, among a less childlike

public, no one would dare lift his eyes to his neighbour or endure his

glance.

With Wagner amorous excitement assumes the form of mad delirium.

The lovers in his pieces behave like tom-cats gone mad, rolling in

contortions and convulsions over a root of valerian. They reflect a

state of mind in the poet which is well known to the professional

expert. It is a form of Sadism. It is the love of those degenerates

who, in sexual transport, become like wild beasts.[194] Wagner

suffered from ‘erotic madness,’ which leads coarse natures to murder

for lust, and inspires ‘higher degenerates’ with works like _Die

Walküre_, _Siegfried_, and _Tristan und Isolde_.

Wagner’s graphomania is shown not only by the substance, but also by

the outward form of his writings. The reader will have been able to

remark in the quotations given what a misuse Wagner makes of italics.

He often has whole half-pages printed in spaced letters. Lombroso

expressly establishes this phenomenon among graphomaniacs.[195] It

is sufficiently explained by the peculiarity of mystical thought, so

often set forth in this work. No linguistic form which the mystically

degenerate subject can give to his thought-phantoms satisfies him; he

is always conscious that the phrases he is writing do not express the

mazy processes of his brain; and as he is forced to abandon the attempt

to embody these in words, he seeks, by means of notes of exclamation,

dashes, dots, and blanks, to impart to his writings more of mystery

than the words themselves can express.

The irresistible propensity to play on words--another peculiarity

of graphomaniacs and imbeciles--is developed to a high degree in

Wagner. I will here give only a few examples from the _Art-work of the

Future_--p. 56: ‘Thus it [the science of music] acquires through sound,

which has become speech ... its most _exalted satisfaction_, and at

the same time its most _satisfying exaltation_,’ p. 91: ‘Like a second

Prometheus, who from _Thon_ (clay) formed men, Beethoven had striven to

form them from _Ton_ (music). Not from clay or music (_Thon_ or _Ton_),

but from both of these substances, should man, the image of Zeus, the

dispenser of life, be created.’ Special attention may, however, be

called to the following astounding passage (p. 103): ‘If fashion or

custom permitted us again to adopt, in speech and writing, the genuine

and true use of _Tichten_ for _Dichten_ (to compose poetry), we should

thus obtain, in the united names of the three primitive human arts,

_Tanz_-, _Ton_-, and _Tichtkunst_ (dancing, music, and poetry), a

beautifully significant, sensuous image of the essence of this trinity

of sisters, viz., a perfect alliteration.... This alliteration would,

moreover, be peculiarly characteristic, on account of the position

held in it by _Tichtkunst_ (poetry), for only as its last member would

_Tichtkunst_ transform the alliteration into rhyme,’ etc.

We now come to the mysticism of Wagner, which permeates all his works,

and has become one of the chief causes of his influence over his

contemporaries--at least, outside Germany. Although he is irreligious

through and through, and frequently attacks positive religions, their

doctrines and their priests, there have, nevertheless, remained

active in him from childhood (passed in an atmosphere of Christian

Protestant views and religious practices) ideas and sentiments which

he subsequently transformed so strangely in his degenerate mind. This

phenomenon, viz., the persistence, in the midst of later doubts and

denials, of early-acquired Christian views, operating as an ever-active

leaven, singularly altering the whole mind, and at the same time

themselves suffering manifold decomposition and deformation--may be

frequently observed in confused brains. We shall meet it, for example,

in Ibsen. At the foundation of all Wagner’s poems and theoretical

writings there is to be found a more or less potent sediment of the

Catechism, distorted as to its doctrines; and in his most luxuriant

pictures, between the thick, crude colours, we get glimpses of strange

and hardly recognisable touches, betraying the fact that the scenes are

brutally daubed on the pale background of Gospel reminiscences.

One idea, or, more accurately, one word, has remained especially deeply

fixed in his mind, and pursued him throughout his whole life as a real

obsession, viz., the word ‘redemption.’ True, it has not with him the

value it possesses in the language of theology. To the theologian

‘redemption,’ this central idea of the whole Christian doctrine,

signifies the sublime act of superhuman love, which freely takes upon

itself the greatest suffering, and gladly bears it, that it may free

from the power of evil those whose strength is insufficient for such a

task. So understood, redemption presupposes three things. Firstly, we

must assume a dualism in nature, most distinctly developed in the Zend

religion; the existence of a first principle of good and one of evil,

between which mankind is placed, and becomes the cause of their strife.

Secondly, the one who is to be redeemed must be free from all conscious

and wilful fault; he must be the victim of superior forces which he is

himself incapable of warding off. Thirdly in order that the redeemer’s

act may be a true act of salvation and acquire power to deliver, he

must, in the fulfilment of a clearly recognised and purposed mission,

offer himself in sacrifice. It is true that a tendency has often

asserted itself to think of redemption as an act of grace, in which

not only the victims, but also sinners, may participate; but the

Church has always recognised the immorality of such a conception, and

has expressly taught that, in order to receive redemption, the guilty

must himself strive for it, through repentance and penance, and not

passively await it as a completely unmerited gift.

This theological redemption is not redemption in Wagner’s sense. With

him it has never any clearly recognisable import, and serves only to

denote something beautiful and grand, which he does not more closely

specify. At the outset the word has evidently made a deep impression on

his imagination, and he subsequently uses it like a minor chord, let

us say _a_, _c_, _e_, which is likewise without definite significance,

but, nevertheless, awakens emotion and peoples consciousness with

floating presentations. With Wagner someone is constantly being

‘redeemed.’ If (in the _Art-work of the Future_) the art of painting

ceases to paint pictures, and produces thenceforth only decorations

for the theatre, this is its ‘redemption.’ In the same way the music

accompanying a poem is a ‘redeemed’ music. Man is ‘redeemed’ when

he loves a woman, and the people is ‘redeemed’ when it plays at the

drama. His compositions also turn upon ‘redemption.’ Nietzsche[196] has

already remarked this, and makes merry over it, if with repulsively

superficial witticisms. ‘Wagner,’ he says, ‘has meditated on nothing

so much as on redemption’ (a wholly false assertion, since Wagner’s

redemption-twaddle is certainly no result of meditation, but only

a mystical echo of childish emotions); ‘his opera is the opera of

redemption. With him someone is always wanting to be redeemed--now a

male, now a female.... Who, if not Wagner, teaches us that innocence

has a predilection for redeeming interesting sinners (the case of

_Tannhäuser_)? Or that even the Wandering Jew will be redeemed and

become sedentary when he marries (the case of _The Flying Dutchman_)?

Or that depraved old wantons prefer to be redeemed by chaste youths

(the case of _Kundry_)? Or that beauteous maidens like best to be

redeemed by a knight who is a Wagnerian (the case in _Meistersinger_)?

Or that even married women like to be redeemed by a knight (the case of

_Isolde_)? Or that the ancient god, after having morally compromised

himself in every respect, is redeemed by a free-thinker and an immoral

character (the case in the _Niebelungen_)? How particularly admirable

is this last profundity! Do you understand it? As for me, defend me

from understanding it.’

The work of Wagner which may be truly termed ‘the opera of redemption’

is _Parsifal_. Here we may catch Wagner’s mind in its most nonsensical

vagaries. In _Parsifal_ two persons are redeemed: King Amfortas and

Kundry. The King has allowed himself to become infatuated with the

charms of Kundry, and has sinned in her arms. As a punishment, the

magic spear which had been entrusted to him has been taken from him,

and be wounded by this sacred weapon. The wound gapes and bleeds

unceasingly, and causes him dreadful suffering. Nothing can heal it

but the spear itself which gave it. But ‘the pure fool who through

compassion knows’ can alone wrest the spear from the wicked magician,

Klingsor. Kundry, when a young maiden, had seen the Saviour on the path

of his Passion, and had laughed at him. As a penalty for her act she

is doomed to live for ever, longing in vain for death, and seducing

to sin all men who approach her. Only if a man is able to resist her

allurements can she be redeemed from her curse. (One man has, in fact,

resisted her, the magician Klingsor. Yet this victorious resistance

has not redeemed her as it ought. Why? Wagner does not reveal this by

a single syllable.) It is Parsifal who brings redemption to the two

accursed ones. The ‘pure fool’ has no inkling that he is predestined

to redeem Amfortas and Kundry, and he neither undergoes any suffering

nor exposes himself to any serious danger in accomplishing the act

of salvation. It is true that, in forcing his way into the enchanted

garden, he is obliged to have a small bout with its knights, but this

skirmish is far more a pleasure than an effort for him, for he is far

stronger than his adversaries, and, after some playful passes, puts

them to flight, bleeding and beaten. He certainly resists the beauty of

Kundry, and this is meritorious, yet it hardly constitutes an act of

deadly self-sacrifice. He obtains the magic spear without any effort.

Klingsor hurls it at him to slay him, but the weapon ‘remains floating

above his head,’ and Parsifal has only to stretch out his hand to take

it at his convenience, and then to fulfil his mission.

