All those to whom the thought of Wagner's development as a man may
have caused pain will find it both restful and healing to reflect upon
what he was as an artist, and to observe how his ability and daring
attained to such a high degree of independence. If art mean only the
faculty of communicating to others what one has oneself experienced,
and if every work of art confutes itself which does not succeed in
making itself understood, then Wagner's greatness as an artist would
certainly lie in the almost demoniacal power of his nature to
communicate with others, to express itself in all languages at once,
and to make known its most intimate and personal experience with the
greatest amount of distinctness possible. His appearance in the
history of art resembles nothing so much as a volcanic eruption of the
united artistic faculties of Nature herself, after mankind had grown
to regard the practice of a special art as a necessary rule. It is
therefore a somewhat moot point whether he ought to be classified as a
poet, a painter, or a musician, even using each these words in its
widest sense, or whether a new word ought not to be invented in order
to describe him.
Wagner's _poetic_ ability is shown by his thinking in visible and actual
facts, and not in ideas; that is to say, he thinks mythically, as the
people have always done. No particular thought lies at the bottom of a
myth, as the children of an artificial culture would have us believe;
but it is in itself a thought: it conveys an idea of the world, but
through the medium of a chain of events, actions, and pains. The Ring
of the Nibelung is a huge system of thought without the usual
abstractness of the latter. It were perhaps possible for a philosopher
to present us with its exact equivalent in pure thought, and to purge
it of all pictures drawn from life, and of all living actions, in
which case we should be in possession of the same thing portrayed in
two completely different forms--the one for the people, and the other
for the very reverse of the people; that is to say, men of theory. But
Wagner makes no appeal to this last class, for the man of theory can
know as little of poetry or myth as the deaf man can know of music;
both of them being conscious only of movements which seem meaningless
to them. It is impossible to appreciate either one of these completely
different forms from the standpoint of the other: as long as the
poet's spell is upon one, one thinks with him just as though one were
merely a feeling, seeing, and hearing creature; the conclusions thus
reached are merely the result of the association of the phenomena one
sees, and are therefore not logical but actual causalities.
If, therefore, the heroes and gods of mythical dramas, as understood
by Wagner, were to express themselves plainly in words, there would be
a danger (inasmuch as the language of words might tend to awaken the
theoretical side in us) of our finding ourselves transported from the
world of myth to the world of ideas, and the result would be not only
that we should fail to understand with greater ease, but that we
should probably not understand at all. Wagner thus forced language
back to a more primeval stage in its development a stage at which it
was almost free of the abstract element, and was still poetry,
imagery, and feeling; the fearlessness with which Wagner undertook
this formidable mission shows how imperatively he was led by the
spirit of poetry, as one who must follow whithersoever his phantom
leader may direct him. Every word in these dramas ought to allow of
being sung, and gods and heroes should make them their own--that was
the task which Wagner set his literary faculty. Any other person in
like circumstances would have given up all hope; for our language
seems almost too old and decrepit to allow of one's exacting what
Wagner exacted from it; and yet, when he smote the rock, he brought
forth an abundant flow. Precisely owing to the fact that he loved his
language and exacted a great deal from it, Wagner suffered more than
any other German through its decay and enfeeblement, from its manifold
losses and mutilations of form, from its unwieldy particles and clumsy
construction, and from its unmusical auxiliary verbs. All these are
things which have entered the language through sin and depravity. On
the other hand, he was exceedingly proud to record the number of
primitive and vigorous factors still extant in the current speech; and
in the tonic strength of its roots he recognised quite a wonderful
affinity and relation to real music, a quality which distinguished it
from the highly evolved and artificially rhetorical Latin languages.
Wagner's poetry is eloquent of his affection for the German language,
and there is a heartiness and candour in his treatment of it which are
scarcely to be met with in any other German writer, save perhaps
Goethe. Forcibleness of diction, daring brevity, power and variety in
rhythm, a remarkable wealth of strong and striking words, simplicity
in construction, an almost unique inventive faculty in regard to
fluctuations of feeling and presentiment, and therewithal a perfectly
pure and overflowing stream of colloquialisms--these are the qualities
that have to be enumerated, and even then the greatest and most
wonderful of all is omitted. Whoever reads two such poems as Tristan
and the Meistersingers consecutively will be just as astonished and
doubtful in regard to the language as to the music; for he will wonder
how it could have been possible for a creative spirit to dominate so
perfectly two worlds as different in form, colour, and arrangement, as
in soul. This is the most wonderful achievement of Wagner's talent;
for the ability to give every work its own linguistic stamp and to
find a fresh body and a new sound for every thought is a task which
only the great master can successfully accomplish. Where this rarest
of all powers manifests itself, adverse criticism can be but petty and
fruitless which confines itself to attacks upon certain excesses and
eccentricities in the treatment, or upon the more frequent obscurities
of expression and ambiguity of thought. Moreover, what seemed to
electrify and scandalise those who were most bitter in their criticism
was not so much the language as the spirit of the Wagnerian
operas--that is to say, his whole manner of feeling and suffering. It
were well to wait until these very critics have acquired another
spirit themselves; they will then also speak a different tongue, and,
by that time, it seems to me things will go better with the German
language than they do at present.
