It is beyond the scope of this work to give anything like a connected
biography of Wagner, even though it would conduce largely to a better
understanding of our researches. I must therefore refer the reader to
the copious literature which exists on the subject of Wagner’s life,
and especially to his own statements, in his Gesammelte Schriften und
Dichtungen. I shall confine myself here simply to calling attention to
those points in his life which are requisite for an explanation of the
psychical processes to which his artistic creations owe their origin.
My treatment of the latter will not aim at anything like an artistic
critical study, but will proceed wholly from a psychological point of
view in so far as may be requisite for the formation of a psychological
analysis.
Wagner was born at Leipsic on May 22, 1813. His father is described
as a clever and intelligent man, by occupation a clerk of police, who
died as early as November, 1813--that is to say, half a year after the
birth of his son. Shortly afterward the child’s mother married a friend
of her late husband, Louis Geyer, an actor, painter, and poet, who
died when Wagner was only seven years of age. The latter’s education,
consequently, was chiefly directed by his mother, who devoted herself
to this duty with all love and conscientiousness. He attended the
Dresden school of art and later the Nicolai school in Leipsic.
Wagner was no infant prodigy. Yet even at an early age he gave evidence
of a lively fantasy, indulging in manifold poetical attempts; but
it was not until the period of his youth that he first displayed any
decided talent for music. It was at the Gewandhaus concerts in Leipsic
that he first came to know Beethoven’s compositions, which made a
strong impression on his youthful mind. With ardent zeal he buried
himself in the study of Beethoven, and Dorn thus expresses himself with
regard to him: “I doubt whether there has ever been a young composer
who was more conversant with Beethoven’s works than Wagner was at the
age of eighteen.”
Even in the years of his youth that impulse made itself felt in Wagner
which we have learned to recognise as a characteristic of great
men--the creative impulse. He himself was perfectly aware of it, and
put it in a poetical form when he said that a fairy had stood beside
his cradle and granted him a gift that is frequently disdained--“The
spirit that is ne’er content, which always thinks of something new.”
This impulse to create was manifested during the period of Wagner’s
artistic development in two different ways. Two opposing elements
struggled in him for the mastery; sometimes the one gained the upper
hand, sometimes the other, until, tried by this struggle, he followed
his true artistic nature and remained true to it to the end. These two
elements were the impulse to give expression to his artistic sensations
and feelings, which impulse we have found to have been the guiding
principle of all the creations of Goethe, and the objectively formed
craving to create, which was excited from without.
After a number of minor attempts in the way of writing poetry and
composing, Wagner put together a libretto called the Fairies, the
idea of which was borrowed from one of Gozzi’s tales. He says, to be
true: “What I constructed was certainly nothing else than just what I
wanted--namely, a libretto; and I set it to music in accordance with
the impressions that Beethoven, Weber, and Marschner had made upon
me.”[142] But he adds: “And yet, not the suitability for a libretto
which I had discovered in Gozzi’s tale alone drew me toward it, but the
subject itself touched me to the quick.” In the poetical subject of the
fairy who gave up her immortality that she might possess the man she
loved, Wagner had unconsciously given artistic expression to the mood
within him.
At the same time an impulse had made itself felt in his case which
perfectly harmonized with his age and the external influences working
upon him--an impulse toward a brilliant artistic career, an ardent
longing for fame and honour. “An impulse grew within me, amounting in
intensity to a consuming yearning, to rise above the littleness and
wretchedness of the circumstances that controlled me. This impulse,
however, had only a secondary influence on my actual life itself;
primarily, it aimed at a brilliant career as an artist.”[143]
While in this state of mind Wagner wrote a second opera--Forbidden
Love, or the Novice of Palermo--for which he had adapted the plot
of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. In the summer of 1834 he had
accepted the post of musical director at the theatre of Magdeburg.
With reference to this he says: “My remarkable converse with singers
behind the scenes and before the footlights entirely corresponded with
my inclination toward diverse forms of amusement.”[144] During this
period he completed the composition of Forbidden Love. His sole purpose
was to please, to win fame and approbation. “For a holiday performance
on New Year’s day, 1835, I hastily prepared some music which generally
pleased. Easily-won successes like this confirmed me very strongly in
the view that, in order to please, one ought certainly not to consider
too scrupulously the means at one’s command. And it was upon this
principle that I proceeded with the composition of my Forbidden Love.”
We perceive an essential difference between the origin of the Fairies
and that of Forbidden Love. Wagner himself recognised this, and says on
the subject: “If this subject is compared with that of the Fairies, it
will be noticed that the possibility was open to me to develop myself
according to either of two fundamentally different tendencies; to the
sacred earnestness of my original sentiment there opposed itself a
bold tendency, nourished by the impressions of my life, toward wild,
sensuous impetuosity, toward a saucy joyousness, which seemed to
contradict the former most emphatically.”[145] Farther on he says:
“Whoever chooses to compare this composition with the Fairies will
hardly be able to comprehend how so marked a conversion of tendencies
could be brought about in so short a time. My path led me in the first
instance to utter frivolity in my opinions about art; this was the
case during the first period of my entry upon the practical career of
musical director at the theatre. The rehearsing and direction of those
very pliant fashionable French operas, the piquant and daring elements
in their orchestral effects, gave me many a childish joy when I could
send them out into the audience from my director’s desk.”[146]
In the autumn of 1837 Wagner went to Riga to take the post of first
musical director of the theatre there. Here he found excellent material
for his opera, and applied himself “with much love to using it.” He
composed for the singers several interpolations for various operas,
and also made up the text for a two-act comic opera, the Happy Bear
Family, the subject of which he had borrowed from a narrative in the
Thousand and One Nights. He had already composed one part of this when
he became filled with disgust at the work and turned away from it with
aversion. He now determined “to do something really great--to write
an opera, for the production of which only the most important forces
should be appropriate,” so that he might not be tempted to bring it
before the public in the limited circumstances in which he happened to
be. It should be to him an incentive to exert himself to the utmost to
get out of the conditions that were so loathsome to him.
In this state of mind he sketched out the plan of a great tragic opera
in five acts--Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes--the material for which
he had borrowed from Bulwer Lytton’s story. He strove in this to
create something great and brilliant, which would satisfy his artistic
ambition. “Even here, in the composition of the text, there was in
my mind really nothing else than to write an effective libretto. The
Grand Opera, with all its scenic and musical splendour, its effectful,
passionate musical fulness, loomed up before me; and it became the
desire of my artistic ambition not merely to seek to imitate it, but to
surpass all it had offered hitherto with unbounded lavishness.”
One portion of this opera had already been completed when Wagner
resolved to break with his present life. Without means, without
preparation, without any prospects, he straightway betook himself from
Riga to Paris. During the sea voyage, which lasted four weeks and in
the course of which he visited the coast of Norway, there recurred
to him the legend of the Flying Dutchman, with which at an earlier
period he had become familiar. This legendary figure now made a deep
impression upon his mind. “He gained spiritual power from my own
peculiar situation; from the storms, the billows, the rocky northern
shore and the activity of the sailors, he got physiognomy and colour.”
