II

Here, then, is a philosophy of life which, in the hands of the artist,

aims at creating a new type of "static" drama, in which speech shall

give way, as far as possible, to suggestion, incident and action to the

immediate revelation of soul-states. Though the drama is to deal with

real life in a way that Maeterlinck would regard as most rigorously

real, there is to be a progressive withdrawal from most of the points

that the average man regards as the essence of reality.

In the first place, naked facts and violent actions are to be passed

over, as not necessary for the communication to us of the essential

thing that the dramatist has to say; in the second place, mere words

are no longer to be looked upon as indispensable intermediaries between

the thought and the expression. Now all this, in its main features,

finds a very close parallel in the work and the arguments of Wagner.

Let us look for a moment at his theories as they figure in actual

practice, taken out of the wordy metaphysic in which he delighted to

obscure them.

The drama and the novel represent an attempt to fire the reader with a

certain emotion that has already flamed up in the writer. The tragedy

of _King Lear_, for example, aims at inspiring in us a sentiment of

pity for an old man who is shattered by filial ingratitude. _Othello_

aims at enlisting our sympathies for an affectionate man and wife whose

happiness is broken to pieces, partly by misunderstanding, partly by

diabolical machinations. There are innumerable other points in the

plays, but these are the great central forces. These are what moved

Shakespeare to the composition of the dramas. These are the ideas

from which he started; and these are the ideas that finally remain

with us when we have seen or read the plays. But owing to the clumsy,

intractable nature of the material in which he works, the dramatist can

stimulate this central idea or feeling in us only by a most roundabout

process. He cannot plunge at once into his subject. He must commence at

a point far distant from that to which he wishes to lead us, and then

work up to it gradually. He cannot adequately communicate an emotion

without unfolding before our eyes the long and complex scenes or set

of circumstances that give rise to this emotion. He cannot confine

himself to the characters and the events that make up the real drama;

he has to illustrate these--to draw sparks from them, as it were--by

the impact of minor incidents and persons. In a word, he has to fill us

with a multiplicity of more or less superfluous feelings before he can

communicate to us the feeling that is really essential.

In music all this is altered. (The reader will of course remember

that I am expounding Wagner.) There being no distinction between the

feeling and the expression, no bar between the emotion and the speech,

the musician can plunge at once into the very heart of his subject.

Further, he need never leave the heart of it; he can devote all his

energies to elucidating the really necessary factors; he has no need

to waste half his time in showing, from the description of extraneous

things, how such and such a situation has come about, or how a man

comes to feel in such and such a way. It takes half-an-hour's reading

of the Tristan legend, or any poem on the subject, before we feel

the atmosphere of tragedy closing round us, or know precisely why it

should come. In Wagner's opera, not only is the fact that there _is_

a tragedy suggested in the first bars of the music, but the very tint

and spiritual quality of the tragedy are painted for us at once. All

through the work, again, we live in the very centre of the metropolis

of that territory of emotion--love, grief, and pity--to which the

legend and the poets have to guide us by devious and frequently

uninteresting paths. We see Tristan and Isolde in the first bar and

in the last; we never leave them for a moment. Thus not only does

the musician draw us at once to the point he wishes us to reach, but

his independence of all the scaffolding necessary to the poet gives

him more freedom of development. He can wring from the souls of his

characters the last bitter juice of their emotions. Wagner himself was

fond of pointing out the gradual growth of his art in these respects.

In the _Flying Dutchman_ he tried "to keep the plot to its simplest

features; to exclude all useless detail, such as the intrigues one

borrows from common life." The plot of _Tannhäuser_ will be found

"far more markedly evolving from its inner motives"; while "the whole

interest of _Lohengrin_ consists in an inner working within the heart

of Elsa, involving every secret of the soul." Wagner's aim was to shake

himself clear of the wearisome mass of detail that, in the poetical

drama, is necessary to show the "whence and wherefore" of each feeling.