In the first place, however, no one who studies Wagner the poet and
word-painter should forget that none of his dramas were meant to be
read, and that it would therefore be unjust to judge them from the
same standpoint as the spoken drama. The latter plays upon the
feelings by means of words and ideas, and in this respect it is under
the dominion of the laws of rhetoric. But in real life passion is
seldom eloquent: in spoken drama it perforce must be, in order to be
able to express itself at all. When, however, the language of a people
is already in a state of decay and deterioration, the word-dramatist
is tempted to impart an undue proportion of new colour and form both
to his medium and to his thoughts; he would elevate the language in
order to make it a vehicle capable of conveying lofty feelings, and by
so doing he runs the risk of becoming abstruse. By means of sublime
phrases and conceits he likewise tries to invest passion with some
nobility, and thereby runs yet another risk, that of appearing false
and artificial. For in real life passions do not speak in sentences,
and the poetical element often draws suspicion upon their genuineness
when it departs too palpably from reality. Now Wagner, who was the
first to detect the essential feeling in spoken drama, presents every
dramatic action threefold: in a word, in a gesture, and in a sound.
For, as a matter of fact, music succeeds in conveying the deepest
emotions of the dramatic performers direct to the spectators, and
while these see the evidence of the actors' states of soul in their
bearing and movements, a third though more feeble confirmation of
these states, translated into conscious will, quickly follows in the
form of the spoken word. All these effects fulfil their purpose
simultaneously, without disturbing one another in the least, and urge
the spectator to a completely new understanding and sympathy, just as
if his senses had suddenly grown more spiritual and his spirit more
sensual, and as if everything which seeks an outlet in him, and which
makes him thirst for knowledge, were free and joyful in exultant
perception. Because every essential factor in a Wagnerian drama is
conveyed to the spectator with the utmost clearness, illumined and
permeated throughout by music as by an internal flame, their author
can dispense with the expedients usually employed by the writer of the
spoken play in order to lend light and warmth to the action. The whole
of the dramatist's stock in trade could be more simple, and the
architect's sense of rhythm could once more dare to manifest itself in
the general proportions of the edifice; for there was no more need of
"the deliberate confusion and involved variety of styles, whereby the
ordinary playwright strove in the interests of his work to produce
that feeling of wonder and thrilling suspense which he ultimately
enhanced to one of delighted amazement. The impression of ideal
distance and height was no more to be induced by means of tricks and
artifices. Language withdrew itself from the length and breadth of
rhetoric into the strong confines of the speech of the feelings, and
although the actor spoke much less about all he did and felt in the
performance, his innermost sentiments, which the ordinary playwright
had hitherto ignored for fear of being undramatic, was now able to
drive the spectators to passionate sympathy, while the accompanying
language of gestures could be restricted to the most delicate
modulations. Now, when passions are rendered in song, they require
rather more time than when conveyed by speech; music prolongs, so to
speak, the duration of the feeling, from which it follows, as a rule,
that the actor who is also a singer must overcome the extremely
unplastic animation from which spoken drama suffers. He feels himself
incited all the more to a certain nobility of bearing, because music
envelopes his feelings in a purer atmosphere, and thus brings them
closer to beauty.
The extraordinary tasks which Wagner set his actors and singers will
provoke rivalry between them for ages to come, in the personification
of each of his heroes with the greatest possible amount of clearness,
perfection, and fidelity, according to that perfect incorporation
already typified by the music of drama. Following this leader, the eye
of the plastic artist will ultimately behold the marvels of another
visible world, which, previous to him, was seen for the first time
only by the creator of such works as the Ring of the Nibelung--that
creator of highest rank, who, like Æschylus, points the way to a
coming art. Must not jealousy awaken the greatest talent, if the
plastic artist ever compares the effect of his productions with that
of Wagnerian music, in which there is so much pure and sunny happiness
that he who hears it feels as though all previous music had been but
an alien, faltering, and constrained language; as though in the past
it had been but a thing to sport with in the presence of those who
were not deserving of serious treatment, or a thing with which to
train and instruct those who were not even deserving of play? In the
case of this earlier kind of music, the joy we always experience while
listening to Wagner's compositions is ours only for a short space of
time, and it would then seem as though it were overtaken by certain
rare moments of forgetfulness, during which it appears to be communing
with its inner self and directing its eyes upwards, like Raphael's
Cecilia, away from the listeners and from all those who demand
distraction, happiness, or instruction from it.