When Wagner reached Paris and became dazzled by the brilliancy of its
musical world, the figure of the Flying Dutchman was at first blotted
out again, and his efforts seemed once more wholly directed toward
the opera that should make an impression. “When I was present at the
brilliant performances of the Grand Opera, an event, by the way, which
did not happen frequently, a voluptuous, wheedling warmth mounted up in
me, and gave me the wish, the hope--nay, the certainty--that I would
yet be able to triumph here. This magnificence of accessories, applied
with enthusiastic artistic purpose, seemed to me to be the zenith
of art, and I felt myself not in the least incapable of attaining
this zenith. Moreover, I recollect that I was quite willing to find
inspiration in all phases of that artistic world which appeared to bear
in any way upon my aim; what was meretricious and unsubstantial was
concealed from my sight by a brilliancy of sensuous externals such as I
had never seen before.”[147]
This mood, this striving after fame and splendour, was not, however,
destined to dominate the soul of the artist for any length of time, but
soon became transformed into a most profound contempt for this artistic
tendency. There arose in him an unspeakable yearning which he was
himself frequently unable to judge correctly. To this were added the
unfortunate material circumstances in which Wagner happened to be at
that time, which constrained him to grasp at the humblest means to gain
his livelihood. In order to be introduced by singers into the salons of
Paris, he composed several French romances, declared himself ready to
compose the music for a vulgar vaudeville for one of the theatres of
the boulevards, and finally had to occupy himself with the arrangement
of arias from “favourite operas” for the _cornet-à-piston_. In these
circumstances, the yearning in him assumed a more and more definite
shape; the artistic world with its brilliancy and glitter, as he now
saw it, and the great Parisian opera filled him with disgust and
aversion, and from this moment he longed to leave it all for a dimly
perceived ideal of intelligent affection. While in this state of mind,
the Flying Dutchman again occurred to him. In this mythical character’s
unspeakable longing for unselfish love, Wagner saw the reflected image
of his inmost soul. The “woman” after whom the Dutchman hankered, and
who unselfishly sacrificed herself for him, represented that ideal
human love of which the artist himself stood in need. “It was this
Flying Dutchman who so repeatedly and with such irresistible power of
attraction sprang up within me out of the quagmires and billows of my
life; it was the first national poem which made any deep impression on
my heart and urged me, as artist, to interpret and mould it into a work
of art.”[148]
It was in this mood that the poem and music of the Flying Dutchman were
brought into being. Wagner compares the legend with that of Odysseus
longing for his domestic hearth, and of the Wandering Jew. But in the
case of the Dutchman, the woman he desired was no longer the actually
existing woman at home, but an ideal which did not yet exist but only
was perceived--the ideal of that human love which sought no recompense.
“The yearning of Odysseus for his home, hearth, and wife had, after
having been nurtured by the sufferings of the Wandering Jew into a
desire for death, been strengthened into the craving after something
new, unknown, not yet visibly present, but already felt.”
Wagner fancied that he would be able to find the satisfaction of his
yearning in Germany rather than in Paris, and while he was busy with
the composition of the Flying Dutchman, the object for which he longed
assumed the shape of home--not the home, of course, that he had left,
but an ideal home, one still to be expected. “A delicate, longing
patriotism took possession of me, of whose existence I had hitherto
not had the slightest suspicion. This patriotism was free from all
political colouring, for even at that time I was well aware that
political Germany, as opposed in any way to political France, did not
possess for me the least power of attraction. It was the feeling of
homelessness in Paris that awakened in me the yearning for my German
home; this yearning, however, did not have a reference to anything that
I had known of old, which could be gained back, but to something felt
and desired, new and unknown, which I was to win for the first time,
and about which I only knew that I would certainly not find it here in
Paris. It was the yearning of my Flying Dutchman for the woman--not, as
I have said, Odysseus’s housewife, but the woman who brought salvation,
whose features did not occur to me in any definite shape, but who
merely hovered before my eyes as the incarnation of the female element.
And this element assumed the appearance of home--that is, of closest
companionship.”
In the Flying Dutchman that artistic tendency had triumphed in Wagner
which corresponded with his true nature, and from this time forward
he remained true to it to the last. No longer were splendour and fame
the aims of his artistic creation; art became to him solely a means of
expression, a means of communicating his inmost feelings and moods,
and his only wish was to be understood--that is to say, to awaken by
his art in others the same sensations to which it owed its origin.
It was no longer his aim to gain admiration and create astonishment.
“One thing kept me up--my art, which was for me a means not for the
acquisition of fame and money, but for the communication of my views to
sensitive hearts.”[149] All his artistic creations were henceforth,
as it were, the mirror of his soul; his art was the proclaimer of his
inmost sensations.
Just as we perceived in the case of the objective poet, Shakespeare,
two easily distinguishable factors in the artist and his work, so we
saw in every line of the subjective Goethe the poet himself in his
most intimate personality. As I have already said in another place, we
could not for this reason love Goethe’s poems without also esteeming in
them the personality of the poet, for poet and artistic work are there
blended into one indissoluble whole. From this point of view alone was
Goethe able to comprehend art, and he therefore said: “One must be
something in order to make something. It is the personal character of
the writer which makes him important in the eyes of the public, and not
the products of his talent.”
Wagner had the same experience in this regard as Goethe; he also is a
subjective artist who can not be separated from his art; every one of
his artistic creations also forms “a fragment of a great confession.”
His art forms a portion of his personality, and is therefore no more
separable from him than speech is from man. He could therefore hope
to be understood only where people felt and experienced with him, not
merely where they were ready to consider a work of art in an objective
manner. They must be able to penetrate with fullest sympathy into
his personal sensations and moods. Wagner therefore says: “As such
[that is to say, as his friends, by whom alone he could hope to be
understood] I can not, however, regard those who pretend to love me
as an artist and yet think it right to deny me their sympathy as a
man. If the separation of the artist from the man is something just
as unthinkable as the divorce of the soul from the body, and if it is
established that an artist can never be loved, that his art can never
be comprehended unless he be also (at all events, unconsciously and
involuntarily) loved as a man, and unless his life also be understood
along with his art, so much the less, as things are at the present
day, and considering the despicably bad condition of our public
artistic conditions, can an artist of my tendency be loved, and his
art consequently be under, stood, unless this understanding and that
possible love be founded before everything upon sympathy--that is to
say, upon compassion and fellow-feeling with the most human part of
his life.”[150] Wagner was perfectly right in this, though only with
reference to “an artist of his tendency,” and he agrees in this opinion
with Goethe; but we have seen that there is also an objective art to
which this opinion would not apply. Wagner, however, from his point of
view, could not come to any other judgment; he felt that he could only
be understood in those cases in which people felt and experienced with
him. His art appealed not to the intellect, but to the feelings. “The
artist appeals to the feelings and not to the intellect; if an answer
is given him from the side of the intellect, it may be said that he
has not been understood, and the criticism amounts in truth to nothing
else than the confession of a lack of understanding of the work of art,
which can only be understood with the feelings.”[151]
Wagner saw, as Goethe expressed it, “the general in the particular,”
and it was in this that his artistic gifts lay. In giving artistic
expression to his own aspirations he unconsciously touched the feelings
of humanity. He felt that he could only be understood by those who
could feel artistically with him, “who happened to be in a more or less
similar position with the artist, developed under similar conditions
of life, and who could sympathize with him from the bottom of their
nature and heart, so that they were, under certain circumstances, in
a position to assume his view as their own, and were able to take the
required intense interest in the effort to give them expression.”