"I too, as I have told you," he writes, "felt driven to this 'whence

and wherefore'; and for long it banned me from the magic of my art. But

my time of penance taught me to overcome the question. All doubt at

last was taken from me, when I gave myself up to the _Tristan_. Here,

in perfect trustfulness, I plunged into the inner depth of soul-events,

and from out this inmost centre of the world I fearlessly built up

its outer form. A glance at the _volume_ of this poem will show you

at once that the exhaustive detail-work which an historical poet is

obliged to devote to clearing up the outward bearing of his plot, to

the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, I now trusted

myself to apply to these latter alone. Life and death, the whole import

and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner

movements of the soul. The whole affecting Action comes about for the

reason only that the inmost soul demands it, and steps to light with

the very shape foretokened in the inner shrine."

Here the analogy with Maeterlinck's theory becomes evident. Both men

despise the cruder, external, historical, active facts on which the

drama has felt itself till now compelled to rely; both aim at a subtle

form of drama in which the soul-states shall be the first and last

thing. There is more in life, they say, than conscious reason; it is

the innermost processes of the soul that we desire to have laid bare

to us in drama. This reflection led Wagner to the choice of the myth

as the best material on which to work. "I therefore believed," he

writes, "I must term the 'mythos' the poet's ideal Stuff--that native

nameless poem of the Folk, which throughout the ages we ever meet new

handled by the great poets of periods of consummate culture; for in it

_there almost vanishes the conventional form_ _of man's relations,

merely explicable to abstract reason_, to show instead the eternally

intelligible, the purely human." This is not clarity itself, but what

Wagner means is that in music as he conceives it you come face to face

with the essential truth of things at once, without having to make a

wearisome journey through a mass of unimportant detail, as you have

to do in the novel and the poetical drama before you can get to the

heart of the emotion. And this is quite true, so far as it goes. If you

conceive life like the mystic or his soul's brother the musician, if

you prefer the general to the particular, the vague to the definite,

the suggested to the spoken, you will naturally seek a medium that

shall allow free passage to your emotion in its broadest form. Like

Wagner, you will not want to stop and explain for half-an-hour who

Tristan and Isolde were, who were the people round them, what the

causes were that led to their tragic end, and so on. You will want to

get to the centre of your subject at once; you abandon all attempts

at demonstration and plunge at once into expression. And if, with

Maeterlinck, it seems quite unimportant to know the names and histories

of two or three given men and women, the scenes in which they live,

the commonplace routine of their daily lives--if you only want to

know how destiny is dealing with them, what bitter-sweet emotion is

being distilled from their souls in some quiet hour that is pregnant

with vital meaning--then you will pass over, like the musician, every

detail that seems to you unimportant, and concentrate yourself on

that supremely fateful hour. You will not depict anything happening,

because it is not the event that is the essential thing, but the

soul-states that are born of the event. To Maeterlinck, as to Wagner,

the "purely human"--the whole man, the essential man--lies deeper than

what is "merely explicable to abstract reason." "A new, indescribable

power," he says, in speaking of Ibsen's _Master Builder_, "dominates

this somnambulistic drama. All that is said therein at once hides and

reveals the source of an unknown life. And if we are bewildered at

times, let us not forget that our soul often appears, to our feeble

eyes, to be but the maddest of forces, and that there are in man many

regions more fertile, more profound, and more interesting than those of

his reason or his intelligence."