In general it may be said of Wagner the Musician, that he endowed
everything in nature which hitherto had had no wish to speak with the
power of speech: he refuses to admit that anything must be dumb, and,
resorting to the dawn, the forest, the mist, the cliffs, the hills,
the thrill of night and the moonlight, he observes a desire common to
them all--they too wish to sing their own melody. If the philosopher
says it is will that struggles for existence in animate and inanimate
nature, the musician adds: And this will wherever it manifests itself,
yearns for a melodious existence.
Before Wagner's time, music for the most part moved in narrow limits:
it concerned itself with the permanent states of man, or with what the
Greeks call ethos. And only with Beethoven did it begin to find the
language of pathos, of passionate will, and of the dramatic
occurrences in the souls of men. Formerly, what people desired was to
interpret a mood, a stolid, merry, reverential, or penitential state
of mind, by means of music; the object was, by means of a certain
striking uniformity of treatment and the prolonged duration of this
uniformity, to compel the listener to grasp the meaning of the music
and to impose its mood upon him. To all such interpretations of mood
or atmosphere, distinct and particular forms of treatment were
necessary: others were established by convention. The question of
length was left to the discretion of the musician, whose aim was not
only to put the listener into a certain mood, but also to avoid
rendering that mood monotonous by unduly protracting it. A further
stage was reached when the interpretations of contrasted moods were
made to follow one upon the other, and the charm of light and shade
was discovered; and yet another step was made when the same piece of
music was allowed to contain a contrast of the ethos--for instance,
the contest between a male and a female theme. All these, however, are
crude and primitive stages in the development of music. The fear of
passion suggested the first rule, and the fear of monotony the second;
all depth of feeling and any excess thereof were regarded as
"unethical." Once, however, the art of the ethos had repeatedly been
made to ring all the changes on the moods and situations which
convention had decreed as suitable, despite the most astounding
resourcefulness on the part of its masters, its powers were exhausted.
Beethoven was the first to make music speak a new language--till then
forbidden--the language of passion; but as his art was based upon the
laws and conventions of the ETHOS, and had to attempt to justify
itself in regard to them, his artistic development was beset with
peculiar difficulties and obscurities. An inner dramatic factor--and
every passion pursues a dramatic course--struggled to obtain a new
form, but the traditional scheme of "mood music" stood in its way, and
protested--almost after the manner in which morality opposes
innovations and immorality. It almost seemed, therefore, as if
Beethoven had set himself the contradictory task of expressing pathos
in the terms of the ethos. This view does not, however, apply to
Beethoven's latest and greatest works; for he really did succeed in
discovering a novel method of expressing the grand and vaulting arch
of passion. He merely selected certain portions of its curve; imparted
these with the utmost clearness to his listeners, and then left it to
them to divine its whole span. Viewed superficially, the new form
seemed rather like an aggregation of several musical compositions, of
which every one appeared to represent a sustained situation, but was
in reality but a momentary stage in the dramatic course of a passion.
The listener might think that he was hearing the old "mood" music over
again, except that he failed to grasp the relation of the various
parts to one another, and these no longer conformed with the canon of
the law. Even among minor musicians, there flourished a certain
contempt for the rule which enjoined harmony in the general
construction of a composition and the sequence of the parts in their
works still remained arbitrary. Then, owing to a misunderstanding, the
discovery of the majestic treatment of passion led back to the use of
the single movement with an optional setting, and the tension between
the parts thus ceased completely. That is why the symphony, as
Beethoven understood it, is such a wonderfully obscure production,
more especially when, here and there, it makes faltering attempts at
rendering Beethoven's pathos. The means ill befit the intention, and
the intention is, on the whole, not sufficiently clear to the
listener, because it was never really clear, even in the mind of the
composer. But the very injunction that something definite must be
imparted, and that this must be done as distinctly as possible,
becomes ever more and more essential, the higher, more difficult, and
more exacting the class of work happens to be.