With a view to giving artistic expression to his feelings, Wagner felt
himself drawn toward a form of art which permitted him to appeal in the
most unlimited manner possible to the receptive sensations, and this
form of art was the musical drama. Of course this form of art had to be
very different from the opera which had existed up to this time, so as
to be in conformity with the difference between their respective aims.
The aim of the opera of that day was the satisfaction of the prevailing
artistic taste of an unintelligent mob, the satisfaction of a longing
for diversion and amusement. The opera had to do justice to all these
requirements. The dominating factor of the opera was the music, to
which everything else was subordinate. To create “fine melodies” was
the duty of the composer; the libretto was a secondary consideration,
and sound and word had no intimate connection with each other. There
was no desire for anything like “sense” in a libretto; the words were
always merely the handmaids of the music, to suit which they were
put together. Just in the same way as the poet was, so to speak, the
train-bearer of the musician, the musician became the slave of the
interpreter. Airs and duets were composed in order to give the singers
the opportunity of displaying their artistic skill; composers had no
hesitation in writing for particular singers, and in letting them
prescribe the nature of their work, in order to attain as “powerful an
effect” as possible.
Between productions of this kind and a form of art whose single aim
it was to give expression to the emotions and feelings of the artist,
there must naturally be a fundamental distinction. In Wagner’s eyes
music was nothing further than a means of expression which in a
co-ordinate manner stood opposed to the other factors of the work as
a whole, of the drama. The meaning of the music begins at the point
where that of the words no longer suffices. Temperaments and passions
may be described in every case by the spoken words, but they can not
be immediately brought to expression. Music, on the other hand, is
the immediate proclaimer of the sensations; the words appeal to the
intellect, the music appeals to the feelings.
Wagner felt very well that he had begun his true artistic career with
the Flying Dutchman. “At that point my career as a poet begins where
I left that of a composer of librettos.” His works of art originated
thereafter no longer in reflection, but in the impulse to communicate
moods that were present in him. “My treatment was new; it was suggested
to me out of my inmost mood, and forced upon me by the impulse to
communicate this mood. In order to deliver myself of what was in
me--that is to say, in order to obey the inward pressure to communicate
with persons feeling like me--I had as an artist to enter upon a path
that had certainly not been suggested to me by outward experience,
and that which impels a man hereto is necessity, a deeply felt,
constraining necessity, though one not known to the practical mind.”
The Flying Dutchman was finished. The indefinite yearning of the artist
assumed a more and more tangible form in the longing for home:
’Tis strange, methinks, to give its name
To every land to which I roam;
But not to find that dearest land
For which I burn--the land called home.[152]
It was in this state of mind that Wagner left Paris in the spring of
1842. Meanwhile his Rienzi had been accepted for the court theatre at
Dresden; the Flying Dutchman was to be produced at Berlin; the future
smiled upon the artist with rosy serenity, and with happy, joyous
heart he set out for home. “For the first time I saw the Rhine, and
with bright tears in my eyes I, poor artist that I was, swore eternal
fidelity to my German Fatherland.”[153] In due course he reached
Dresden, where he was received with love and sympathy. Rienzi was
produced and proved a brilliant triumph. “After a long struggle amid
paltry circumstances,” so Wagner writes, “after hard-fought battles,
sufferings, and condemnation amid the loveless Parisian artistic and
social life, I quickly found myself in surroundings that acknowledged
me, helped me, and frequently met me in the most affectionate spirit.”
Wagner had already been for some time acquainted with the legend of
Tannhäuser through an old book of folk-tales. On the journey from Paris
to Dresden he visited the Wartburg for the first time, and it was in
this way that this legend, which in the book in question was loosely
connected with the singers’ war, came once more clearly before his
eyes. But in Dresden, where he again took part in the outward pomp
of modern artistic life, this impression gradually faded away. The
extraordinary success of his Rienzi, the veneration and admiration
which fell to his lot, deceived him once again with respect to the
condition of art as it really existed, and caused him to regard it in
an idealistic light. The post of director of the royal opera at Dresden
having at this time been offered to him, it became perfectly clear to
him that the public life of art did not imply any true art such as he
had learned to know it, but only a “self-interest which adorned itself
with an artistic appearance.” But the brilliancy of such a post in the
eyes of others blinded him also, and he became director of the royal
opera.
The production of the Flying Dutchman at Berlin had come to naught;
but, in consequence of the great success which had attended Rienzi,
the director of the court theatre of Dresden decided to have the
Flying Dutchman also produced. The opera was quickly rehearsed under
Wagner’s own direction, but fell entirely flat. The public had expected
something like Rienzi, but this “new tendency” left it perfectly cold
and unsympathetic. His Rienzi was repeated with so much the more
enthusiasm, and it must have been clear to Wagner which path he ought
to tread if he wished to make sure of fame and fortune. Once more
the temptation came to him to be untrue to his real artistic nature.
“The sensuous, luxurious mood,” so he writes, “which had come upon me
by virtue of the complete change in my external circumstances, and
in consequence of the first enjoyment of an assured position, but
especially also of a certain amount of affection and admiration on the
part of the public, became intensified into a pleasurable self-content,
and soon led me more and more deeply into a misunderstanding and
misuse of my true nature as it had hitherto developed itself, with its
necessary consequences.”[154]
Once again the impulse came to Wagner to write a great, brilliant opera
in the style of Rienzi, and he therefore took up a scheme which had
already been sketched out at an earlier period, an historical opera in
five acts--The Saracens--of which Manfred, son of the Emperor Frederick
II, was the hero. But this artistic tendency, which was merely
calculated for splendour and effect and was repugnant to his whole
nature, was bound very soon to fill him with aversion and disgust. He
himself describes this internal struggle: “An impulse, such as in every
person impels toward the immediate present, now determined me, in my
special circumstances as an artist, to a tendency which was bound again
very soon and violently to disgust me. This impulse would only have
been appeased in life if I had also sought as an artist to aspire to
brilliancy and profit by a perfect subordination of my true nature to
the demands of the public taste. I would have had to sacrifice myself
to fashion and to playing upon the public’s taste, and here, at this
point, it was clear to my feeling that in actually entering upon this
tendency I would have to come to naught from sheer disgust.”
