We shall now find that at the point where The Ring changes from
music drama into opera, it also ceases to be philosophic, and becomes
didactic. The philosophic part is a dramatic symbol of the world as
Wagner observed it. In the didactic part the philosophy degenerates into
the prescription of a romantic nostrum for all human ills. Wagner, only
mortal after all, succumbed to the panacea mania when his philosophy was
exhausted, like any of the rest of us.
The panacea is by no means an original one. Wagner was anticipated in
the year 1819 by a young country gentleman from Sussex named Shelley, in
a work of extraordinary artistic power and splendor. Prometheus Unbound
is an English attempt at a Ring; and when it is taken into account that
the author was only 27 whereas Wagner was 40 when he completed the poem
of The Ring, our vulgar patriotism may find an envious satisfaction in
insisting upon the comparison. Both works set forth the same conflict
between humanity and its gods and governments, issuing in the redemption
of man from their tyranny by the growth of his will into perfect
strength and self-confidence; and both finish by a lapse into
panacea-mongering didacticism by the holding up of Love as the remedy
for all evils and the solvent of all social difficulties.
The differences between Prometheus Unbound and The Ring are as
interesting as the likenesses. Shelley, caught in the pugnacity of his
youth and the first impetuosity of his prodigious artistic power by
the first fierce attack of the New Reformation, gave no quarter to
the antagonist of his hero. His Wotan, whom he calls Jupiter, is the
almighty fiend into whom the Englishman's God had degenerated during two
centuries of ignorant Bible worship and shameless commercialism. He is
Alberic, Fafnir Loki and the ambitious side of Wotan all rolled into
one melodramatic demon who is finally torn from his throne and hurled
shrieking into the abyss by a spirit representing that conception
of Eternal Law which has been replaced since by the conception of
Evolution. Wagner, an older, more experienced man than the Shelley of
1819, understood Wotan and pardoned him, separating him tenderly from
all the compromising alliances to which Shelley fiercely held him;
making the truth and heroism which overthrow him the children of his
inmost heart; and representing him as finally acquiescing in and working
for his own supersession and annihilation. Shelley, in his later works,
is seen progressing towards the same tolerance, justice, and humility
of spirit, as he advanced towards the middle age he never reached. But
there is no progress from Shelley to Wagner as regards the panacea,
except that in Wagner there is a certain shadow of night and death come
on it: nay, even a clear opinion that the supreme good of love is that
it so completely satisfies the desire for life, that after it the Will
to Live ceases to trouble us, and we are at last content to achieve the
highest happiness of death.
This reduction of the panacea to absurdity was not forced upon Shelley,
because the love which acts as a universal solvent in his Prometheus
Unbound is a sentiment of affectionate benevolence which has nothing to
do with sexual passion. It might, and in fact does exist in the absence
of any sexual interest whatever. The words mercy and kindness connote it
less ambiguously than the word love. But Wagner sought always for some
point of contact between his ideas and the physical senses, so that
people might not only think or imagine them in the eighteenth century
fashion, but see them on the stage, hear them from the orchestra, and
feel them through the infection of passionate emotion. Dr. Johnson
kicking the stone to confute Berkeley is not more bent on common-sense
concreteness than Wagner: on all occasions he insists on the need
for sensuous apprehension to give reality to abstract comprehension,
maintaining, in fact, that reality has no other meaning. Now he could
apply this process to poetic love only by following it back to its
alleged origin in sexual passion, the emotional phenomena of which he
has expressed in music with a frankness and forcible naturalism which
would possibly have scandalized Shelley. The love duet in the first act
of The Valkyries is brought to a point at which the conventions of our
society demand the precipitate fall of the curtain; whilst the prelude
to Tristan and Isolde is such an astonishingly intense and faithful
translation into music of the emotions which accompany the union of a
pair of lovers, that it is questionable whether the great popularity of
this piece at our orchestral concerts really means that our audiences
are entirely catholic in their respect for life in all its beneficently
creative functions, or whether they simply enjoy the music without
understanding it.
But however offensive and inhuman may be the superstition which brands
such exaltations of natural passion as shameful and indecorous, there is
at least as much common sense in disparaging love as in setting it up as
a panacea. Even the mercy and loving-kindness of Shelley do not hold good
as a universal law of conduct: Shelley himself makes extremely short
work of Jupiter, just as Siegfried does of Fafnir, Mime, and Wotan; and
the fact that Prometheus is saved from doing the destructive part of
his work by the intervention of that very nebulous personification of
Eternity called Demogorgon, does not in the least save the situation,
because, flatly, there is no such person as Demogorgon, and if
Prometheus does not pull down Jupiter himself, no one else will. It
would be exasperating, if it were not so funny, to see these poets
leading their heroes through blood and destruction to the conclusion
that, as Browning's David puts it (David of all people!), "All's Love;
yet all's Law."
Certainly it is clear enough that such love as that implied by
Siegfried's first taste of fear as he cuts through the mailed coat of
the sleeping figure on the mountain, and discovers that it is a woman;
by her fierce revolt against being touched by him when his terror gives
way to ardor; by his manly transports of victory; and by the womanly
mixture of rapture and horror with which she abandons herself to the
passion which has seized on them both, is an experience which it is much
better, like the vast majority of us, never to have passed through, than
to allow it to play more than a recreative holiday part in our lives. It
did not play a very large part in Wagner's own laborious life, and does
not occupy more than two scenes of The Ring. Tristan and Isolde, wholly
devoted to it, is a poem of destruction and death. The Mastersingers,
a work full of health, fun and happiness, contains not a single bar
of love music that can be described as passionate: the hero of it is
a widower who cobbles shoes, writes verses, and contents himself with
looking on at the sweetheartings of his customers. Parsifal makes an end
of it altogether. The truth is that the love panacea in Night Falls On
The Gods and in the last act of Siegfried is a survival of the first
crude operatic conception of the story, modified by an anticipation of
Wagner's later, though not latest, conception of love as the fulfiller
of our Will to Live and consequently our reconciler to night and death.