Sometimes he gets very far away from Pessimism indeed, and recommends
Roeckel to solace his captivity, not by conquering the will to live at
liberty, but by "the inspiring influences of the Beautiful." The next
moment he throws over even Art for Life. "Where life ends," he says,
very wittily, "Art begins. In youth we turn to Art, we know not why; and
only when we have gone through with Art and come out on the other side,
we learn to our cost that we have missed Life itself." His only comfort
is that he is beloved. And on the subject of love he lets himself loose
in a manner that would have roused the bitterest scorn in Schopenhaur,
though, as we have seen (Love Panacea), it is highly characteristic of
Wagner. "Love in its most perfect reality," he says, "is only possible
between the sexes: it is only as man and woman that human beings can
truly love. Every other manifestation of love can be traced back to that
one absorbingly real feeling, of which all other affections are but an
emanation, a connection, or an imitation. It is an error to look on this
as only one of the forms in which love is revealed, as if there were
other forms coequal with it, or even superior to it. He who after the
manner of metaphysicians prefers UNREALITY to REALITY, and derives the
concrete from the abstract--in short, puts the word before the fact--may
be right in esteeming the idea of love as higher than the expression
of love, and may affirm that actual love made manifest in feeling
is nothing but the outward and visible sign of a pre-existent,
non-sensuous, abstract love; and he will do well to despise that
sensuous function in general. In any case it were safe to bet that such
a man had never loved or been loved as human beings can love, or he
would have understood that in despising this feeling, what he condemned
was its sensual expression, the outcome of man's animal nature, and
not true human love. The highest satisfaction and expression of the
individual is only to be found in his complete absorption, and that is
only possible through love. Now a human being is both MAN and WOMAN: it
is only when these two are united that the real human being exists; and
thus it is only by love that man and woman attain to the full measure
of humanity. But when nowadays we talk of a human being, such heartless
blockheads are we that quite involuntarily we only think of man. It is
only in the union of man and woman by love (sensuous and supersensuous)
that the human being exists; and as the human being cannot rise to the
conception of anything higher than his own existence--his own being--so
the transcendent act of his life is this consummation of his humanity
through love."
It is clear after this utterance from the would-be Schopenhaurian, that
Wagner's explanations of his works for the most part explain nothing but
the mood in which he happened to be on the day he advanced them, or
the train of thought suggested to his very susceptible imagination and
active mind by the points raised by his questioner. Especially in his
private letters, where his outpourings are modified by his dramatic
consciousness of the personality of his correspondent, do we find him
taking all manner of positions, and putting forward all sorts of cases
which must be taken as clever and suggestive special pleadings, and
not as serious and permanent expositions of his works. These works must
speak for themselves: if The Ring says one thing, and a letter written
afterwards says that it said something else, The Ring must be taken to
confute the letter just as conclusively as if the two had been written
by different hands. However, nobody fairly well acquainted with Wagner's
utterances as a whole will find any unaccountable contradictions in
them. As in all men of his type, our manifold nature was so marked in
him that he was like several different men rolled into one. When he had
exhausted himself in the character of the most pugnacious, aggressive,
and sanguine of reformers, he rested himself as a Pessimist and
Nirvanist. In The Ring the quietism of Brynhild's "Rest, rest, thou God"
is sublime in its deep conviction; but you have only to turn back the
pages to find the irrepressible bustle of Siegfried and the revelry of
the clansmen expressed with equal zest. Wagner was not a Schopenhaurite
every day in the week, nor even a Wagnerite. His mind changes as
often as his mood. On Monday nothing will ever induce him to return to
quilldriving: on Tuesday he begins a new pamphlet. On Wednesday he
is impatient of the misapprehensions of people who cannot see how
impossible it is for him to preside as a conductor over platform
performances of fragments of his works, which can only be understood
when presented strictly according to his intention on the stage: on
Thursday he gets up a concert of Wagnerian selections, and when it is
over writes to his friends describing how profoundly both bandsmen and
audience were impressed. On Friday he exults in the self-assertion
of Siegfried's will against all moral ordinances, and is full of a
revolutionary sense of "the universal law of change and renewal": on
Saturday he has an attack of holiness, and asks, "Can you conceive a
moral action of which the root idea is not renunciation?" In short,
Wagner can be quoted against himself almost without limit, much as
Beethoven's adagios could be quoted against his scherzos if a dispute
arose between two fools as to whether he was a melancholy man or a merry
one.