In this state of mind Tannhäuser again presented himself to Wagner’s
soul, in his longing henceforth to get out of the world of sensuality
and pleasure:
There’s more than joy affects my heart,
’Midst my delight I seek for smart;
Far from thy realm I must me hie,
O Queen! O Goddess! Let me fly![155]
He turned from this artistic tendency with aversion, and became filled
with a mighty yearning after satisfaction in a higher, nobler element,
which, in antithesis to the sensual world of enjoyment that was about
him and that strove for fame and splendour, must appear to him like a
“pure, chaste, maidenly, unapproachable and intangible loving being.”
“How,” thus proceeds Wagner, “could this yearning for love, the noblest
sensation which, taking into consideration my nature, I could feel, be
anything but the craving after emancipation from the earthly present,
after rebirth into an element of infinite love, such as is not to be
found on earth, but seemed only attainable by death?”
In this internal struggle his true artist nature had once again come
off victorious. Wagner had on many occasions called music his “good
angel”; now he was freed by it through the irresistible impulse to
truer, more unselfish devotion, from the sensuous striving after
external splendour and fame. A sublime, unattainable ideal of the most
unselfish sacrifice, only tangible in death, hovered before him in
the form of a pure, chaste maiden, and within him sounded the words of
redemption:
An angel prayed for thee on earth--
All blissful did she soar o’er thee:
Elizabeth![156]
This was the state of mind to which Tannhäuser owed its origin. How
painfully must it have affected Wagner to be so entirely misunderstood
in his intentions and efforts! He himself says: “How silly must those
critics appear to me who have become ingenious under the influence
of modern loose living, when they try to impute to my Tannhäuser a
specifically Christian, impotently heavenward tendency!”[157]
The figure of Tannhäuser had sprung from his inmost soul; in it his
true feelings and sensations found artistic incorporation. He now
found himself again on the path of the only art which was capable of
satisfying him, yet felt that here he must always deny himself fame and
splendour. But he shunned neither struggle nor conflict; the freedom
of his artistic creation was of more value to him than the sensual
pleasures which had surrounded him.
Nay, I must off the earth to see,
With thee I can a slave but be;
For liberty I still do crave,
For full free liberty I rave;
To toil and strife I must be near,
Though ’tis to die and disappear;
So from thy realm I must me hie--
O Queen! O Goddess! Let me fly![158]
Well did he know what a thorny path he would henceforth have to
traverse, for he says: “In writing this work I signed my own death
warrant. No longer could I now hope for aught from the modern world of
art.” Fully did he feel the curse of Venus:
Thy shame will then dishonour breed;
Expelled and cursed, taunts follow thee;
Crushed and oppressed I see thee come,
Thy dishonoured head with dust defiled.[159]
Nevertheless, bravely and unhesitatingly he went forward upon the only
path that was possible for him.
He felt that on this path he would alienate the public and many friends
who had hitherto honoured him; he knew that he would not be able to
offer an adequate substitute for the amusing and pleasure-giving
popular opera of the day; he recognised that his works were entirely
unfitted for the artistic stage as it then was. Thus he says: “A piece
that is likely to draw good houses, that is likely to be produced
before the public for a lengthy period, or perhaps always, alternated
with other pieces like it, ought not to be derived from any mood,
nor to require for its understanding any particular mood. For this
purpose productions must be taken that are either based on no mood in
particular, or even on no mood at all, and therefore do not aim to
appeal to a particular mood in the public. They should furnish, by the
splendour of representation, and through the sympathy felt for the
performers, a light form of entertainment.”
The directory of the court theatre at Dresden decided upon a
production of Tannhäuser, which by this time had been finished. The
opera was lavishly mounted, and--met with the same fate as the Flying
Dutchman. The public was once more disappointed in its expectations,
and did not hesitate to make known its extreme dissatisfaction.
Wagner was overpowered by a feeling of utter isolation. He had, indeed,
found the means of giving artistic form and expression to his feelings;
he now possessed, indeed, a language by which he could communicate his
sensations, but there was no one who understood this language, who
shared his sensations, who felt and experienced with him. “I had now
become conscious of my perfect isolation as an artistic person to such
an extent that it was only from this very feeling of isolation that
I could draw the impulse and strength to endeavor to speak to those
around me.”[160]
While in this state of mind there occurred to his fantasy a legend
which he had already studied in connection with the Tannhäuser
saga--that of Lohengrin. In Tannhäuser, Wagner had swung himself free
from a world of sensuality, of outward brilliancy and vain aspiration;
he had succeeded in soaring aloft to the desired height of purity
and chastity. He had escaped from the world of weak indulgence to
the lonely height of noblest renunciation. But on this height an
inexpressible yearning filled him to get away from this sunlike
brilliancy of chastest purity to the refreshing warmth of life, to the
complete surrender of unselfish love. He yearned, not to get back to
the life which he had left, but to be in a new ideal life which he had
not yet known. “From this height my longing looks perceived--woman, the
woman for whom the Flying Dutchman yearned from the ocean depth of his
misery; the woman who like a star of heaven directed Tannhäuser from
the dens of sensuality of the Venusberg to the way upward, and who now
drew Lohengrin down from sunny heights to the cherishing bosom of the
earth.”
Lohengrin did not wish to be looked up to and admired by the woman whom
he went to seek, for whose deliverance he had been sent; he wished to
be loved by her. This love was not to consist of a trembling adoration
of a higher being, but was to be experienced in the inmost heart; it
was to rest upon a truer, more intelligent devotion. For this it was
necessary that Lohengrin should conceal his higher origin. For himself
alone was Elsa to love him; nor must she ask who he was or whence he
came:
Ne’er venture to inquire,
Nor proof from me desire,
Whence I my journey trace,
And what’s my name and race![161]
“Thus he desired the woman--thus the human heart.” Upon Elsa’s cry
for help, which echoed up from the midst of humanity to his dreary
isolation, he came to her aid, and saw in her the woman for whom he
craved. Confidingly she gave herself up to her brave hero:
Take me! Hero, saviour mine!
All that I am deem thou as thine![162]
But soon jealousy and envy set to work, and awaken doubt and suspicion
in the soul of the beloved woman. He perceives that she adores but does
not understand him. The confession of his origin is forced from him,
and he is compelled to return, crushed in spirit, to the dreariness of
his isolation.
This is the story of Lohengrin, of which Wagner says: “In the
character and the plight of this Lohengrin I now recognise unmistakably
the symbol of the only tragic material, the only tragic element, in
fact, of modern life.”[163]
He himself felt this tragedy in his inmost soul on the lonely height
upon which he stood, and where he was consumed by ardent longing.
“Here at last I hit the chief point of what is tragic in the situation
of the true artist toward the life of the present time--the same
situation, in truth, which received from me in Lohengrin its artistic
shape. The most necessary and most natural craving of such an artist
is, to be unreservedly accepted and understood by the feeling; and the
impossibility, caused by our modern artistic life, of finding this
feeling in such a state of ingenuousness and undoubting trust as he
asked--to be understood; the necessity of having to communicate himself
almost wholly to the critical understanding only, instead of to the
feelings--this is indeed the first tragical element of his situation.