That is why all Wagner's efforts were concentrated upon the one object
of discovering those means which best served the purpose of
_distinctness_, and to this end it was above all necessary for him to
emancipate himself from all the prejudices and claims of the old
"mood" music, and to give his compositions--the musical
interpretations of feelings and passion--a perfectly unequivocal mode
of expression. If we now turn to what he has achieved, we see that his
services to music are practically equal in rank to those which that
sculptor-inventor rendered to sculpture who introduced "sculpture in
the round." All previous music seems stiff and uncertain when compared
with Wagner's, just as though it were ashamed and did not wish to be
inspected from all sides. With the most consummate skill and
precision, Wagner avails himself of every degree and colour in the
realm of feeling; without the slightest hesitation or fear of its
escaping him, he seizes upon the most delicate, rarest, and mildest
emotion, and holds it fast, as though it had hardened at his touch,
despite the fact that it may seem like the frailest butterfly to every
one else. His music is never vague or dreamy; everything that is
allowed to speak through it, whether it be of man or of nature, has a
strictly individual passion; storm and fire acquire the ruling power
of a personal will in his hands. Over all the clamouring characters
and the clash of their passions, over the whole torrent of contrasts,
an almighty and symphonic understanding hovers with perfect serenity,
and continually produces concord out of war. Taken as a whole,
Wagner's music is a reflex of the world as it was understood by the
great Ephesian poet--that is to say, a harmony resulting from strife,
as the union of justice and enmity. I admire the ability which could
describe the grand line of universal passion out of a confusion of
passions which all seem to be striking out in different directions:
the fact that this was a possible achievement I find demonstrated in
every individual act of a Wagnerian drama, which describes the
individual history of various characters side by side with a general
history of the whole company. Even at the very beginning we know we
are watching a host of cross currents dominated by one great violent
stream; and though at first this stream moves unsteadily over hidden
reefs, and the torrent seems to be torn asunder as if it were
travelling towards different points, gradually we perceive the central
and general movement growing stronger and more rapid, the convulsive
fury of the contending waters is converted into one broad, steady, and
terrible flow in the direction of an unknown goal; and suddenly, at
the end, the whole flood in all its breadth plunges into the depths,
rejoicing demoniacally over the abyss and all its uproar. Wagner is
never more himself than when he is overwhelmed with difficulties and
can exercise power on a large scale with all the joy of a law-giver. To
bring restless and contending masses into simple rhythmic movement,
and to exercise one will over a bewildering host of claims and
desires--these are the tasks for which he feels he was born, and in
the performance of which he finds freedom. And he never loses his
breath withal, nor does he ever reach his goal panting. He strove just
as persistently to impose the severest laws upon himself as to lighten
the burden of others in this respect. Life and art weigh heavily upon
him when he cannot play wit their most difficult questions. If one
considers the relation between the melody of song and that of speech,
one will perceive how he sought to adopt as his natural model the
pitch, strength, and tempo of the passionate man's voice in order to
transform it into art; and if one further considers the task of
introducing this singing passion into the general symphonic order of
music, one gets some idea of the stupendous difficulties he had to
overcome. In this behalf, his inventiveness in small things as in
great, his omniscience and industry are such, that at the sight of one
of Wagner's scores one is almost led to believe that no real work or
effort had ever existed before his time. It seems almost as if he too
could have said, in regard to the hardships of art, that the real
virtue of the dramatist lies in self-renunciation. But he would
probably have added, There is but one kind of hardship--that of the
artist who is not yet free: virtue and goodness are trivial
accomplishments.
Viewing him generally as an artist, and calling to mind a more famous
type, we see that Wagner is not at all unlike Demosthenes: in him also
we have the terrible earnestness of purpose and that strong prehensile
mind which always obtains a complete grasp of a thing; in him, too, we
have the hand's quick clutch and the grip as of iron. Like
Demosthenes, he conceals his art or compels one to forget it by the
peremptory way he calls attention to the subject he treats; and yet,
like his great predecessor, he is the last and greatest of a whole
line of artist-minds, and therefore has more to conceal than his
forerunners: his art acts like nature, like nature recovered and
restored. Unlike all previous musicians, there is nothing bombastic
about him; for the former did not mind playing at times with their
art, and making an exhibition of their virtuosity. One associates
Wagner's art neither with interest nor with diversion, nor with Wagner
himself and art in general. All one is conscious of is of the great
_necessity_ of it all. No one will ever be able to appreciate what
severity evenness of will, and self-control the artist required during
his development, in order, at his zenith, to be able to do the
necessary thing joyfully and freely. Let it suffice if we can
appreciate how, in some respects, his music, with a certain cruelty
towards itself, determines to subserve the course of the drama, which
is as unrelenting as fate, whereas in reality his art was ever
thirsting for a free ramble in the open and over the wilderness.