Every individual feature of this mystical piece is in direct contrast

to the Christian idea of redemption, which has nevertheless inspired

it. Amfortas is in need of redemption through his own weakness and

guilt, not on account of an invincible fate, and he is redeemed without

any assistance on his part beyond whining and moaning. The salvation he

is awaiting and ultimately obtains has its source completely outside

his will and consciousness. He has no part in its attainment. Another

effects it for him, and bestows it on him as a gift. The redemption

is a purely external affair, a lucky windfall, and not the reward of

an inward moral struggle. Still more monstrous are the conditions of

Kundry’s redemption. Not only is she not allowed to labour for her

own salvation, but she is compelled to employ all her strength to

prevent it; for her redemption depends on her being despised by a man,

and the task to which she has been condemned is to turn to account

all the seductive power of beauty and passionate solicitation to win

over the man. She must by all possible means thwart the man by whom

her redemption is to come, from becoming her redeemer. If the man

yields to her charms, then the redemption is frustrated, not through

her fault, though by her action; if the man resists the temptation,

she obtains redemption without deserving it, because in spite of her

opposing effort. It is impossible to concoct a situation more absurd

and at the same time more immoral. Parsifal the redeemer is, in fine,

from beginning to end, a mystic re-incarnation of ‘Hans in Luck’ in

the German fairy-tale. He succeeds in everything without personal

effort. He sets out to kill a swan, and finds the Grail and the royal

crown. His redeemership is no self-sacrifice, but a benefice. The

favour of Heaven has called him to an enviable, honourable office--on

what powerful recommendation Wagner does not disclose. But a closer

examination reveals worse things. Parsifal, the ‘pure fool,’ is simply

a precipitate of confused reminiscences of Christology. Powerfully

struck by the poetical elements of the Saviour’s life and sufferings,

Wagner has been impelled to externalize his impressions and emotions,

and has created Parsifal, whom he causes to experience some of the most

affecting scenes of the Gospel, and who in his hands becomes (partly,

perhaps, without his being aware of it) at once a foolish and frivolous

caricature of Jesus Christ. In the mystical work, the temptation of the

Saviour in the desert is transformed into the temptation of Parsifal by

Kundry. The scene in the Pharisee’s house, where the Magdalene anoints

the Saviour’s feet, is reproduced exactly: Kundry bathes and anoints

Parsifal’s feet, and dries them with her unbound hair; and the ‘pure

fool’ plagiarizes the words of Christ, ‘Thy sins be forgiven thee,’

in this exclamation: ‘Thus I accomplish my first office; be baptized

and believe on the Redeemer.’ That the ordinary theatre-goer is not

shocked by this misused application of the Christ legend--nay, that in

the distorted fragments of the Gospel he is able to revive some of the

emotions it perhaps at one time excited in him--is conceivable. But

it is incomprehensible that earnest believers, and especially zealous

fanatics, have never perceived what a profanation of their most sacred

ideas is perpetrated by Wagner, when he endows his Parsifal with traits

of the Christ Himself.

We may mention only one of the other absurd details of the _Parsifal_.

The aged Titurel has succumbed to the earthly penalty of death, but

through the Saviour’s mercy continues to live in the grave. The

sight of the Grail continually renews for a time his waning vital

strength. Titurel seems to attach a great value to this comfortless

life-in-death existence. ‘By the mercy of the Saviour I live in the

tomb,’ he joyously cries from his coffin, demanding with impetuous

vehemence that the Grail be shown him, in order that his life may

thereby be prolonged. ‘Am I to-day to see once more the Grail and

live?’ he asks in anguish, and because he receives no immediate answer

thus laments, ‘Must I die unaccompanied by the Deliverer?’ His son,

Amfortas, hesitates, whereupon the old man gives his orders: ‘Unveil

the Grail! The benediction!’ And when his wishes are complied with, he

exults: ‘Oh, sacred bliss! How bright the Lord doth greet us to-day!’

Subsequently Amfortas has for some time neglected the unveiling of the

Grail, and hence Titurel has had to die. Amfortas is in despair. ‘My

father! highly blessed of heroes!... I, who alone was fain to die, to

thee have I given death!’ From all this it undoubtedly results that all

the persons concerned see in life, even if it be the shadowy and empty

life of a being already laid in his coffin, an exceedingly precious

possession, and in death a bitter misfortune. And this takes place in

the same piece in which Kundry endures eternal life as a frightful

curse, and passionately longs for death as a most delicious salvation!

Is a more ridiculous contradiction conceivable? Moreover, the Titurel

episode is a denial of all the premises of _Parsifal_, constructed as

it is on the foundation of the religious idea of personal persistence

after death. How can death frighten the man who is convinced that the

bliss of paradise awaits him? We are here in the presence of the same

non-comprehension of his own assumptions which has already struck

us in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Tolstoi. But this is precisely the

peculiarity of morbidly mystic thought. It unites mutually exclusive

ideas; it shuns the law of consistency, and imperturbably combines

details which are dumbfounded at finding themselves in company. We do

not observe this phenomenon in one who is a mystic through ignorance,

mental indolence, or imitation. He may take an absurd idea as a point

of departure for a train of thought; but the latter unrolls itself

rationally and consistently, and suffers no gross contradiction among

its particular members.

As Christology inspired Wagner with the figures of _Parsifal_, so

did the Eucharist inspire him with the most effective scene of the

piece--the love-feast of the Grail. It is the _mise-en-scène_ of

the Catholic Mass, with the heretical addition of one Protestant

feature--the partaking by the communicants of the elements in both

kinds. The unveiling of the Grail corresponds to the elevation

of the Host. The acolytes take the form of the choir of boys and

youths. In the antiphonal songs and the actions of Amfortas, we find

approximations to all four parts of the Mass. The knights of the Grail

intone a sort of stunted introit, the long plaint of Amfortas: ‘No!

Let it not be unveiled! Oh, may no one, no one, fathom the depths of

this torment!’ etc., may be regarded as a _Confiteor_. The boys sing

the offertory (‘Take ye my blood for the sake of our love!’ etc.).

Amfortas proceeds to the consecration; all partake in the Communion,

and there is even a parodied reminiscence of the ‘Ite, missa est’ in

Gurnemanz’s exclamation, ‘Go out hence upon thy way!’ Since Constantine

the Great, since the elevation of Christianity to the rank of a State

religion, no poet has dared do what Wagner has done; he has drawn

theatrical effects from the incomparable rich emotional content of the

function of the Mass. He felt profoundly the symbolism of the Lord’s

Supper; it provoked in him a powerful mystical excitement, and the

need arose in him of endowing the symbolical event with a dramatic

form, and of sensuously experiencing in all its details and in its

entirety that which in the sacrifice of the Mass is only indicated,

condensed, and spiritualized. He wished to see and feel in his own

person how the elect enjoy, amid violent emotions, the body of Christ

and His redeeming blood; and how super-terrestrial phenomena, the

purple gleaming of the Grail and the downward hovering dove (in the

final scene), etc., make palpable the real presence of Christ and the

divine nature of the Eucharist. Just as Wagner has borrowed from the

Church his inspiration for the scenes in the Grail, and then for his

own purposes has popularized the liturgy in the style of the _Biblia

Pauperum_, so does the audience find again the cathedral and high mass

on his stage, and import into the piece all the emotions left in their

soul by Church ceremonies. The real priest in his sacerdotal robes,

the remembrance of his gestures, of the hand-bell and the genuflexions

of the servers, the blue reek and perfume of the incense, the pealing

of the organ and the play of chequered sunlight through the stained

windows of the church--these are, in the heart of the public, Wagner’s

collaborators; and it is not his art which lulls them into mystic

ecstasy, but the fundamental mood inculcated in the vast majority of

white races by two centuries of Christian sentiment.

Mysticism is, as we know, always accompanied by eroticism, especially

in the degenerate, whose emotionalism has its chief source in

morbidly excited states of the sexual centres. Wagner’s imagination

is perpetually occupied with woman. But he never sees her relation

to man in the form of healthy and natural love, which is a benefit

and satisfaction for both lovers. As with all morbid erotics (we have

already remarked this in Verlaine and Tolstoi), woman presents herself

to him as a terrible force of nature, of which man is the trembling,

helpless victim. The woman that he knows is the gruesome Astarté of

the Semites, the frightful man-eating Kali Bhagawati of the Hindoos, an

apocalyptic vision of smiling bloodthirstiness, of eternal perdition

and infernal torment, in demoniacally beautiful embodiment. No poetical

problem has so profoundly moved him as the relation between man and

this his ensnaring destroyer. He has approached this problem from

all sides, and has given it different solutions corresponding to his

instincts and views of morality. The man frequently succumbs to the

temptress, but Wagner revolts against this weakness, of which he is

himself only too conscious, and in his chief works makes the man offer

a desperate, but finally victorious, resistance. Not, however, by his

own strength does man tear himself from the paralyzing charm of woman.

He must receive supernatural aid. This proceeds most frequently from a

pure and unselfish virgin, who forms the antithesis to the sphinx with

soft woman’s body and lion’s paws. In conformity with the psychological

law of contrast, Wagner invents as a counterpart to the terrible

woman of his inmost perception an angelic woman, who is all love, all

devotion, all celestial mildness; a woman who asks for nothing and

gives all; a woman soothing, caressing and healing; in a word, a woman

for whom an unhappy creature pants as he writhes, consumed by flames,

in the white-hot flames of Belit. Wagner’s Elizabeth, Elsa, Senta, and

Gertrude are extremely instructive manifestations of erotic mysticism,

in which the half-unconscious idea is struggling for form, viz., that

the safety of the sexually crazy degenerate lies in purity, continence,

or in the possession of a wife having no sort of individuality, no

desire and no rights, and hence incapable of ever proving dangerous to

the man.

In one of his first compositions, as in his last, in _Tannhäuser_ as in

_Parsifal_, he treats of the combat between man and his corruptress,

the fly versus the spider, and in this way testifies that for

thirty-three years, from youth to old age, the subject has never been

absent from his mind. In _Tannhäuser_ it is the beautiful devil Venus

herself who ensnares the hero, and with whom he has to wage a desperate

conflict for the salvation of his soul. The pious and chaste Elizabeth,

this dream-being, woven of moonlight, prayer, and song, becomes his

‘redeemer.’ In _Parsifal_ the beautiful devil is named Kundry, and the

hero escapes the danger with which she threatens his soul only because

he is ‘the pure fool,’ and is in a state of grace.

In the _Walküre_ Wagner’s imagination surrenders itself to unbridled

passion. He here represents the ardent man wildly and madly abandoning

himself to his appetite, without regard to the dictates of society, and

without attempting to resist the furious impetuosity of his instinct.

Siegmund sees Sieglinde, and thenceforth has but one idea--to possess

her. That she is another’s wife--nay, that he recognises her as his

own sister--does not check him for a moment. Those considerations are

as feathers before the storm. He pays for his night of pleasure by his

death the following morning. For with Wagner love is always a fatality,

and ever round its pillow blaze the flames of hell. And as he has not

made manifest in Sieglinde the images of carnage and annihilation

evoked in him by his idea of woman, he personifies these separately in

the _Walküre_. Their appearance in the drama is for him a psychological

need. The traits inseparable in his mind from his conception of woman,

and ordinarily united by him in a single figure, are here separated and

raised to the dignity of independent types. Venus, Kundry, are seducer

and destroyer in one person. In the _Walküre_ Sieglinde is only the

seducer, but the destroyer grows into a horde of gruesome Amazons, who

drink the blood of battling men, revel in the spectacle of murderous

blows, and rush with wild, exulting cries across the corpse-strewn

waste.

_Siegfried_, _Götterdämmerung_, _Tristan und Isolde_ are exact

repetitions of the essential content of the _Walküre_. It is always

the dramatic embodiment of the same obsession of the terrors of love.

Siegfried sees Brunhilde in the midst of her fire-circle, and both

instantly fall into each other’s arms in a rage of love; but Siegfried

must expiate his happiness with his life, and falls under the steel

of Hagen. The mere death of Siegfried does not suffice for Wagner’s

imagination as the inevitable consequence of love; destiny must show

itself more terribly. The castle of Asgard itself breaks out in flames,

and the slave of love in dying drags to his own perdition all the

gods of heaven along with him. _Tristan und Isolde_ is the echo of

this tragedy of passion. Here also is the complete annihilation of

the sentiment of duty and self-conquest, by the springing up of love

both in Tristan and Isolde; and here also is death as the natural

end towards which love is hurried. To express his fundamental mystic

thought, that love is an awful fatality wherewith the unapproachable

powers of destiny visit the poor mortal incapable of resistance, he

has resort to a childishly clumsy device; he introduces into his

compositions love-philtres of potent spell, now to explain the birth

of the passion itself, and to indicate its superhuman nature, as

in _Tristan und Isolde_; now to withdraw all the moral life of the

hero from the control of his will, and show him as the plaything of

super-terrestrial forces, as in the _Götterdämmerung_.

Thus Wagner’s poems give us a deep insight into the world of ideas of

an erotically emotional degenerate nature. They reveal the alternating

mental conditions of a most reckless sensuality, of a revolt of moral

sentiment against the tyranny of appetite, of the ruin of the higher

man and his despairing repentance. As has already been said, Wagner

is an admirer of Schopenhauer and his philosophy. Like his master,

he persuaded himself that life is a misfortune, and non-existence

salvation and happiness. Love, as the constantly active incitement

to the maintenance of the species and continuance of life, with all

its accompanying sufferings, was bound to seem to him the source of

all evil; and, on the other hand, the highest wisdom and morality, to

consist in the victorious resistance of this incitement, in chastity,

sterility, the negation of the will to perpetuate the species. And

while his judgment bound him to these views, his instincts attracted

him irresistibly to woman, and forced him during his whole life to

do all that flouted his convictions and condemned his doctrine. This

discord between his philosophy and his organic inclinations is the

inner tragedy of his mental life, and his poems form a unique whole,

recounting the process of the internal conflict. He sees a woman,

at once loses himself, and is absorbed in her charms (Siegmund and

Sieglinde, Siegfried and Brunhilde, Tristan and Isolde). This is a

great sin, demanding expiation; death alone is an adequate punishment

(final scenes in the _Walküre_, _Götterdämmerung_, _Tristan und

Isolde_). But the sinner has a timid and feeble excuse: ‘I could not

resist. I was the victim of superhuman powers. My seducer was of the

race of the gods’ (Sieglinde, Brunhilde). ‘Magic philtres deprived

me of my reason’ (Tristan, Siegfried in his relations with Gutrune).

How glorious to be strong enough to vanquish the devouring monster

of appetite within! How radiant and exalted the figure of a man able

to plant his foot on the neck of the demon woman! (Tannhäuser and

Parsifal). And, on the other hand, how beautiful and adorable the

woman who should not set ablaze the hell-fire of passion in man, but

aid him in quenching it; who should not exact of him a revolt against

reason, duty, and honour, but be an example to him of renunciation and

self-discipline; who, instead of enslaving him, should, as his loving

handmaid, divest herself of her own nature, to blend herself with his;

in a word, a woman who would leave him safe in his defencelessness,

because she herself would be unarmed! (Elizabeth, Elsa, Senta,

Gutrune). The creation of these forms of woman is a sort of _De

Profundis_ of the timid voluptuary, who feels the sting of the flesh,

and implores aid to protect him from himself.

Like all the degenerates, Wagner is wholly sterile as a poet, although

he has written a long series of dramatic works. The creative force

capable of reproducing the spectacle of universal normal life is

denied him. He has recourse to his own mystico-erotic emotions for the

emotional content of his pieces, and the external incidents forming

their skeleton are purely the fruits of reading, the reminiscences

of books which have made an impression on him. This is the great

difference between the healthy and the degenerate poet who receives

his sentiments at second-hand. The former is able to ‘plunge into

full human life,’ as Goethe says; to seize it, and either make it

enter all breathing and palpitating into a poem which itself thus

becomes a part of natural life, or else remould it with idealizing

art, suppressing its accidental, accessory features, so as to make

prominent the essential; and in this way convincingly to reveal law

behind enigmatically bewildering phenomena. The degenerate subject,

on the contrary, can do nothing with life; he is blind and deaf to

it. He is a stranger in the midst of healthy men. He lacks the organs

necessary for the comprehension of life--nay, even for its perception.

To work from a model does not lie within his powers. He can only copy

existing sketches, and then colour them subjectively with his own

emotions. He can see life only when it lies before him on paper in

black and white. While the healthy poet resembles the chlorophyllic

plant, which dives into the soil, and, by the honest labour of its own

roots, procures for itself the nutritive materials out of which it

constructs its blossoms and fruit, the degenerate poet has the nature

of a parasitic plant, which can only live on a host, and receives its

nutriment exclusively from the juices already elaborated by the latter.

There are modest parasites and proud parasites. Their range extends

from the insignificant lichen to the wondrous rafflesia, the flower

of which, a yard in breadth, illumines the sombre forests of Sumatra

with the wild magnificence of its blood-red colour. Wagner’s poems

have in them something of the carrion stench and uncanny beauty of

this plant of rapine and corruption. With the single exception of the

_Meistersinger_, they are grafted on the Icelandic sagas, the epics

of Gottfried of Strassburg, Wolfram of Eschenbach, and the singer of

the Wartburg war in the Manessian manuscript, as on so many trunks of

half-dead trees, and they draw their strength from these. _Tannhäuser_,

the _Niebelungen Tetralogy_, _Tristan und Isolde_, _Parsifal_, and

_Lohengrin_, are constructed entirely from materials supplied him by

ancient literature. _Rienzi_ he derives from written history, and the

_Fliegender Holländer_ from the tradition already utilized a hundred

times. Among popular legends, that of the Wandering Jew has made

the deepest impression on his mind, on account of its mysticism. He

has elaborated it once in the _Fliegender Holländer_; a second time

transposed it feature for feature into a feminine form in the person of

Kundry, not without weaving into this inversion some reminiscences of

the legend of Herodias. All this is patchwork and dilettantism. Wagner

deceives himself (probably unconsciously) as to his incapacity for

creating human beings, representing, not men, but gods and demi-gods,

demons and spectres, whose deeds are not to be explained by human

motives, but by mysterious destinies, curses and prophecies, fatal and

magic forces. That which passes before our eyes in Wagner’s pieces is

not life, but spectres, witches’ sabbaths, or dreams. He is a dealer

in old clothes, who has bought at second-hand the cast-off garments of

fairy-tales, and makes of them (often not without clever tailoring) new

costumes, in which we may recognise, strangely jumbled and joined, rags

of ancient gala stuffs and fragments of damascened suits of armour. But

these masquerading suits do not serve for clothes to a single being

of flesh and blood. Their apparent movements are produced exclusively

by the hand of Wagner, who has slipped into the empty doublets and

sleeves, and behind the flowing trains and dangling robes, and kicks

about in them with epileptic convulsions, that he may awaken in the

spectator the impression of a ghostly animation in this obsolete

wardrobe.

Healthy geniuses have also, no doubt, allied themselves with popular

tradition or history, like Goethe in _Faust_ and _Tasso_. But what a

difference between the respective treatment by a healthy poet and a

degenerate one of that which they find, of that which is given! To

the former it is a vessel which he fills with genuine, fresh life, so

that the new contents become the essential part; to the latter, on

the contrary, the outside is and remains the chief thing, and his own

activity consists at best in choking the receptacle with the chaff of

nonsensical phrases. The great poets, too, lay claim to the cuckoo’s

privilege of laying their egg in a strange nest. But the bird which

issues from the egg is so much larger, handsomer and stronger than

the original denizens, that the latter are mercilessly driven from

their home and the former remains the sole possessor. When the great

poet puts his new wine into old bottles, he doubtless shows a little

indolence, a little poverty of invention and a not very high-minded

reckoning on the reader’s pre-existing emotions. But he cannot be

held too rigorously accountable for this small amount of stinginess,

because, after all, he gives us so much that is his own. Imagine

_Faust_ deprived of all the portions drawn from old popular books;

there would still remain nearly everything; there would remain all of

the man who thirsts for knowledge and seeks for it; all the struggle

between his baser instincts craving for satisfaction, and the higher

morality rejoicing in renunciation; in brief, just that which makes

the work one of the loftiest poems of humanity. If, on the other hand,

Wagner’s old ancestral marionettes are stripped of their armour and

brocades, there remains nothing, or, at best, only air and a musty

smell. Assimilating minds have hundreds of times felt tempted to

modernize _Faust_. The undertaking is so sure of success that it is

superfluous; Faust in dress-coat would be no other than the unaltered

embodiment of Goethe’s own Faust. But imagine Lohengrin, Siegmund,

Tristan, Parsifal, as contemporaries! They would not even serve for

burlesque, in spite of the Tannhäuser lampoon by the old Viennese poet

Nestroy.

Wagner swaggered about the art-work of the future, and his partisans

hailed him as the artist of the future. He the artist of the future! He

is a bleating echo of the far-away past. His path leads back to deserts

long since abandoned by all life. Wagner is the last mushroom on the

dunghill of romanticism. This ‘modern’ is the degraded heir of a Tieck,

of a La Motte-Fouqué--nay more, sad to say, of a Johann Friedrich Kind.

The home of his intellect is the Dresden evening paper. He derives his

subsistence from the legacy of mediæval poems, and dies of starvation

when the remittance from the thirteenth century fails to arrive.

The subject alone of the Wagnerian poems can raise a claim to

serious consideration. As for their form, it is beneath criticism.

The absurdity of his style, his shallowness, the awkwardness of his

versification, his complete inability to clothe his feelings and

thoughts in anything like adequate language--these have been so often

pointed out and exposed in detail that I may spare myself the trouble

of dwelling on these points. But one faculty among the essential

constituents of dramatic endowment cannot be denied him--that of

picturesque imagination. It is developed in him to the point of genius.

Wagner as a dramatist is really a historical painter of the highest

rank. Nietzsche (in his skit, _Der Fall Wagner_[197]) perhaps means

the same when, without stopping at this important assertion, he calls

Wagner, not only ‘magnetizer’ and ‘collector of gew-gaws,’ but also

a ‘fresco-painter.’ This he is in a degree never yet attained by any

other dramatic author in the whole world of literature. Every action

embodies itself for him in a series of most imposing pictures, which,

when they are composed as Wagner has seen them with his inner eye, must

overwhelm and enrapture the beholder. The reception of the guests in

the hall of the Wartburg; the arrival and departure of Lohengrin in

the boat drawn by the swan; the gambols of the Rhine maidens in the

river; the defiling of the gods over the rainbow-bridge towards the

castle of Asgard; the bursting of the moonlight into Hunding’s hut;

the ride of the Walküre over the battlefield; Brunhilde in the circle

of fire; the final scene in _Götterdämmerung_, where Brunhilde flings

herself on to her horse and leaps into the midst of the funeral-pyre,

while Hagen throws himself into the surging Rhine, and the heavens

are aflame with the glow from the burning palace of the gods; the

love-feast of the knights in the castle of the Grail; the obsequies

of Titurel and the healing of Amfortas--these are pictures to which

nothing hitherto in art approaches. It is on account of this gift for

inventing incomparably imposing spectacles that Nietzsche has termed

Wagner a ‘comedian.’ The word signifies nothing, and, in so far as it

may contain a tinge of contempt, is unjust. Wagner is no comedian,

but a born painter. If he had been a healthy genius, endowed with

intellectual equilibrium, that is what he would undoubtedly have

become. His inner vision would have forced the brush into his hand,

and constrained him to realize it on canvas, by means of colour.

Leonardo da Vinci had the same gift. It made him the greatest painter

the world had yet known, and at the same time the unsurpassed deviser

and organizer of fêtes, pageants, triumphs, and allegorical plays,

which, perhaps more than his genius as a painter, won for him the

admiration of his princely patrons Ludovico Moro, Isabella of Aragon,

Cæsar Borgia, Charles VIII., Louis XII., Francis I. But Wagner, as is

the case with all the degenerate, did not see clearly into his own

nature. He did not understand his natural impulses. Perhaps also,

with the feeling of his own deep organic feebleness, he dreaded the

heavy labour of drawing and painting, and, conformably with the law of

least effort, his instinct sought vent in the theatre, where his inner

visions were embodied by others--the decorative painters, machinists,

and actors--without requiring him to exert himself. His pictures have

unquestionably a large share in the effect produced by his pieces.

They are admired without an inquiry into how far their introduction

is warranted by the rational course of the drama. However nonsensical

as part of an action, they justify their appearance, from an artistic

standpoint, by their intrinsic beauty, which makes of them independent

æsthetical phenomena. Through their enormous aggrandizement by the

media of the stage, their pictorial allurements are perceptible even to

the eye of the most crass Philistine, whose sense were otherwise dead

to them.

Of Wagner the musician, more important to all appearance than Wagner

the author, dramatic poet and fresco-painter, I treat lastly, because

this task will give us a clear proof of his degeneration, although

this is very much more evident in his writings than in his music,

where certain stigmata of degeneration are not so prominent, and where

others appear as its unmistakable advantages. The incoherence in words,

noticeable at once to an attentive person, does not exhibit itself in

music unless it is excessively strongly marked; the absurdity, the

contradictions, the twaddle, are hardly apparent in the language of

tones, because it is not the function of music to express an exact

meaning, and emotionalism is not in it an indication of disease, since

emotion is music’s proper essence.

We know, moreover, that high musical talent is compatible with a very

advanced state of degeneration--nay, even with pronounced delusion,

illusion, and idiocy. Sollier[198] says: ‘We have to deal with certain

aptitudes very often manifested with great intensity by idiots and

imbeciles.... That for music especially is often met with.... Although

this may seem disagreeable to musicians, it nevertheless proves that

music is the least intellectual of all the arts.’ Lombroso[199]

remarks: ‘It has been observed that the aptitude for music has been

displayed almost involuntarily and unexpectedly among many sufferers

from hypochondria and mania, and even among the really insane.’ He

cites, with other cases, a mathematician attacked with melancholia, who

improvised on the piano; a woman seized with megalomania, who ‘sang

very beautiful airs, at the same time improvising two different themes

on the piano’; a patient ‘who composed very beautiful new and melodious

tunes,’ etc.; and he adds in explanation that those who are afflicted

with megalomania and general paralysis surpass other mental invalids in

musical talent, ‘and from the very same cause as that of their unusual

aptitude for painting, viz., their violent mental excitation.’

Wagner the musician encounters his most powerful attacks from musicians

themselves. He himself bears witness to it:[200] ‘Both my friends

(Ferd. Hiller and Schumann) believed that they very soon discovered

me to be a musician of no remarkable endowment. My success also has

seemed to them to be due to the libretti written by myself.’ In other

language, the same old story--musicians regarded him as a poet,

and poets as a musician. It is of course convenient to explain _a

posteriori_ the decisive judgments of men who were at once prominent

professionals and sincere friends of Wagner by saying (after he had

attained success) that his tendency was too novel to be immediately

appreciated, or even understood, by them. This solution, however,

hardly applies to Schumann, as he was a friend to all innovations, and

audacities, even differing from his own, rather attracted than shocked

him. Rubinstein[201] still makes important reservations in regard to

Wagner’s music; and among serious contemporary musical critics who

have witnessed the birth, development and triumph of the Wagner cult,

Hanslick remained a long time recalcitrant, until at last, though not

very valiantly, he struck his colours in face of the overpowering

fanaticism of hysterical Wagnerphiles. What Nietzsche (in his _Der Fall

Wagner_) says against Wagner as a musician is unimportant, since the

brochure of abjuration is quite as insanely delirious as the brochure

of deification (_Wagner in Bayreuth_) written twelve years before.

In spite of the unfavourable judgments of many of his professional

brethren, Wagner is incontestably an eminently gifted musician. This

coolly-expressed recognition will certainly seem grotesque to Wagnerian

fanatics, who place him above Beethoven. But a serious inquirer into

truth need not trouble himself about the impressions provoked by Wagner

among these persons. In the first period of his productivity Wagner

much oftener achieved compositions of beauty than subsequently, and

among these many may be termed pearls of musical literature, and will

for a long time enjoy even the esteem of serious and rational people.

But Wagner the musician had to confront a lifelong enemy, who forcibly

prevented the full unfolding of his gifts, and this enemy was Wagner

the musical theorist.

In his graphomaniacal muddle he concocted certain theories, which

represent so many fits of æsthetic delirium. The most important

of these are the dogmas of the _leit-motif_ and of the unending

melody. Everyone now undoubtedly knows what Wagner understood by

the former. The expression has passed into all civilized languages.

The _leit-motif_, in which the threshed-out discarded ‘programme

music’ was bound logically to culminate, is a sequence of tones

supposed to express a definite conception, and appears in the

orchestration whenever the composer intends to recall to the auditor

the corresponding conception. By the _leit-motif_ Wagner transforms

music into dry speech. The orchestration, leaping from _leit-motif_

to _leit-motif_, no longer embodies general emotions, but claims

to appeal to memory and to reason, and communicate sharply defined

presentations. Wagner combines a few notes into a musical figure, as

a rule not even distinct or original, and makes this arrangement with

the auditor:--‘This figure signifies a combat, that a dragon, a third

a sword,’ etc. If the auditor does not agree to the stipulation, the

_leit-motifs_ lose all significance, for they possess in themselves

nothing which compels us to grasp the meaning arbitrarily lent

them; and they cannot have anything of this kind in them, because

the imitative powers of music are by its nature limited to purely

acoustical phenomena, or at most to those optical phenomena ordinarily

accompanied by acoustical phenomena. By imitating thunder, music can

express the notion of a thunderstorm; by the imitation of the tones of

a bugle, it can call up that of an army in such a way that the listener

can hardly have a doubt as to the significance of the corresponding

sequences of tones. On the other hand, it is absolutely denied to

music, with the means at its disposal, to produce an unequivocal

embodiment of the visible and tangible world, let alone that of

abstract thought. Hence the _leit-motifs_ are at best cold symbols,

resembling written characters, which in themselves say nothing, and

convey to the initiated and the learned alone the given import of a

presentation.

Here again is found the phenomenon already repeatedly indicated by us

as a mark of the mode of thought among the degenerate--the unconscious

moon-struck somnambulous way in which they transgress the most

firmly-established limits of the particular artistic domain, annul the

differentiation of the arts arrived at by long historical evolution,

and lead them back to the period of the lacustrines, nay, of the most

primitive troglodytes. We have seen that the pre-Raphaelites reduce the

picture to a writing which is no longer to produce its effect by its

pictorial qualities, but must express an abstract idea; and that the

Symbolists make of the word, that conventional vehicle of a conception,

a musical harmony, by whose aid they endeavour to awaken not an idea,

but a phonetic effect. In precisely the same way Wagner wishes to

divest music of its proper essence, and to transform it from a vehicle

of emotion into a vehicle of rational thought. The disguise produced by

this interchange of costumes is in this way complete. Painters proclaim

themselves writers; poets behave like the composers of symphonies; the

musician plays the poet. Pre-Raphaelites wishing to record a religious

apothegm do not make use of writing, which leaves nothing to be desired

in the way of convenience, and by which they would be distinctly

understood, but plunge into the labour of a highly-detailed painting,

costing them much time, and which, in spite of its wealth of figures,

is far from speaking so clearly to the intelligence as a single line of

rational writing. Symbolists desirous of awakening a musical emotion

do not compose a melody, but join meaningless, though ostensibly

musical words, capable, perhaps, of provoking amusement or vexation,

but not the intended emotion. When Wagner wishes to express the idea of

‘giant,’ ‘dwarf,’ ‘tarn-cap which makes the wearer invisible,’ he does

not say in words universally understood ‘giant,’ ‘dwarf,’ ‘tarn-cap’

(which makes the wearer invisible), but replaces these excellent words

by a series of notes, the sense of which no one will divine without a

key. Is anything more needed to expose the complete insanity of this

confusion of all the means of expression, this ignorance of what is

possible to each art?

It is Wagner’s ambition to imitate those facetious students who teach

their dog to say ‘papa.’ He wants to perform the trick of making music

say the names ‘Schulze’ and ‘Müller’ (=Smith and Jones). The score

should, when necessary, supply the place of the directory. Language

does not suffice him. He creates for himself a _volapük_, and demands

that his hearers should learn it. No admission without hard work! Those

who have not assimilated the vocabulary of the Wagnerian _volapük_

cannot understand his operas. It is useless to go to the trouble of a

journey to Bayreuth if one cannot talk fluently in _leit-motifs_. And

how pitiable after all is the result of this delirious effort! H. von

Wolzogen, the writer of the _Thematische Leitfaden_ (Thematic Guide)

to the Niebelungen Tetralogy, finds in all these four prodigious works

only ninety _leit-motifs_. A language of ninety words, however inflated

they may be, such as ‘motif of the weary Siegmund,’ ‘motif of the mania

for vengeance,’ ‘motif of bondage,’ etc.! with such a vocabulary it

would be impossible even to exchange ideas about the weather with a

native of Tierra del Fuego. A page of Sanders’ lexicon contains more

means of expression than Wolzogen’s entire dictionary of the Wagnerian

_leit-motif_ language. The history of art knows no more astounding

aberration than this _leit-motif_ craze. To express ideas is not the

function of music; language provides for that as completely as could

be desired. When the word is accompanied by song or orchestra it is

not to make it more definite, but to re-enforce it by the intervention

of emotion. Music is a kind of sounding-board, in which the word has

to awake something like an echo from the infinite. But such an echo of

presentiment and mystery does not ring out from _leit-motifs_ coldly

pasted together, as if by the labour of a conscientious registrar.

With the ‘unending melody,’ the second of Wagner’s tenets, it is

the same as with the _leit-motif_. It is a product of degenerate

thought; it is musical mysticism. It is the form in which incapacity

for attention shows itself in music. In painting, attention leads to

composition; the absence of it to a uniformly photographic treatment

of the whole field of vision as with the pre-Raphaelites. In poetry,

attention results in clearness of ideas, consistency of statement,

the suppression of the unimportant, and the giving emphasis to the

essential; its absence leads to twaddle as with the graphomaniacs,

and to a painful prolixity in consequence of the indiscriminate

recording of all perceptions as with Tolstoi. Finally, in music

attention expresses itself in completed forms, _i.e._, in well-defined

melodies; its absence, on the contrary, by the dissolution of form,

the obliteration of its boundary lines, and thus by unending melodies

as with Wagner. This parallelism is not an arbitrary play of ideas,

but an exact picture of the corresponding mental processes among the

different groups of degenerate subjects, producing in the different

arts different manifestations according to their specific means and

aims.

Let us grasp what melody is. It is the regular grouping of notes in a

highly expressive series of tones. Melody in music corresponds to what

in language is a logically-constructed sentence, distinctly presenting

an idea, and having a clearly-marked beginning and ending. The dreamy

rambling of half-formed nebulous thoughts as little allows the mintage

of sentences of this kind, as does the fleeting agitation of the vague

bewildered emotion lead to the composition of a melody. The emotions,

too, have their own grades of distinctness. They, too, can appear as

chaotic, or as well-regulated states. In the one case they stand out in

the consciousness which grasps their composition and their purpose as

discriminable modes strongly illuminated by the attention; in the other

case they are a disturbing enigma to consciousness, and perceived by

it merely as a generic excitement, as a sort of subterranean trembling

and rumbling of unknown origin and tendency. If the emotions are

intelligible, they will be fain to manifest themselves in a form at

once the most expressive and most easily grasped. If, on the contrary,

they are a generic continuous state, without determined cause and

discoverable aim, the music presenting them to the senses will be as

blurred and as nebulously fluctuating in form as themselves. Melody

may be said to be an effort of music to say something definite. It

is clear that an emotion unconscious of its cause and its aims, and

unilluminated by attention, will not raise its musical expression to

the height of melody, precisely because it has nothing definite to say.

A completed melody is a late acquisition of music, obtained by it

only after long evolution. In its historic, and still more in its

prehistoric, beginnings, the art of music knew it not. Music springs

originally from song, and the rhythmic noise (_i.e._, noise repeated in

equal or regular intervals of time) of accompanying stamping, knocking,

or clapping of the hands; and song is nothing but speech grown louder

and moving in wider intervals through emotional excitement. I should

like to cite only one passage from the almost unlimited literature on

this hackneyed subject. Herbert Spencer, in his well-known treatise on

_The Origin and Function of Music_,[202] says: ‘All music is originally

vocal.... The dance-chants of savage tribes are very monotonous, and

in virtue of their monotony are much more nearly allied to ordinary

speech than are the songs of civilized races.... The early poems of the

Greeks, which, be it remembered, were sacred legends embodied in that

rhythmical, metaphorical language which strong feeling excites, were

not recited, but chanted; the tones and the cadences were made musical

by the same influences which made the speech poetical.... This chanting

is believed to have been not what we call singing, but nearly allied

to our recitative; far simpler, indeed, if we may judge from the fact

that the early Greek lyre, which had but _four_ strings, was played in

_unison_ with the voice, which was therefore confined to four notes....

That recitative--beyond which, by the way, the Chinese and Hindoos

seem never to have advanced--grew naturally out of the modulations and

cadences of strong feeling, we have, indeed, still current evidence.

There are even now to be met with occasions on which strong feeling

vents itself in this form. Whoever has been present when a meeting of

Quakers was addressed by one of their preachers (whose practice it is

to speak only under the influence of religious emotion) must have been

struck by the quite unusual tones, like those of a subdued chant, in

which the address was made.’

Recitative, which is nothing but speech intensified, and allows no

recognition of completed forms of melody, is therefore the most ancient

form of music; it is the degree of development reached by the art of

music among savages, the ancient Greeks, and contemporary races in

Eastern Asia. Wagner’s ‘unending melody’ is nothing but recitative,

richly harmonized and animated, but, nevertheless, recitative. The name

bestowed by him on his pretended invention must not mislead us. In the

mouth of the degenerate a word has never the meaning ascribed to it

by universal language. Wagner calmly applies the term ‘melody’--with

a distinguishing adjective--to a form which is actually the negation

and suppression of melody. He designates unending melody as an advance

in music, while it is really a return to its primeval starting-point.

Here there recurs in Wagner what we have so often laid stress upon in

the preceding chapters, viz., that by a strange optical illusion the

degenerate regard their atavism, their morbid reversion to the most

remote and lowest grades of evolution, as an ascent into the future.

Wagner was led to his theory of unending melody by his limited capacity

for the invention of finite, that is of real, melodies. His weakness in

melodic creation has struck all impartial musicians. In youth his power

in this direction was more abundant, and he succeeded in creating some

superb melodies (in _Tannhäuser_, _Lohengrin_, _Fliegende Höllander_).

With increasing age this power became more and more impoverished, and

in proportion as the torrent of melodic invention dried up in him, he

accentuated his theory of unending melody with ever more obstinacy and

asperity. Always there reappears the well-known device of concocting

a theory _a posteriori_ as a plausible ground for, and palliation

of, what is done through unconscious organic necessity. Wagner was

incapable of distinguishing the individual personages of his operas

by a purely musical characterization, and therefore he invented the

_leit-motif_.[203] Experiencing a great difficulty, especially with

advancing age, in creating true melodies, he set up the postulate of

the unending melody.

All the other crotchets of his musical theory also find their

explanation in this clear consciousness of definite incompetency. In

the _Art-work of the Future_ he overwhelms the theory of counterpoint

and the contrapuntists--those dull pedants who abase the most vital

of all arts to a desiccated, dead mathematics--with a scorn intended

to be biting, but producing the effect of an echo of Schopenhauer’s

invectives against the German philosophers. Why? Because, as an

inattentive mystic, abandoned to amorphous dreams, he must feel

intolerably oppressed by the severe discipline and fixed rules of the

theory of composition, which gave a grammar to the musical babbling

of primeval times, and made of it a worthy medium for the expression

of the emotions of civilized men. He asserts that pure instrumental

music ended with Beethoven; that progress after him is impossible; that

‘musical declamation’ is the only path along which the art of music can

further develop itself. It may be that, after Beethoven, instrumental

music will make no progress for decades, or for centuries. He was such

a stupendous genius that it is, in fact, difficult to imagine how he

can be surpassed, or even equalled. Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare,

Cervantes, Goethe, produce a similar impression; and, in truth, these

geniuses have not yet been surpassed. It is also conceivable that

there are limits which it is impossible for any given art to pass at

all, so that a very great genius says the last word for it, and after

that no progress can be made in it. In such a case, however, the

aspirant should humbly say: ‘I know that I cannot do better than the

supreme master of my art; I am therefore contented to labour as one

of the _epigoni_ in the shadow of his greatness, content if my work

expresses some peculiarities of my individuality.’ He ought not in

presumptuous self-conceit to affirm: ‘There is no sense in emulating

the eagle-flight of the mighty one; progress now lies alone in the

flapping of my bats’-wings.’ But this is exactly what Wagner does. Not

being himself endowed with any great gift for pure instrumental music,

as his few symphonic works suffice to prove, he decrees in the tone of

infallibility: ‘Instrumental music ended with Beethoven. It is an error

to seek for anything on this well-browsed field. The future of music

lies in the accompaniment of the word, and I am he who is to show you

the way into that future.’

Here Wagner simply makes a virtue of his necessity, and of his

weakness a title of glory. The symphony is the highest differentiation

of musical art. In it music has wholly discarded its relationship with

words, and attained its highest independence. Hence the symphony is

the most musical of all that music can produce. To disown it is to

disown that music is a special, differentiated art. To place above the

symphony music as an accompaniment of words is to raise the handmaiden

to a higher rank than her free-born mistress. It will never occur to

a composer, whose inmost being is charged with musical feeling and

thought, to seek words instead of musical themes for the expression of

that in him which is yearning for embodiment. For if it does occur to

him, it is a proof that in his inmost being he is a poet or an author,

and not a musician. The choruses in the Ninth Symphony are not to

be cited as proof of the inaccuracy of this assertion. In that case

Beethoven was overmastered by an emotion so powerful and univocal,

that the more general and equivocal character of purely musical

expression could no longer suffice for him, and he was unconditionally

compelled to call in the aid of words. In the deeply significant

Biblical legend, even Balaam’s ass acquired the power of speech when

he had something definite to say. The emotion which becomes clearly

conscious of its content and aim ceases to be a mere emotion, and

transforms itself into presentation, notion and judgment, but these

express themselves, not in music, but in articulate language. When

Wagner, as a fundamental principle, placed music as an accompaniment

to words above that which is purely instrumental, and not as a medium

for the expression of thought--for in regard to that there can be no

difference of opinion--but as a musical form properly so called, he

only proved that, in the inmost depths of his nature, and by virtue of

his organic disposition, he was not a musician, but a confused mixture

of a poet feeble in style, and a painter lazy of brush, with a Javanese

‘gamelang’ accompaniment buzzing in between. This is the case with

most ‘higher degenerates,’ except that the separate fragments of their

strangely intermingled hybrid talent are not so strong and great as

Wagner’s.

The musical productions in which Wagner has been most successful--the

Venusberg music; the E flat, G, B flat, ‘Wigala-Weia’ of the

Rhinemaidens, repeated one hundred and thirty-six times; the Walküre

ride; the fire incantation; the murmur of the forest; the Siegfried

idyl; the Good-Friday spell; magnificent compositions, and highly

praised with justice--show precisely the peculiarly unmusical character

of his genius. All these pieces have one thing in common that they

depict. They are not an inner emotion crying out from the soul in

music, but the mental vision of the gifted eye of a painter, which

Wagner, with gigantic power, but also with gigantic aberration,

strives to fix in tones instead of lines and colours. He avails himself

of natural sounds or noises, either imitating them directly, or

awakening ideas of them through association, reproducing the ripple and

roar of waves, the sough of the tree-top and the song of wild birds,

which are in themselves acoustic; or, by an acoustic parallelism,

the optical phenomena of the movements in the dance of voluptuous

female forms, the tearing along of fiercely snorting steeds, the

blazing and flickering of flames, etc. These creations are not the

outgrowth of emotional excitement, but have been produced by external

impressions conveyed through the senses; they are not the utterance

of a feeling but a reflection--_i.e._, something essentially optical.

I might compare Wagner’s music, at its very best, to the flight of

flying-fishes. It is an astonishing and dazzling spectacle, and yet

unnatural. It is a straying from a native to an alien element. Above

all, it is something absolutely barren and incapable of profiting

either normal fishes or normal birds.

Wagner has felt this himself very forcibly; he was quite clear on

the point that no one could build further on the foundation of his

tone-paintings; for with reference to the efforts of musicians eagerly

desirous of founding a Wagner school, he complains[204] that ‘younger

composers were most irrationally putting themselves to trouble in

imitating him.’

A searching examination has thus shown us that this pretended musician

of the future is an out-and-out musician of long-ago. All the

characteristics of his talent point not forward, but far behind us.

His _leit-motif_, abasing music to a conventional phonetic symbol, is

atavism; his unending melody is atavism, leading back the fixed form

to the vague recitative of savages; atavism, his subordination of

highly differentiated instrumental music to music-drama, which mixes

music and poetry, and allows neither of the two art-forms to attain

to independence; even his peculiarity of almost never permitting more

than one person on the stage to sing and of avoiding vocal polyphony is

atavism. As a personality he will occupy an important place in music;

as an initiator, or developer of his art, hardly any, or a very narrow

one. For the only thing that musicians of healthy capacity can learn

from him is to keep song and accompaniment in opera closely connected

with the words, to declaim with sincerity and propriety, and to suggest

pictorial ideas to the imagination by means of orchestral effects. But

I dare not decide whether the latter is an enlargement or an upheaval

of the natural boundaries of musical art, and in any event disciples

of Wagner must use his rich musical palette with caution if they are

not to be led astray.

Wagner’s mighty influence on his contemporaries is to be explained,

neither by his capacities as author and musician, nor by any of his

personal qualities, with the exception, perhaps, of that ‘stubborn

perseverance in one and the same fundamental idea’ which Lombroso[205]

cites as a characteristic of graphomaniacs, but by the peculiarities

in the life of the present nervous temperament. His earthly destiny

resembles that of those strange Oriental plants known as ‘Jericho

roses’ (_Anastatica asteriscus_), which, dingy-brown in colour,

leathery and dry, roll about, driven by every wind, until they reach

a congenial soil, when they take root and blossom into full-blown

flowers. To the end of his life Wagner’s existence was conflict and

bitterness, and his boastings had no other echo than the laughter

not only of rational beings, but, alas! of fools also. It was not

until he had long passed his fiftieth year that he began to know the

intoxication of universal fame; and in the last decade of his life he

was installed among the demi-gods. It had come to this, that the world

had, in the interval, become ripe for him--and for the madhouse. He had

the good fortune to endure until the general degeneration and hysteria

were sufficiently advanced to supply a rich and nutritious soil for his

theories and his art.

The phenomenon repeatedly established and verified in these pages, that

lunatics fly to each other as iron filings to the magnet, is quite

strikingly observable in Wagner’s life. His first great patroness

was the Princess Metternich, daughter of the well-known eccentric

Count Sandor, and whose own eccentricities formed material for the

chronicle of the Napoleonic Court. His most enthusiastic disciple and

defender was Franz Liszt, whom I have elsewhere characterized (see

my _Ausgewählte Pariser Briefe_; 2^{te} Auflage; Leipzig, 1887, p.

172), and of whom I will therefore only briefly remark that he bore

in his nature the greatest resemblance to Wagner. He was an author

(his works, filling six thick volumes, have an honourable place in the

literature of graphomaniacs), composer, erotomaniac and mystic, all in

an incomparably lower degree than Wagner, whom he surpassed only in a

prodigiously developed talent for pianoforte-playing. Wagner was an

enthusiastic admirer of all graphomaniacs who came in his way--_e.g._,

of that A. Gleizès expressly cited by Lombroso[206] as a lunatic, but

whom Wagner praises in most exuberant terms;[207] and he even gathered

round him a court of select graphomaniacs, among whom may be mentioned

Nietzsche, whose insanity compelled his confinement in a madhouse; H.

von Wolzogen, whose _Poetische Laut-Symbolik_ might have been written

by the most exquisite of French ‘Symbolists’ or ‘Instrumentists’;[208]

Henri Porges, E. von Hagen, etc. But the most important relations of

this kind were with the unhappy King Louis II. In him Wagner found

the soul he needed. In him he met with a full comprehension of all

his theories and his creations. It may be safely asserted that Louis

of Bavaria created the Wagner Cult. Only when the King became his

protector did Wagner and his efforts become of importance for the

history of civilization; not, perhaps, because Louis II. offered Wagner

the means of realizing the boldest and most sumptuous of his artistic

dreams, but chiefly because he placed the prestige of his crown in

the service of the Wagnerian movement. Let us for a moment consider

how deeply monarchical is the disposition of the vast majority of

the German people; how the knees of the beery Philistine tremble as

he reverentially salutes even an empty court carriage; and how the

hearts of well-bred maidens flutter with ineffable inspiration at the

sight of a prince! And here was a real king, handsome as the day,

young, surrounded by legends, whose mental infirmity was at that time

regarded by all sentimentalists as sublime ‘idealism,’ displaying

unbounded enthusiasm for an artist, and reviving on a far larger

scale the relations between Charles Augustus and Goethe! From that

moment it was natural that Wagner should become the idol of all loyal

hearts. To share in the royal taste for the ‘ideal’ was a thing to be

proud of. Wagner’s music became provisionally a royal Bavarian music,

adorned with crown and escutcheon, till it should subsequently become

an imperial German music. At the head of the Wagnerian movement there

walks, as is fit, an insane king. Louis II. was able to bring Wagner

into vogue with the entire German nation (excepting, of course, those

Bavarians who were revolted by the King’s prodigalities); nevertheless,

no amount of grovelling obsequiousness could by itself have produced

a fanaticism for Wagner. That the mere Wagner-fashion might attain to

this height another factor was necessary--the hysteria of the age.

Although not so widespread as in France and England, this hysteria is

not wanting in Germany, where during the last quarter of a century it

has continued to gain ground. Germany has been longer protected from

it than the civilized nations of the West by the smaller development

of large industry and by the absence of large cities properly so

called. In the last generation, however, both of these gifts have been

abundantly accorded her, and two great wars have done the rest to

make the nervous system of the people susceptible to the pernicious

influences of the city and the factory system.

The effect of war on the nerves of the participants has never been

systematically investigated; and yet how highly important and necessary

a work this would be! Science knows what disorders are produced in man

by a single strong moral shock, _e.g._, a sudden mortal danger; it

has recorded hundreds and thousands of cases in which persons saved

from drowning, or present at a fire on shipboard, or in a railway

accident, or who have been threatened with assassination, etc., have

either lost their reason, or been attacked by grave and protracted,

often incurable, nervous illnesses. In war hundreds of thousands are

exposed to all these fearful impressions at the same time. For months

cruel mutilation or sudden death menaces them at every step. They are

frequently surrounded by the spectacle of devastation, conflagration,

the most appalling wounds, and heaps of corpses frightful to behold.

Moreover, the greatest demands are made on their strength; they are

forced to march until they break down, and cannot count on having

adequate nourishment or sufficient sleep. And shall there not appear

among these hundreds of thousands the effect which is proved to result

from a single one of the occurrences which take place by thousands

during war? Let it not be said that in a campaign a soldier becomes

callous to the horrors encompassing him. That merely signifies that

they cease to excite the attention of his consciousness. They are

nevertheless perceived by the senses and their cerebral centres, and

therefore leave their traces in the nervous system. That the soldier

does not at the moment notice the deep shock--nay, even shattering--he

has experienced, equally proves nothing. ‘Traumatic hysteria,’ ‘railway

spine,’ the nervous maladies consequent on a moral shock, are also

frequently unobserved until months after the event occasioning them.

In my belief, it can scarcely be doubted that every great war is a

cause of hysteria among multitudes, and that far the larger number of

soldiers, even completely unknown to themselves, bring home from a

campaign a somewhat deranged nervous system. Of course this is much

less applicable to the conquerors than to the conquered, for the

feeling of triumph is one of the most pleasurable the human brain can

experience, and the force-producing (‘dynamogenous’) effect of this

pleasurable feeling is well qualified to counteract the destructive

influences of the impressions produced by war. But it is difficult

for it to entirely annul these impressions, and the victors, like the

vanquished, no doubt leave a large part of their nervous strength and

moral health on the battlefield and in the bivouac.

The brutalization of the masses after every war has become a

commonplace. The expression originates in the perception that after a

campaign the tone of the people becomes fiercer and rougher, and that

statistics show more acts of violence. The fact is correctly stated,

but the interpretation is superficial. If the soldier on returning home

becomes more short-tempered, and even has recourse to the knife, it is

not because the war has made him rougher, but because it has made him

more excitable. This increased excitability is, however, only one of

the forms of the phenomenon of nervous debility.

Hence under the action of the two great wars in connection with

the development of large industries and the growth of large towns,

hysteria among the German people has, since 1870, increased in an

extraordinary manner, and we have very nearly overtaken the unenviable

start which the English and French had over us in this direction.

Now, all hysteria, like every form of insanity, and for that matter

like every disease, receives its special form from the personality

of the invalid. The degree of culture, the character, propensities

and habits of the deranged person give the derangement its peculiar

colour. Among the English, always piously inclined, degeneration and

hysteria were bound to appear both mystical and religious. Among the

French, with their highly developed taste and widespread fondness for

all artistic pursuits, it was natural that hysteria should take an

artistic direction, and lead to the notorious extravagances in their

painting, literature and music. We Germans are in general neither very

pious nor very cultivated in matters of art. Our comprehension of the

beautiful in art expresses itself, for the most part, in the idiotic

‘_Reizend!_’ (charming), and ‘_Entzückend!_’ (ravishing), squeaked in

shrill head-tones and with upturned eyes by our well-bred daughters at

the sight of a quaintly-shaved poodle, and before the Darmstadt Madonna

by Holbein, indiscriminately; and in the grunts of satisfaction with

which the plain citizen pumps in his beer at a concert of his singing

club. Not that we are by nature devoid of a sense of the beautiful--I

believe, on the contrary, that in our deepest being we have more of it

than most other nations--but owing to unfavourable circumstances this

sense has not been able to attain development. Since the Thirty Years’

War we have been too poor, we have had too hard a struggle for the

necessities of life to have anything left for any sort of luxury; and

our ruling classes, profoundly Latinized and slaves to French fashion,

were so estranged from the masses, that for the last two centuries

the latter could have no part in the culture, taste, or æsthetic

satisfactions of the upper strata of society, separated from them by an

impassable gulf. As, therefore, the large majority of the German people

had no interest in art, and troubled themselves little about it, German

hysteria could not assume an artistic, æsthetic form.

It assumed other forms, partly abominable, partly ignoble and partly

laughable. German hysteria manifests itself in anti-Semitism, that most

dangerous form of the persecution-mania, in which the person believing

himself persecuted becomes a savage persecutor, capable of all crimes

(the _persécuté persécuteur_ of the French mental therapeutics).[209]

Like hypochondriacs and ‘hémorroïdaires,’ the German hysterical

subject is anxiously concerned about his precious health. His crazes

hinge on the exhalations of his skin and the functions of his

stomach. He becomes a fanatic for Jaeger vests, and for the groats

which vegetarians grind for themselves. He gets vehemently affected

over Kneipp’s douches and barefoot perambulations on wet grass. At

the same time, he excites himself with morbid sentimentalism (the

‘Zoophilia’ of Magnan) concerning the sufferings of the frog, utilized

in physiological experiments, and through all this anti-Semitic,

Kneippish, Jaegerish, vegetarian, and anti-vivisection insanity, there

rings out the fundamental note of a megalomaniacal, Teutonomaniacal

Chauvinism, against which the noble Emperor Frederick vainly warned

us. As a rule, all these derangements appear simultaneously, and in

nine out of ten cases it is safe to take the proudly strutting wearer

of Jaeger’s garments for a Chauvinist, the Kneipp visionary for a

groats-dieted maniac, and the defender of the frog, thirsting for the

professor’s blood, for an anti-Semitist.

Wagner’s hysteria assumed the collective form of German hysteria. With

a slight modification of Terence’s _Homo sum_, he could say of himself,

‘I am a deranged being, and no kind of derangement is a stranger to

me.’ He could as an anti-Semitist give points to Stoecker.[210] He has

an inimitable mastery of Chauvinistic phraseology.[211] Was he not able

to convince his hypnotized hysterical following that the heroes of his

pieces were primeval German figures--these Frenchmen and Brabanters,

these Icelanders and Norwegians, these women of Palestine--all the

fabulous beings he had fetched from the poems of Provence and Northern

France, and from the Northern saga, who (with the exception of

_Tannhäuser_ and the _Meistersinger_) have not a single drop of German

blood or a single German fibre in their whole body? It is thus that, in

public exhibitions, a quack hypnotist persuades his victims that they

are eating peaches instead of raw potatoes. Wagner became an advocate

for vegetarianism, and as the fruit needed for the nourishment of the

people in accordance with this diet exists in abundance only in warm

regions of the earth, he promptly advised ‘the direction of a rational

emigration to lands resembling the South American peninsula, which,

it has been affirmed, might, through its superabundant productivity,

supply nourishment for the present population of the entire

globe.’[212] He brandishes his knightly sword against the physiologists

who experiment on animals.[213] He was not an enthusiast for wool,

because personally he preferred silk; and this is the only hiatus

in the otherwise complete picture. He did not live to witness the

greatness of the reverend Pastor Kneipp, otherwise he probably would

have found words of profound significance for the primitive German

sanctity of wet feet, and the redeeming power vested in the knee-douche.

When, therefore, the enthusiastic friendship of King Louis had given

Wagner the necessary prestige, and directed the universal attention of

Germany to him; when the German people had learned to know him and his

peculiarities, then all the mystics of the Jewish sacrifice of blood,

of woollen shirts, of the vegetable _menu_, and sympathy cures, were

compelled to raise their pæans in his honour, for he was the embodiment

of all their obsessions. As for his music, they simply threw that into

the bargain. The vast majority of Wagner fanatics understood nothing of

it. The emotional excitement which the works of their idol made them

experience did not proceed from the singers and the orchestra, but in

part from the pictorial beauty of the scenic tableaux, and in a greater

measure from the specific craze each brought with him to the theatre,

and of which each worshipped Wagner as the spokesman and champion.

I do not, however, go so far as to assert that _skat_[214] patriotism,

and the heroic idealism of natural cures, rice with fruit, ‘away with

the Jews!’ and flannel, alone made the hearts of Wagner-bigots beat

faster in blissful emotion when they were listening to his music.

This music was certainly of a nature to fascinate the hysterical. Its

powerful orchestral effects produced in them hypnotic states (at the

Salpêtrière hospital in Paris the hypnotic state is often induced by

suddenly striking a gong), and the formlessness of the unending melody

was exactly suited to the dreamy vagaries of their own thought. A

distinct melody awakens and demands attention, and is hence opposed to

the fugitive ideation of the weak brains of the degenerate. A flowing

recitative, on the contrary, without beginning or end, makes no sort

of demand on the mind--for most auditors trouble themselves either

not at all, or for a very short time, about the hide-and-seek play of

the _leit-motif_--one can allow one’s self to be swayed and carried

along by it, and to emerge from it at pleasure, without any definite

remembrance, but with a merely sensual feeling of having enjoyed a

hot, nervously exciting tone-bath. The relation of true melody to the

unending melody is the same as that of a genre or historical painting

to the wayward arabesques of a Moorish mural decoration, repeated a

thousand times, and representing nothing definite; and the Oriental

knows how favourable the sight of his arabesques is to ‘Kef’--that

dreamy state in which Reason is lulled to sleep, and crazy Imagination

alone rules as mistress of the house.

Wagner’s music initiated hysterically-minded Germans into the mysteries

of Turkish Kef. Nietzsche may make sport of this subject with his

idiotic play on words ‘_Sursum_--bum-bum,’ and with his remarks about

the German youth who seeks for ‘Ahnung’ (presentiments); but the

fact is not to be denied that a part of Wagner’s devotees--those who

brought a diseased mysticism with them to the theatre--found in him

their satisfaction; for nothing is so well qualified to conjure up

‘presentiments,’ _i.e._, ambiguous, shadowy borderland presentations,

as a music which is itself born of nebulous adumbrations of thought.

Hysterical women were won over to Wagner chiefly by the lascivious

eroticism of his music, but also by his poetic representation of the

relation of man to woman. Nothing enchants an ‘intense’ woman so much

as demoniacal irresistibleness on the part of the woman, and trembling

adoration of her supernatural power on the part of the man. In contrast

to Frederick William I., who cried in anger, ‘You should not fear, but

love me,’ women of this sort would rather shout to every man, ‘You are

not to love me, but to lie, full of dread and terror, in the dust at my

feet.’ ‘Frau’ Venus, Brunhilde, Isolde, and Kundry have won for Wagner

much more admiration among women than have Elizabeth, Elsa, Senta, and

Gudrune.

After Wagner had once conquered Germany, and a fervent faith in him

had been made the first article in the catechism of German patriotism,

foreign countries could not long withstand his cult. The admiration

of a great people has an extraordinary power of conviction. Even its

aberrations it forces with irresistible suggestion on other nations.

Wagner was one of the foremost conquerors in the German wars. Sadowa

and Sedan were fought in his behalf. The world, _nolens volens_, had to

take up its attitude with regard to a man whom Germany proclaimed its

national composer. He began his triumphal march round the globe draped

in the flag of Imperial Germany. Germany’s enemies were his enemies,

and this forced even such Germans as withstood his influence to take

his side against foreign lands. ‘I beat my breast: I, too, have fought

for him against the French in speech and writing. I also have defended

him against the pastrycooks who hissed his _Lohengrin_ in Paris.’ How

was one to get off this duty? Hamlet thrusts at the arras, well knowing

that Polonius stands there; hence any son or brother of Polonius is

bound resolutely to attack Hamlet. Wagner had the good fortune to play

the part of the tapestry to the French Hamlets, giving them the pretext

for thrusting at the Polonius of Germany. As a result, the attitude in

the Wagner question of every German was rigidly prescribed for him.

To the zeal of Germans all manner of other things added their aid in

favouring the success of Wagner abroad. A minority, composed in part

of really independent men of honorably unprejudiced minds, but in part

also of degenerate minds with a morbid passion for contradiction, took

sides with him just because he was blindly and furiously maligned by

the Chauvinist majority, who were a prey to national hatred. ‘It is

contemptible,’ cried the minority, ‘to condemn an artist because he is

a German. Art has no fatherland. Wagner’s music should not be judged

with the memory of Alsace-Lorraine.’ These views are so reasonable

and noble, that those who entertained them must have rejoiced in them

and been proud of them. On listening to Wagner, they had the clear

feeling, ‘We are better and cleverer than the Chauvinists,’ and this

feeling necessarily placed them at the outset in such an agreeable and

benevolent mood, that his music seemed much more beautiful than they

would have found it if they had not been obliged first to stifle their

vulgar and base instincts, and fortify those which were more elevated,

free and refined. They erroneously ascribed to Wagner’s music the

emotions produced by their self-satisfaction.

The fact that only in Bayreuth could this ‘music be heard, unfalsified

and in its full strength, was also of great importance for the

esteem in which it was held. If it had been played in every theatre,

if, without trouble and formalities, one could have gone to a

representation of Wagner as to one of _Il Trovatore_, Wagner would not

have obtained his most enthusiastic public from foreign countries. To

know the real Wagner it was necessary to journey to Bayreuth. This

could be done only at long intervals and at specified times; seats and

lodgings had to be obtained long in advance, and at great expenditure

of trouble. It was a pilgrimage requiring much money and leisure; hence

‘hoi polloi’ were excluded from it. Thus, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth

became a privilege of the rich and well-bred, and to have been to

Bayreuth came to be a great social distinction among the snobs of

both worlds. The journey was a thing to make a great parade of and be

haughty over. The pilgrim no longer belonged to the vulgar crowd, but

to the select few; he became a hadji! Oriental sages so well know the

peculiar vanity of the hadjis, that one of their proverbs contains an

express warning against the pious man who has been thrice to Mecca.

Hence the pilgrimage to Bayreuth became a mark of aristocracy, and

an appreciation of Wagner’s music, in spite of his nationality, was

regarded as evidence of intellectual preeminence. The prejudice in

his favour was created, and provided one went to him in this mood,

there was no reason why Wagner should not have the same influence

on hysterical foreigners as on hysterical Germans. _Parsifal_ was

especially fitted completely to subjugate the French neo-Catholics and

Anglo-American mystics who marched behind the banner of the Salvation

Army. It was with this opera that Wagner chiefly triumphed among his

non-German admirers. Listening to the music of _Parsifal_ has become

the religious act of all those who wish to receive the Communion in

musical form.

These are the explanatory causes of Wagner’s conquest, first

of Germany, and then of the world. The absence of judgment and

independence among the multitude, who chant the antiphony in the

Psalter; the imitation of musicians possessed of no originality, who

witnessed his triumph, and, like genuine little boys wanting ‘to be

taken,’ clung to his coat-tails--these did what was still needed to

lay the world at his feet. As it is the most widely diffused, so is

Wagnerism the most momentous aberration of the present time. The

Bayreuth festival theatre, the _Bayreuther Blätter_, the Parisian

_Revue Wagnérienne_, are lasting monuments by which posterity will be

able to measure the whole breadth and depth of the degeneration and

hysteria of the age.