As an artistic person I had to feel this, and it was destined to affect
me in the course of my further development to such a degree that I
finally broke out in open rebellion against the pressure of this
situation.”[164]
Wagner describes how, during the elaboration of the material, the true
nature of Elsa came more and more clearly before his mind’s eye. He
saw in her not a woman filled with curiosity or jealousy, but “the
longed-for complement of Lohengrin,” which blended with him into one
whole, the “other part of his own nature.” “Elsa is the unconscious,
involuntary element in which the conscious, voluntary nature of
Lohengrin longs to dissolve itself.” The involuntary impulse, the
motive force of his own efforts and creations, Wagner recognised in
this Elsa, before whom “manly egoism even in its noblest shape had
effaced itself totally.” “Elsa, the woman--the woman whom hitherto
I had not understood, but whom now I knew--this most necessary
incarnation of the purest sentient involuntariness--has converted
me into a perfect revolutionist. She was the spirit of the people,
the spirit in which I as an artistic person also longed for my
freedom.”[165]
The home that had been yearned for in the Flying Dutchman, Wagner had
failed to find. He felt a stranger and alone among those that did not
comprehend him. His ideal sense perceived everywhere the limitations
of the human mind by external circumstances, traditional usages, and
convention, and nowhere did he see that free man who stood high above
the trifling manœuvres of modern life, and for whom he craved with a
glowing desire.
While in this state of mind he joined--I might say in an ingenuous
manner--the revolution, as he hoped to see his ideal realized thereby.
Thus he says: “From the degrading yoke of slavery, of general
handicraftship, with its pale soul of money, we will soar up to a
free artistic humanity with its bright universal soul; from wretched,
burdened day-labourers, we will all become beautiful, strong men, to
whom the world belongs as an eternal, inexhaustible source of highest
artistic enjoyment.”[166]
His rebellion was not directed against a governing power but against
a culture that had gone astray; his wrath was not a political but a
purely human matter which had been developed by his individual artistic
nature. When he had to fly in consequence of his share in the uprising,
he said, therefore: “With nothing can I compare the agreeable sensation
which, after I had surmounted the first grievous impressions, pervaded
me when I felt myself free--free of the world’s tormenting, always
unfulfilled wishes, free from the relations in which these wishes had
been my only consuming nourishment! Since no consideration any longer
bound me, the outlaw and fugitive, to any falsehood of any kind
whatsoever; since I had thrown behind me every hope, every expectation
from this now triumphant world, and could publicly and openly shout to
it, with the most unconstrained candidness, that I, the artist, scorned
it from the very bottom of my heart--this world so hypocritical and
apprehensive of art and culture; since I could say to it that not a
drop of really artistic blood flowed in any part of its vital veins,
that it was incapable of pouring out a breath of human civilization,
a whiff of human beauty--I felt myself for the first time in my life
thoroughly and truly free, light, and happy, even though I might not
know where next day I should hide myself that I might breathe the air
of heaven.”[167]
While Wagner’s artistic creations had hitherto sprung from one single
mood, one special situation in life, he was now impelled, as in the
course of time all his sensations and views had assumed a more and
more comprehensible form, to give to this inner life, these thoughts
and feelings, artistic form in a great work of art. To the idea which
chiefly filled him, the yearning after the free man who had raised
himself above culture and civilization, he had given expression
in his writings in the most various ways. Thus he says in Art and
Revolution:[168] “Nature, human nature, will lay down the law to the
two sisters--culture and civilization: So far as I am comprehended in
you, shall you live and bloom; so far as I am not in you, shall you die
and wither!” In another passage he says: “The real man will therefore
not come until his life is formed and governed according to true human
nature, and not by arbitrary political laws.”[169] In Art and Climate
he says: “There is no higher power than that of the communistic man;
there is nothing more lovable than communistic man. Only by the highest
power of love do we, however, attain to true freedom, for there is no
true freedom except that which is common to all men.”[170]
At the time of the Revolution Wagner had already plunged into the study
of German mythology, by which he felt specially attracted. He says:
“In the effort to give artistic form to the desires of my heart, and
in the course of my earnest investigation as to what attracted me so
irresistibly to the original source of the legends, I advanced step
by step deeper into that antiquity where I was finally to find, to my
unutterable joy, and that, too, right in the highest antiquity, the
youthful, beautiful man in the strongest freshness of his power. My
studies in this way led me through the poems of the Middle Ages to the
very foundation of ancient German mythology; one vesture after the
other, which later poetry had thrown around it to its disfigurement,
I was able to sever from it so as finally to see it in its chastest
beauty. What I here saw was no longer the historical conventional
figure, whereof the vesture more than the real form must interest
us, but the real fundamental man, in whom I was able to recognise
every pulsation of the blood, every twitch of the strong muscles, in
unconfined freedom--in short, the true man.”[171]
This “true, free man” it was who hovered before him as the ideal
after which he yearned. He was filled with an internal impulse to
the artistic realization of the “purely human being, free from all
conventionality.” In Siegfried he had found this ideal: “Elsa had
taught me to find this man; he was to me the manly incorporation of
the eternal involuntariness, of the doer of real deeds, of the human
being in the fulness of highest, most direct power, and most undoubted
worthiness of love.”
If, in spite of Wagner’s unmistakable explanations, even his earlier
works were so entirely misunderstood, in which only single moods
were treated, how much more likely was his greatest work, into which
he entered with all his soul, in which he incorporated artistically
his view of the world, to give occasion to misunderstandings! If,
therefore, I discuss this work at greater length, I can only point in
excuse to the fact that, as we shall see later on, mistakes and false
conceptions have given rise to the most momentous results. Let us
therefore proceed to a consideration of the trilogy of the Ring of the
Nibelungs.
The first scene of the Rhinegold shows us the three Daughters of the
Rhine in harmless, playful sport at the bottom of the river. Alberich
approaches them in a wild passion of sensual love. He tries to
overpower them. When one escapes him he pursues the others. It is all
the same to him which one he overtakes, and that one always appears to
him to be the most beautiful whom he happens to hold in his embrace.
In him we see the representative of that sensuality which forms the
antithesis to ideal, unselfish love. While he is thus engaged in
pursuing the Daughters of the Rhine, the gold glitters with a strong
light and delights with its splendour the Daughters of the Rhine, who
artlessly hail it. Alberich stands blinded in amazed embarrassment, and
listens to the proclaiming words of the Daughters of the Rhine:
He gains the world
As his own inheritance,
Who from the Rhinegold
Creates the ring
Which measureless might doth bestow.[172]
It is not in every one’s power, however, to accomplish this miracle:
Only who Love’s might
Doth withstand,
Only who Love’s joys
Drives away,
None but he gets the secret power
The gold to force into a ring.[173]
Now, what is the meaning of this ring, which thus bestows “measureless
might”--nay, the command of the world? In it we must see the sensuous
rendering of that world from which Tannhäuser yearned to escape, from
which he was saved by Elisabeth--the world of sensual enjoyment, the
striving after outward fame and splendour, the all-constraining,
world-ruling power of gold. That the love which he must renounce who
longed to forge this ring, is not sexual love, is indicated by the fact
that Alberich had a son, Hagen; it is, on the contrary, that ideal,
unselfish impulse, that self-sacrificing love--Elisabeth.