For these obscure perceptions of the soul, words alone are plainly

an inadequate mode of expression. Hence both Wagner and Maeterlinck

feel that some more direct kind of utterance is required, some more

immediate means of communication between the feeling of the artist

and the feeling of the auditor. Wagner finds this in music, which

substitutes a direct appeal for the indirect appeal of the ordinary

poet. The dramatic poem must be drafted "in such a fashion that it

may penetrate the finest fibres of the musical tissue, and the spoken

_thought_ entirely dissolves into the _feeling_." Not that there is

to be any surrender of that grip upon the inner life that is the

essence of thoughtful drama. On the contrary, Wagner maintains, after

the manner of Maeterlinck, that it is only when the soul is set free

from the disturbing accidents of the temporary life that it can see

clearly into the movements of the universal life. Wagner holds that in

the Beethoven symphony, for example, a world-view is presented, quite

as philosophical, quite as logically connected, as any that can be put

together in words. "In this symphony, instruments speak a language

whereof the world at no previous time had any knowledge; for here,

with a hitherto unknown persistence, the purely musical expression

enchains the hearer in an inconceivably varied mesh of nuances; rouses

his inmost being to a degree unreachable by any other art; and in all

its changefulness reveals an ordering principle so free and bold that

we can deem it more forcible than any logic, yet without the laws of

logic entering into it in the slightest; nay, rather, the reasoning

march of thought, with its track of causes and effects, here finds no

sort of foothold. So that this symphony must positively appear to us a

revelation from another world; and in truth it opens out a scheme of

the world's phenomena quite different from the ordinary logical scheme,

and whereof one foremost thing is undeniable: that it thrusts home with

the most overwhelming conviction, and guides our feeling with such

a sureness that the logic-mongering reason is completely routed and

disarmed thereby."

Now set beside this view of the relations of the musical drama to the

poetical drama Maeterlinck's comparison of his own dramatic ideals with

those of the "active" poet. The latter passes unthinkingly over many

of the feelings that give to a tragic event its real significance.

Why should not these feelings, the essential core of the drama, be

given fuller play, and the mere incidents be looked upon as either

superfluous or purely ancillary? He too, like Wagner, wants to

show the heart of a tragic situation without the customary tedious

cataloguing of all its limbs. He wants the spiritual essence of drama,

and the essence alone, not the crude material facts from which this

essence has to be distilled. The whole of Maeterlinck's magnificent

passage must here be quoted: "The mysterious chant of the Infinite,

the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on

the horizon, the destiny or fatality that we are conscious of within

us, though by what tokens none can tell--do not all these underlie

_King Lear_, _Macbeth_, _Hamlet_? And would it not be possible, by

some interchanging of the _rôles_, to bring them nearer to us, and

send the actor farther off? Is it beyond the mark to say that the

true tragic element, normal, deep-rooted, and universal--that the

true tragic element of life only begins at the moment when so-called

adventures, sorrows, and dangers have disappeared?... When we think

of it, is it not the tranquillity that is terrible, the tranquillity

watched by the stars? And is it in tumult or in silence that the

spirit of life quickens within us? Is it not when we are told, at the

end of the story, 'They were happy,' that the great disquiet should

intrude itself? What is taking place while they are happy? Are there

not elements of deeper gravity and stability in happiness, in a single

moment of repose, than in the whirlwind of passion? Is it not then

that we at last behold the march of time--ay, and of many another

on-stealing besides, more secret still--is it not then that the hours

rush forward? Are not deeper chords set vibrating by all these things

than by the dagger-stroke of conventional drama? Is it not at the very

moment when a man believes himself secure from bodily death that the

strange and silent tragedy of the being and the immensities does indeed

raise its curtain on the stage? Is it while I flee before a naked sword

that my existence touches its most interesting point? Is life always at

its sublimest in a kiss? Are there not other moments, when one hears

purer voices that do not fade away so soon? Does the soul flower only

on nights of storm? Hitherto, doubtless, this belief has prevailed.

It is only the life of violence, the life of bygone days, that is

perceived by nearly all our tragic writers; and truly may one say that

anachronism dominates the stage, and that dramatic art dates back as

many years as the art of sculpture."

He places the spiritual purposes of painting and music on a higher

plane; "for these," he says, "have learned to select and reproduce

those obscurer phases of daily life that are not the less deep-rooted

and amazing. They know that all that life has lost, as regards mere

superficial ornament, has been more than counterbalanced by the depth,

the intimate meaning, and the spiritual gravity it has acquired. The

true artist no longer chooses Marius triumphing over the Cimbrians,

or the assassination of the Duke of Guise, as a fit subject for his

art; for he is well aware that the psychology of victory or murder is

but elementary and exceptional, and that the solemn voice of men and

things, the voice that issues forth so timidly and hesitatingly, cannot

be heard amidst the idle uproar of acts of violence. And therefore

will he place on his canvas a house lost in the heart of the country,

an open door at the end of a passage, a face or hands at rest, and by

these simple images will add to our consciousness of life, which is a

possession that it is no longer possible to lose."