The incarnation of sensuality, Alberich, cursed this love, stole the
gold, forged the ring, and won by its means that measureless might
which made him ruler of the world. Everybody had to create and work for
him; his insatiable cupidity craved ever new treasures and wealth; even
his own brother he held in a “degrading yoke of slavery,” and compelled
him to make that wonderful piece of work, the Tarnhelm.[174]
After the ring and the hoard had been stolen from him, Alberich cursed
the gold:
No joy shall please
Him who it holds;
Upon no favourite of fortune shall shine
Its brilliant light;
Who it doth own
Let care devour,
And who has it not,
Let envy gnaw!
All shall strive
For what it brings,
Yet none joy shall reap
Though it is used.[175]
This curse weighed upon the gold from this time on, and brought death
and ruin on those who possessed it.
The central figure of the whole action, in which all that is tragic
in the drama is realized, is the mighty form of the all-governing god
Wotan, the father of gods and men. Wagner writes in an article:[176]
“In my conception of the Ring of the Nibelung I had, unknown to
myself, confessed the truth relative to human affairs. Everything here
is thoroughly tragic, and the will which would form a world after
its wish, can finally attain nothing more satisfactory than its own
dignified destruction.” This will, bereft of freedom and conditioned
and bound down by circumstances, is Wotan. He feels the mighty power
within him, yet can not put it forth. He is bound by stipulations; he
must resist his desire.
In contradistinction to him, the restless, forward-pressing will which
always strives after new aims while it denies itself, stands Erda,
the representative of intellectual knowledge. We meet her first in
Rhinegold, when Wotan deliberates as to whether he shall deliver up the
world-governing ring in order to recover the stolen Freia:
How all was, I know,
How all is,
How all will be,
I see too:
Th’ eternal world
Ur-Wala,
Erda puts in your mind.[177]
Erda, true knowledge, sleeps, and in her place watches Fricka, Wotan’s
spouse. In her we have to see the representative of right based upon
pure convention. She protects the right, not because of its intrinsic
value, or because she has recognised it as such, but because it exists
and is designated as right. She sticks to the letter, and law and
custom are the motives which alone determine her. The deeper emotions
of heart and feeling out of which true right proceeds are strange to
her; she is personified externality, purely arbitrary formality.
The second scene of Rhinegold discloses to us Walhalla, the mighty burg
of the gods, raising heavenward its shining battlements. It signifies
the irresistible will power, the struggle for endless fame. Fricka is
anxious and terror-stricken at sight of the burg. As representative
of the law, of strict right, she first of all bethinks herself of the
bargain that has been made, and of the stipulated reward:
Ready is the burg,
The pledge forfeited:
Dost thou forget what thou didst give?[178]
To the restless, onward striving will the bargain suggests no cause for
anxiety. Wotan rejoices at the sight of the mighty citadel; he breaks
the concluded agreement by which he rules the world, but has to atone
for his guilt, since his will is fettered, bound by law and custom.
To the giants who built the burg, Wotan had promised Freia as a reward.
Fasolt and Faffner now approach to claim their reward, the building of
the burg being completed. Freia is the refreshing ideal, that “artistic
humanity with its bright universal soul,” that love which Alberich
had cursed--the unselfish love of human being for human being. The
partaking of her apples, which she proffers to the gods, gives them
everlasting youthful energy. But if they are withheld from them they
shall wither in joyless, fameless old age. Wotan now recognises his
mistake in sacrificing Freia, and refuses the reward: “I will not sell
Freia.”
While the giants persist in claiming the reward for which they had
bargained, Loge approaches, the representative of cunning, stratagem,
and untruth, who had advised the agreement. Very characteristic of the
signification of Freia and of the Rhinegold is Loge’s account of how he
sought to replace Freia and finally discovered the Rhinegold.
Loge’s narrative arouses the cupidity of the giants. They are ready
to renounce Freia if the Rhinegold is given them in her stead. Very
characteristic of the difference between the Rhinegold and Freia is
the scene in which Fasolt and Faffner exchange her for the hoard.
Even the “awkward giants,” the “rude clowns,” the representatives
of the coarsest materialism, the rough-hewn opposites of delicate
feeling--even they will not sever themselves from the ravishing woman.
To lose the woman,
Be sure, will grieve me sorely:
If then she from my sight must go,
The hoard of metal
Must so be heaped
That from my eyes
It wholly the fair one conceals![179]
With gold he will bury the gentlest higher emotion of the heart:
Alas, still shines
Her glance on me,
Her eye’s bright star
Still lights my way:
Through a small crevice
I must her spy!--
Do I see the dear delicious eyes.
I can not leave this woman fair.[180]
So soon as the giants have gained possession of the hoard, the
Tarnhelm, and the ring, the curse of Alberich becomes fulfilled.
Beset by jealousy and envy, they fall to quarreling, and Fasolt slays
Faffner, his own brother. While the possession of the gold aroused in
Alberich primarily lust of power, it manifests itself in Faffner’s
case as the mere naked desire for possession itself. He does not know
the value and the power of what he possesses; he finds delight merely
in the fact that he possesses it. Through dread that some of it may be
stolen from him, he drags his possession to a cavern, metamorphoses
himself by means of the Tarnhelm into a mighty dragon, and there looks
after his treasure in idle repose. “I lie and hold possession, let me
repose,” are Faffner’s words. If we look around us in our modern world
for Faffners, who seek to possess merely for the sake of possessing, it
will not prove a very difficult task for us to discover a whole series
of them.
The second part of the drama, the Walkyry, represents the hot struggle
between Wotan, the mighty will which struggles for freedom, and Fricka,
the incarnation of inflexible law, convention, and custom. Wotan
recognises the bondage of his will, the impossibility of unfolding
himself freely and unhampered:
I who by pact am a lord,
To the selfsame pact am now slave.[181]
Eternal knowledge, Erda, had predicted his destruction, “an ignominious
end of the eternal.” He must fear Alberich. Should he ever be
successful in acquiring the ring,
Then would Walhall be lost:
Who love did imprecate
He alone
With envy would use
The runes of the ring
Giving the noble
Infinite grief.[182]
To defy the foe, to shield himself and Walhalla, Wotan sent out the
Walkyries to bring heroes, who should fight for him. The Walkyries,
Wotan’s daughters, formed a portion of his personality. They formed the
wish for liberty; they were hostile to Fricka--hostile to her right.
Their origin “in wild love” of itself denotes their opposition to
convention and custom.
But Fricka still reigns. The Walkyries form only a part of Wotan; the
agreements that bind him they are unable to break. They, too, must
submit to Fricka’s will.
Wotan is aware that only a free hero, one who starts up boldly and
unhampered, will be able to defy the foe. Through such a hero he had
hoped to attain what he wished. He betook himself to a noble stock
which itself had sprung from him--the Wälsung. He had thrust a sacred
sword into the trunk of an ash tree in such a way that only the
strongest hero should be able to withdraw it. Siegmund, the Wälsung,
the brave hero, he himself stimulated to the deed. Siegmund felt in
himself the impulse to freedom; unhampered did his defiant spirit
unfold itself. Then he found Sieglinde, his own sister, in the enemy’s
house, married without love, courted without affection by Hunding. The
deepest love was kindled in the young pair; custom and law failed to
separate them; they followed solely the true human feeling which moved
the inmost recesses of their hearts.
How wrongly has this love between Siegmund and Sieglinde been
interpreted! After what has been said before, it requires no further
explanation that here, as in all of Wagner’s creations, love is merely
the symbolical expression of certain sensations; that it was in no
way Wagner’s purpose to glorify in this relationship the impulse of
sensual love or the like, but that the myth was only made use of in
an ingenious way to incorporate artistically that already discussed
antithesis, unfettered human freedom and right based upon custom and
convention.
Fricka, the inflexible law which deviates not from the path of
tradition, the conventional form, the personified externality, is
horrified at this unequalled delinquency. Wotan, the will that strives
for freedom, can not see anything wrong, any misdeed in the act:
What deed so bad
Have these twain done,
Whom spring united in love?
’Twas affection’s charm
Enraptured them;
Why should I blame affection’s might?[183]
Then he continues:
Thou see’st but one thing,
I another see,
And the first is driven from my sight.[184]
They are antagonistic principles--the right that is formed by virtue of
interest and convention, and the right that is based upon a truer, more
purely human experience. The sharply antagonistic elements which are
here dealt with, and are so sharply opposed, one might specially refer
to the moral sphere, and call illegal morality and legal immorality.
Wotan then proceeds:
Unholy
Deem I the oath
Which without love unites;
And of me in truth
Do not require
That by force I hold
What doth not cling to thee.
For where bold powers themselves array,
I must counsel open war.[185]
Fricka knows full well that she must regard the strong, free hero as
her foe; that his triumph means her fall, her destruction, and she
therefore demands of Wotan that he will deny him his countenance. She
gains the day in this struggle with Wotan, and the latter is compelled
to resolve upon Siegmund’s end. He has to give up his own yearning; he
has to will against his wish:
In my own fetters
Am I caught:
I, the least free of all![186]
Such is Wotan’s plaint to Brünhilde, his and Erda’s daughter.
In her, the daughter of Will and Knowledge, Wotan sees his own will,
formed through knowledge, whose free unfolding, however, he fears.
Wotan recognises that in Siegmund he merely sees himself, his own
sword, his own energy, and he therefore determines upon Siegmund’s
death.
Brünhilde, the daughter of Knowledge, knows that Sieglinde bears
already under her heart the greatest hero:
Thy wife trust to me
On account of the pledge,
Which blissful from thee she received.[187]
In her is kindled the struggle between Knowledge and Will; the latter
gets worsted, and she determines to save Siegmund against the will of
Wotan. The fettered will, Wotan, has to will against his own wish,
he has to destroy with his own hand Siegmund, whom he loves. Against
Wotan’s spear, marked with the runes of the contract, his sword breaks,
and Siegmund falls.
Wotan’s wrath, however, is only greater, his passion more headstrong,
his fury more savage at the disobedience of Brünhilde; for he feels
only more deeply his own bondage, his own weakness and impotency.
Thus Wotan casts off his child. But his heart is softened and appeased
by the prayers of the “brave, noble child.” He will not yield her up as
a prize “to the most cowardly man for an easy booty”:
A true bridal fire
Shall burn now for thee,
As ne er hitherto for bride it has burned!
Let flaming glow
Warm the rock around;
With consuming terror
Let it cowards scare;
Let faint heart avoid
Brünhilde’s rock:
For one alone woos the bride,
Who is freer than I, the god![188]
Brünhilde, Wotan’s glorious child, pure, unalloyed, genuine Knowledge,
is sunk in a deep sleep and awaits the strong, free hero, who,
uninfluenced by law and custom, free from human tradition, guided only
by internal impulse to eternal perception and true beauty, shall come
to awaken her.
Wotan, however, the fettered will, the denial of the will to live,
resolves upon his end:
Depart, then,
Imperious pride,
Of divine splendour
Braggart disgrace!
Break all together,
What I have built!
My work I renounce;
There’s but one thing still left:
The end----
The end!--[189]
At this point the tragic element of the drama reaches its climax;
“the will, which would form a world after its own wish,” finds a
fitting destruction. But the world of the artist could not at the
same time attain to a close. Borne on the wings of an artistic and
enthusiastic fantasy, the artist soars in majestic flight to a height
never foreseen. There he has seen it--the daring, free being “with the
bright universal soul”; he has felt it, felt it deeply. In it Wagner
saw the human ideal. It is the free, uninfluenced human being who acts
according to the circumstances of this world without being influenced
or impelled from without, whose actions are not conditioned by custom
and convention, but who strives after what is highest and noblest from
free inward stimulus. He only acts according to the dictates of his
pure discernment, his true knowledge, and his stronger will is able to
triumph over all the obstructions of the world.
Wotan had longed for this hero when he said to Brünhilde:
But one has the power.
Which I ne’er had:
A knight, whom to help
I never inclined;
Strange to the god,
Free from his grace,
Unconsciously,
Without command.
From his own need
With his own weapon
Performed the act,
Which I have to fear,
’Gainst which I gave no warning.
My only wish e’en wished it.[190]
Siegfried was the brave, happy hero, “the real original, human being
in whom every pulsation of the blood, every twitch of the energetic
muscles, was to be recognised in unconfined, fresh action”--the true,
free human being. The myth, which makes him one of twins, is here
symbolically and poetically turned to account; even his origin points
to absolute freedom from custom and convention. Siegfried instinctively
recognises in Mime the enemy, the traitor. In the latter we see
incorporated the lowest human passions--envy, jealousy, and crudest
egoism.
For Siegfried, the strong youth, no glaive was destined, as had been
the father’s case. By his own strength he must form it, weld together
the strong pieces of the divine glaive. The free man who is independent
of conventional morality can, of course, know no fear. He alone has the
courage and strength and activity to mount to the most beautiful ideal,
to true human freedom. The forging of the sword is accomplished by
Siegfried after a fashion quite counter to custom and in violation of
every ancient rule of the craft, and his success greatly amazes Mime.
The character traits with whose representatives, Mime and Faffner,
we have made acquaintance, must disappear with the appearance of the
ideal free man. Hence, in the drama, both are destroyed by Siegfried.
With Nothung, the wonderful glaive, he slays the evil dragon before
the grudge hole (Neidhöhle). The hoard of the Niebelung, and with it
the Tarnhelm and the ring, now belong to Siegfried. He regards them,
however, as useless toys, and does not trouble himself about the
properties of that which he possesses:
What use you are to me
I do not know.[191]
The beautiful, strong, free man, who is artistically embodied in
Siegfried, seeks in his inner worth alone happiness and contentment,
not in the heaping up of external riches and goods.
Siegfried now strides away to the mount that no craven can approach
without being consumed by the blazing fire. His actions are determined
solely by his own will, which strives continually after what is noble.
The restraint of compacts is foreign to him. He does not, therefore,
bow to the spear of Wotan marked with runes of compact, which is held
in his way, and against which the glaive of the father was shattered.
Wotan is not able to withstand his might; he shivers the holy spear
with Nothung, his glaive welded by his own strength. All hindrances,
even the ocean of fire, must yield to his power and his will. So the
hero, who “fears not the point of the spear,” advances, strides through
the fire, his strength quenching the flaming glow, and approaches
Brünhilde to awaken her from her long, inactive sleep. The beautiful,
strong, free man, whom the artist sees in radiant light, awakens the
world from long sleep. True knowledge, pure cognition awakens humanity
to holy bliss. In self-forgetting and self-surrendering love Brünhilde
demands of her lover that he leave her, and that he go out into the
wide world to perform new and lordly deeds.
We now see the strong, free man in connection with the bad world,
surrounded by plots and jealousy, envy and malice. In Hagen we
recognise the representative of those properties for which Mime and
Alberich previously stood. He is the antithesis of Siegfried, and
his nature is shown by his descent. While Siegfried is the issue of a
fiery _liaison_ of love contrary to conventional law, Hagen, the son of
Alberich, owes his existence to a love bought with gold. Hagen says of
himself:
My blood would spoil your drink;
It flows not genuine
And noble as yours,
Stubborn and cold
It curdles in me;
My cheek will not blush,
Wherefore I remain far
From the fiery bond.[192]
Siegfried, in his intercourse with the bad world, acts solely in
conformity with his inner feelings. He believes everybody with whom
he comes into contact open and true like himself. Hence all distrust
is foreign to him, and he acts as the moment suggests. This is the
signification of the drink of forgetfulness. Such a naïve, trustful
behaviour must in the wicked world lead to ruin and destruction.
Reflection, cunning calculation, and accurate recognition of the
wickedness of others are the weapons necessary to self-assertion
in the world. Thus Siegfried falls a sacrifice to hate, cupidity,
and envy. He, to whom the slightest false motion of the heart is an
impossibility, and whose soul is of divine peerage and noblest purity,
becomes in the eyes of the world a criminal. He is accused of perjury,
adultery, fraud, and treason, and intrigue is able to prove its charges
and to require punishment therefor. But the true knowledge--the
knowledge which, standing without the world, is conditioned by
nothing--Brünhilde recognises the eternal and celestial faithfulness of
him she loves.
Truer than he
Swore no man oath;
More loyally than he
Held no man his pacts;
Purer than he
Loved never another.[193]
The ring, laden with the curse of the Nibelung, is restored by
Brünhilde to the daughters of the Rhine. The Walhalla, with the old
world of gods, collapses; but Brünhilde, in radiant accoutrement, bears
Siegfried on high upon Grane, the courageous steed. The strife for
outward glitter and display, for riches and possessions, ceases. The
world, which had been governed by a will bound down to conventional
ideas, collapses; and in its stead the true, free will, bound to
nothing, but associated with pure knowledge and true recognition, is
lord over all.
No more than Wagner intended in his Tannhäuser to teach “a specifically
Christian, impotently heaven-expecting moral,” did he in Parsifal, his
last artistic creation, have specifically religious ideas in view.
Parsifal has rightly been called a continuation of the Nibelungen
trilogy. That free hero, who in the trilogy must be overthrown in
combating the wicked world, but whose final victory is there only
intimated, becomes in Parsifal the real saviour of humanity.
The wardens of the Holy Grail--the sensuous emblem of the highest,
holiest good of humanity, the human ideal, the renunciation of the
sensual life, greedy for wealth, fame, and pleasure--were the knights
of the Grail, who in the holy grove in the Gralsburg, or Grail castle,
far from the ignoble impulses of the world, were dedicated to the
service of the Holy Grail. A pure cup of crystal containing the blood
of Christ was intrusted to the care of Amfortas, the king of the Grail
knights. Klingsor, the representative of the element hostile to the
ideal--that is, of selfishness and lust of power--himself aspired
to the possession of the Holy Grail, not on account of its ideal
graciousness, but from self-interest and cupidity. But it was granted
to the pure alone to find the path to the relic:
Ye, who their service have attained to
By paths no sinners ever gained to,
Ye know ’tis but permitted
The pure to be admitted
’Mid those the Grail’s divinely magic power
With strength for pious work doth dower.[194]
Klingsor, conscious of his incapacity to become the master of sinful
temptations, mutilated himself and so sought to obtain the Grail:
Unable in himself to stifle thoughts of evil,
Quickly turned he his guilty hand,
Resolved to gain the Grail’s command.
But scornfully was by its guardian spurned.[195]
Repulsed by Amfortas, Klingsor built a mighty enchanted palace in the
neighbourhood of the Holy Grail castle, whither he knew how to decoy
the knights of the Grail, and they fell sacrifices to the seductions of
sensuality.
It left Amfortas no peace. He himself sallied forth to fight the
wicked enemy and to free the knights from the danger, whereupon he
himself fell a victim to the seductions of the crafty one:
While near the walls from us the king was taken,
A woman fair as sin has turned his brain;
He lay in transport her enfolding--
The spear escaped his holding;
A deathly cry! I rushed anigh:--
But laughing, Klingsor fled before,
The sacred spear with him he bore.[196]
That holy spear, with which Amfortas might have conquered the enchanter
without trouble, had once shed the blood of Christ. The spear and that
holy vessel, the most precious possession of all, had been conveyed by
angels to Amfortas’s father, the pious Titurel. They were to be guarded
in the holy castle as the holiest of holies--the highest ideals of
humanity. Now Klingsor had succeeded in purloining the holy spear, and
with it had inflicted upon Amfortas a bad wound, which was never to be
healed:
That wound it is, which none may make to close.
Klingsor, being in possession of the mighty and holy weapon, hoped to
exterminate the entire race of knights, and to get the Holy Grail as
well. Sinful humanity, which found poetic shape in Kundry, is without
will power in the hands of the mighty Klingsor, in the grasp of
unconquerable passions. Kundry must do evil against her wish, against
her will. She certainly felt within her an impulse to unselfish
conduct, and sought in constant self-sacrifice to throw off the burden
of her selfish propensities; but, driven as by demoniac power, she is
not mistress of her will. When, struggling with herself, she cries out,
“I will not!” Klingsor answers: