The sight of the Holy Grail gives rejuvenated life and renewed strength
to all that are noble and pure; but that which refreshes and quickens
others fills him who is condemned to guard it with ineffable agony.
The pains of the frightful wound are by the holy lustre exacerbated to
insufferable torments; the conscience laden with guilt can not bear the
contemplation of the highest ideal. In vain Amfortas seeks means for
the alleviation of his pain, for relief from his torments. There came
to him one comforting prophecy of the Grail:
Before the plundered sanctuary
In pray’r impassioned lay Amfortas,
Imploring for a sign of safety;
Heavenly radiance from the Grail then floated,
A sacred phantom face
From lips divine did chase
These words, whose purport clearly could be noted:
“By pity lightened,
The guileless fool,
Waits for him
My chosen tool.”[198]
The promised, long-desired redeeming hero, Parsifal, approached, “by
pity knowing, the pure fool.” Solitary, unskilled in arms, he was
attracted to the far desert. As Siegfried had made his glaive, so
had Parsifal himself made his bow. From his mother he went out into
the world, and fighting made his way. Parsifal naively asks: “They
threatened me; were they bad? Who is good?” He has not acquired the
knowledge of good and evil, he can only experience them in the depths
of his human soul, whence they can also resound pure and true, without
being changed by the prejudice of a conventional right. His knowledge
is neither erudite nor recondite, but results from the delicacy and
candour of sense and of sentiment. He approaches the castle and is
present when Amfortas uncovers the Holy Grail. He is deeply seized by
all the pains and torments of the king; except that of the torment of
guilt, which causes those sufferings, he as yet knows nothing. For
that reason Gurnemanz indignantly pushes the “fool” out of the door,
whereupon the latter wends his way to the enchanted palace of Klingsor.
He strikes back with strong arm the knights who oppose him; and the
enticements of the lovely maidens in the odorous flower garden fail to
captivate him. Kundry approaches in the magical beauty wherewith she
once seduced Amfortas himself, and tries under the ban of Klingsor all
her arts upon the lad. She tells him of his mother, how she has died
from love and care for him. Then occurs to him what he has undertaken
with his life thus far. In overpowering pain he sinks at the feet of
the seductive woman:
Woe’s me! woe’s me! What did I? Where was I?
Mother! Sweetest, dearest mother!
Thy son, thy son must be thy murderer?
O fool! Weak and frivolous fool!
Where couldst thou have been, thus to forget her?
Thus--ah! thus to forget thee,
Faithful, fondest of mothers![199]
Kundry essays in this way to force an entry to his heart:
To thee now she sends
Benediction from above,
In this first kiss of love![200]
But he starts up in horror, pressing his hand strongly against his
heart:
Amfortas!
The spear wound! the spear wound!
In me I feel it burning.[201]
Unspeakable sympathy with the torments of the king seizes him; he feels
the pains as though they were his own. By them he knows and recognises
the danger of seduction, which he stoutly withstands. The holy spear
which Klingsor seizes as a last recourse and hurls at him remains
hovering stationary over his head. Parsifal snatches it, and before the
sign of the cross Klingsor’s magical magnificence decays into nothing.
“By pity lightened, the guileless fool” approaches with the holy spear
to bring welfare and redemption. In the baptism of Kundry he purifies
the world, which lies in the bondage of sensual pleasure, and in
closing with the holy spear the wound of Amfortas, he frees the world
from the torment of conscious guilt. The ideal of humanity, the Holy
Grail, which was for a long time secluded, is unveiled anew, with its
radiant lustre reburnished, its glowing light imparting new life and
strength to its reanimated knights.
In contrast to the “understanding that is due to fellow-feeling” stands
the schematic, conventional knowledge based on tradition, sprung from
no penetrating warm sympathy for humanity, but from the frigid letter
and egoistic calculation that strives after an endless accumulation
of stores of knowledge, losing sight of the end of wisdom, which is
the welfare of mankind. In Wagner, the assistant of Faust, Goethe
has scourged this aimless, egotistic, self-admiring knowledge, which
pursues no common human good:
To study’s toil have I with zeal myself addressed.
I do know much: would I might know the rest!
Faust, on the other hand, has come to see that true, serviceable
knowledge must owe its origin to sympathy with mankind. He says:
My bosom, of the science-itch now cured,
Henceforth is closed to no pain that’s endured;
And what to all mankind is parcelled out
I wish with my own heart to know about,
The highest and the lowest Mine to keep,
Every man’s weal and woe upon Me heap,
My private self to Man’s great self expand,
Though I be wrecked, great Man to understand.
With the exception of two, we have now briefly considered all of
Wagner’s music dramas. The two excepted are Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg and Tristan und Isolde. In the former he has humorously
painted his own position in relation to modern art. The first idea
of the latter occurred to him during the musical composition of the
Nibelungen-Trilogy. It impelled him to paint in a drama of his own the
ideal unselfish love that he had studied in Siegfried and Brünhilde.
Thus Wagner’s poems form a coherent chain, and each of them may
well be termed “a fragment of a great confession.” His moods and
sentiments, vehemently pressing toward artistic embodiment, formed the
spring from which his art productions sprang. Wagner repeatedly and
expressly declares that his art is merely the mirror of his feelings,
and must therefore be all but exclusively interpreted by heart and
sentiment. Hence we find in Wagner that refinement and elaboration of
the heart-life, those moods often inclining toward gloom, with which
we have been familiarized by the study of the subjective poets, and in
particular of Goethe. “Heaven-high exulting, to death cast down,” was
the temperament of Wagner likewise. How often he yearned after death,
and believed his only rescue was to be found in it! Wagner reminds
us of those tears that Goethe shed in reading Hermann und Dorothea,
when he tells us how often “in hot tears” he lamented the unavoidable
severance of Lohengrin from Elsa.[202] Art for Wagner was simply a
means of expression. It was his tongue, in which he endeavoured to
impart himself. Like Goethe, he laughed at the idea of being considered
the founder of a “new school,” or a “new departure,” or a “new aim.”
More than once he poked sarcastic fun at the new “tendency” that was
ascribed to him. In an essay on Opera-poetry, and in Particular on
Opera-composition,[203] he says: “Not so much the study of my works as
their success seems to have led many to follow my ‘tendency.’ What this
consists of has remained a mystery to me. Perhaps of a long-continued
preference for mediæval material. The Edda and the rude North, in
general, were regarded as mines of ‘good texts.’ But the choice and
character of the opera texts seem to be not the only important items
of the alleged ‘new departure’; much else enters into it, especially
‘_Durch Komponieren_,’ and above all the uninterrupted interposition
of the orchestra in the concerns of the singers, a practice which has
been followed the more liberally as a good deal of ‘departure’ has
arisen of late in the instrumentation, harmonization, and modulation of
orchestral compositions.” Interesting is Wagner’s own description[204]
of how music gradually became a mother tongue to him; of how, in
composing, it could not at all be his purpose to invent beautiful
and original melodies or harmonies, but how he simply expressed in
this tongue what he had to say in the only way in which it could be
expressed. The reader will recollect that, in the discussion of the
psychology of genius, I adduced a saying of Goethe in which he gives us
to understand how indispensable the gift of verse was to him, since he
was governed by such manifold feelings and moods and could only find
repose and satisfaction in giving them artistic shape. This impulse to
give artistic shape to his sentiments was felt by Wagner in the same
measure, but neither the nature of his art nor outward circumstances
enabled him so easily to see his artistic creations embodied as those
of the simple poet. A poem, even though its form be dramatic, is a
completed artistic work as soon as it is on paper; but a piece of
music, especially a musical drama, receives life and existence only
when it comes to be performed. Let an artist look upon his art not as
a means of gaining money and fame, but merely as a means of expressing
his sentiments, and if the means of imparting them be taken from him,
as was Wagner’s case, owing to every imaginable obstacle being put in
the way of the performance of his works, or, worse yet, and still more
discouraging, if his works are arbitrarily altered and cut, and, owing
to a defective understanding of them, performed quite disfigured,
so that what was originally intended and felt is quite lost, then
it will be quite psychologically conceivable that he should feel a
just resentment and aversion toward those who, partly from want of
understanding and partly from envy and ill will, deprive him of what to
ordinary men is one of the highest of possessions--human speech.
In spite of all the obstacles placed in his path, Wagner did not let
himself be subjugated by pain, because art held him erect. When he
created his greatest work, the Ring of the Nibelungen, he did not
himself believe that he should ever live to see it performed. It
was not his purpose to gain fame and glory by it, but it afforded
him satisfaction to unburden himself, as it were, by the artistic
incorporation of his ideas, and at any rate to impart them to some
friends, or even only to one. In such mood he wrote to Liszt:
“What I am now creating shall never, or only under quite suitable
circumstances, enter into life. Upon that I will henceforth unite all
my force, and all my pride, and all my resignation. If I die before
these works have been performed, I bequeath them to you, and if you die
without their having attained a worthy performance, burn them. That is
settled.”
The impulse to communicate, in some way or other, with wider circles,
as well as material need and cares, drove Wagner repeatedly into the
literary career. Here it is, from a psychological point of view, of
great interest for us to see how the artist fatigues himself in vain in
debating, from a purely theoretical standpoint, the ideas that filled
him, and how vainly he labours to make himself understood in a language
which is wholly incapable of expressing his meaning; for the only
language of artistic sentiment is art. Would Beethoven ever have been
able to express the sentiments of the heroic symphony in words?
Whoever knows the writings of Wagner, especially his larger works on
Opera and Drama, The Art of the Future, etc., will be acquainted with
his inflated and often unintelligible style; will have been offended by
the many repetitions and apparent contradictions; and will, perhaps,
have had the feeling that what the writer wished to communicate has
actually been left unsaid. He did not consider himself by any means a
writer, but wrote with great reluctance, driven by necessity; and he
himself perfectly recognised the cause of his shortcomings. He knew
that what he had to say could be expressed in one language only--the
language of art. Wagner says: “Here again, and again and again, I have
only been able to express myself through the channel of writing. What
trouble this method of communication gives to me I need not assure
those who know me as an artist. They can see themselves by the style
of the literary works in which I torture myself to express what I
could so tersely, easily, and gracefully render in art, so soon as its
proper sensuous appearance stood as nearly in my power as its technical
notation with pen on paper. But so odious to me is the whole literary
business, and the necessity which has forced writing upon me, that I
would that with this communication I might appear for the last time as
a _littérateur_ before my friends.”[205]
It is not my task here to inquire what the value of Wagner’s art may
be, nor what rank he is destined to take in the history of art. For us,
however, it is important to ascertain to what psychical processes his
works owe their origin, and what psychical processes they produce.
The former question finds its solution in the foregoing considerations.
The latter is an affair of observation and experience. This observation
is, however, not always easy; it is sometimes decidedly difficult. The
success of a work of art, the applause or disapprobation of the public,
establishes but a very limited conclusion in regard to the mood called
forth by it. Too many deceptive factors enter into the phenomenon,
to permit us to trust to unconfirmed appearances. Experience teaches
that only posterity, which allows the work of art to produce its effect
unprejudiced and uninfluenced by personal considerations, is able to
decide the question of the psychical effect. Along with this question
posterity is judge of artistic value. Not theoretical reasons, not
rules and statutes secure to a work of art enduring life, but solely
its psychical effect. If the artist succeeds in exciting with his work
in posterity the intended mood, its value is fixed. If we wish to-day
to account to ourselves for the beauty of Beethoven’s music, we find
nothing more to say than that it is beautiful because we find it so. We
do not ask the why and wherefore, but surrender ourselves, as Lohengrin
desired Elsa to do, to love and pleasure, without inquiring for reasons.
We are to-day the beginning of Wagner’s posterity. Now that the zealous
flame of fanatical Wagnerianism has died out, and--at any rate in the
younger generation--prejudices, personal motives, envy, and malice have
passed away, the moods and sentiments that Wagner’s music is able to
excite come out more clearly, and it is these alone which are to give
definitive judgment upon the value of this art.
Wagner himself tells us how he gradually learned to handle his art as
his vernacular language, so as to communicate his sentiments without
impediment. The public, too, has gradually to learn the language of
the artist, and this it must do, not with the intellect, but with the
heart and sentiment. This circumstance explains many things which will
not escape the close external observer. Most persons who come to this
art unprejudiced declare that the first impression of a given work is
neutral or even repellent; but after frequent repetition the sentiment
becomes greatly augmented, reaching, it may be, to high enthusiasm.
But older persons, especially those who have grown up in another
definite art departure, can not readily habituate themselves to the
“new departure.” They are in the same situation in reference to it as
they would be toward a new language, as compared with young persons and
children.
Wagner, in his earlier works, was, so far as outward form goes,
especially in a musical respect, very much under the influence of
the art impressions under which he had grown up. Gradually and
unconsciously his own temper gained greater and greater relative
emphasis, until at last he was altogether free from external influence,
and stood quite upon his own feet. But the further he departed from
the land of tradition, the harder it necessarily became for the public
to follow him and to learn the new language. Hence his earlier works,
in spite of the antagonisms and difficulties which even they had to
overcome, always had a better reception from the public, and were more
understood, than his later compositions. Down to Lohengrin he was at
all events followed; but his later works excited a veritable storm of
indignation and opposition.
It is human nature to condemn whatever is not understood; and it is
only at a late hour, and very often not at all, that the question
occurs, Might not the cause of the want of understanding be our own
incapacity? Had Wagner lived five hundred years earlier, he might very
likely have been walled up alive or burned as bewitched. But in the
nineteenth century, such proceedings being no longer matters of regular
routine, the modern prescription for making everything clear that is
not understood was applied, and Wagner was declared to be insane. The
rubric was, “Tannhäuser and Lohengrin are very beautiful; but the later
operas are crazy.” Such was the language of the seventies.
Of course, such a diagnosis of insanity, based solely upon the fact
that the subject had created works of art which were unintelligible to
the public, was not a professional one. Nevertheless, the universal
cry, “Wagner is insane!” was destined to penetrate professional
assemblies, until at last a “specialist in psychiatry” was found
who from a scientific standpoint sought to demonstrate Wagner’s
insanity according to all the rules of the art. This “specialist in
psychiatry,” to use the designation which he expressly assumed, was
Dr. Theodor Puschmann, who in the year 1873 published a work with
this design.[206] He says: “This pamphlet is not intended to lead up
to any preconceived doctrine. We are not allied to any party, and are
not ranged either among the adherents or the opponents of Richard
Wagner. We have never held any political or artistic relations with him
whatever, and consider ourselves therefore able to preserve the perfect
objectivity of our judgment, which is a prerequisite to all scientific
investigation.” This general proposition is quite unexceptionable; but
is it a fact that Puschmann displays such objectivity of judgment? Has
he limited himself to making out the psychical processes of Wagner’s
mind? Not at all. On the contrary, he judges of Wagner’s works in
a thoroughly subjective manner, as if he were the final court of
appeal; and then, because Wagner’s art finds no grace in his eyes, he
concludes that Wagner is insane. In short, his procedure differs in
but a single respect from that of a layman--namely, that he styles
himself a “specialist in psychiatry.” Thus he says: “Apart from some
reminiscences of an earlier period, his later works bear the stamp of
mental mediocrity, hurried imperfection, and a wild raggedness. The
Meistersinger, Tristan und Isolde, Rheingold, etc., do not in the least
attain that mental elevation, that inward nobility, which was effused
upon his earlier works. In both matter and form, in words and music,
they are unbeautiful, disjointed, and careless. The world has judged
them with a correct instinct. While Lohengrin and Tannhäuser have won
a place in the hearts of the people, his later works are already
buried before they have come to life.” Is this what Dr. Puschmann calls
“objectivity”? Is it the business of a “specialist in psychiatry” to
render such a judgment as this upon a work of art?
In another place he says: “We have already mentioned above what poverty
of ideas, what increasing mental desolation, Wagner has shown of late
years. All that is beautiful and great in what he has ever accomplished
was devised and completed before he reached the age of fifty. Since
this time an impotent unproductivity has seized upon him. His genius
is extinct, and has given place to a lamentable emptiness of mind. His
wings are crippled; the heaven-storming genius has fallen from his
shining pinnacle, and, like a poor, sick, pitiful bird, chattering
senseless stuff not to be understood, picks up the dusty corns that he
and others once rejected.... The long-forgotten ideas of his youth,
fugitive sketches such as a gifted man often produces and as quickly
tosses into the waste-basket as useless, are now raked out and set
forth with a quantity of _baroque_ peculiarities in words and music
which snatch at originality. To these are added a brain-shattering
instrumentation and the most horrible dissonances; so that, as a
connoisseur says, ear nerves must be thick as cables to go through
such noise undamaged and sound. Along with this is the most unheard-of
prodigality of decoration and machinery, such as only the extravagant
fancy of a madman rioting in transcendentalism could imagine. And
all this Wagner, in his morbid delusion, declares to be such a work
of art as never was, and exacts of the world that it consider this
unnaturalness as genuine art, and insanity as genius.” I will not
“exact” of the respected reader to hear more of Puschmann’s criticisms.
I can only ask again, Is this the needful “objectivity” of the
“specialist in psychiatry”? Every layman must see that the diagnosis
of the mental condition of an artist has nothing to do with deciding
whether his works are “good” or “bad,” and that the sole business of
the psychiatrist is to ascertain the psychical processes by which those
works have been produced. Supposing that Dr. Puschmann really were the
court of last appeal in reference to the artistic value of Wagner’s
art, and the world had to submit to his judgment that the Meistersinger
and Tristan und Isolde contain nothing but “brain-shattering noise” and
“frightful dissonances,” would this be a reason for a real psychiatrist
to diagnose insanity?
Puschmann says: “In Tristan und Isolde we find so many reminiscences
of Offenbach’s Belle Hélène that we might presume an affinity of
soul between the two authors.” Had Herr Puschmann been a “specialist
in psychiatry” in fact, and not merely upon the title-page of his
pamphlet, he would have had no difficulty in conceiving the distinction
between these two states of mind and soul. While we seek in vain in
Puschmann’s mode of passing judgment upon Wagner’s artistic creations
for his boasted “objectivity,” we find that quality still more
distinctly wanting in his mode of quoting Wagner’s writings and his
use of such quotations to support his assertions. Although he puts
the passages between quotation marks, implying that they are given
_verbatim et literatim_ and that their genuineness is guaranteed,
yet he alters both matter and form to suit himself. What is the
name of such a proceeding in plain English? And what becomes of the
“objectivity” of this “specialist in psychiatry”? Without going into
details here, I refer the reader upon this point to a publication which
gives the real and pretended passages from Wagner’s writings in deadly
parallels.[207]
I do not unearth Puschmann’s pamphlet for the sake of refuting it, for
refuted it has been to satiety for twenty years. Besides, it refutes
itself by its contradictions and mendacities. But in considering the
question of how far a diagnosis of insanity can properly be based
upon a work of art, it lay in my way to show into what errors one
might thus be betrayed, and to give an example of how a psychiatrist
should not proceed. Puschmann collects a list of morbid symptoms
which Wagner is said to have suddenly manifested, such as delusion of
grandeur, delusion of persecution, moral insanity, and erotomania.
There really is no disease in which such an abundance of symptoms is
suddenly exhibited. But independently of that, the data upon which
Puschmann rests his “symptoms” are based upon falsehood and error. A
few examples may be given. Referring to the friendship between King
Ludwig and Wagner, Puschmann says: “The man who was so admired did not
use the power which a piece of good luck had afforded him to help his
fellow-men to do any good, or to produce anything great. He did not
justify the confidence of his royal patron, nor did he fulfil the hopes
which the world of art had built upon his gifted youth. Sunk in the
soft velvet of a palace _fauteuil_, he gave himself up to the enjoyment
of a torpid repose. He basked comfortably in the adulation which the
fame of his past procured for him, but created nothing more; at least,
nothing of importance after Lohengrin was worthy of a great master.”
This assertion needs no commentary. Whoever is tolerably familiar with
Wagner’s life and works must see its utter falsity.
Wagner’s “delusion of grandeur” is described by Puschmann in the
following words: “Herr Wagner suffers from a self-conceit beyond all
bounds and measure, a vanity and self-boasting truly morbid, which
blind him to the merits of others, and allow him to regard himself
as the sole embodied ideal of the loftiest wisdom and ability.
The greatest masters of his art fade to nullity in his eyes; the
illustrious musicians Mozart, Gluck, and others have no importance, nor
title to mention in the history of culture, except in so far as they
may have served as his forerunners; and even the immortal Beethoven
is, at best, nothing more than an easel upon which can be displayed
the full-length portraiture of ‘the greatest master of all the ages,’
Richard Wagner.” Whoever has even cast a glance into Wagner’s writings
must recognise the total falsity of this assertion. The masters
mentioned--Beethoven, Mozart, and Gluck--had no more glowing and
enthusiastic worshipper than Wagner. His candid veneration for them
found such oft-repeated expression in his writings that one is amazed
to find the very contrary opinion thus substituted for his. In Opera
und Drama we read as follows: “And here I indicate to you again the
masterly musician, in whom music was quite that which it is able to
be in man, when quite in the fulness of its essentiality it is music
and nothing else than music. Look at Mozart!” This is only one among
numberless examples.
In another place Puschmann says: “But all this was not enough for
his insatiable ambition. The world must kneel suppliant at his feet,
and give him incense like a god.” These are empty phrases with no
basis of truth. This “specialist in psychiatry” rather incongruously
interchanges “ambition” and “delusion of grandeur.” But that is no
excuse for ascribing to Wagner motives from which he was unusually
exempt. Wagner did not wish to be “supplicated” or honoured as a
higher being; he only desired to be understood. For that his soul
thirsted--for understanding and sympathy. It would have sufficed to be
understood by some few friends; to the world at large he was entirely
indifferent. He wrote to Liszt: “I feel myself more than completely
recompensed for all my endeavours, for my operas, and for my art wars,
when I see what impression I have made by them upon you. To be thus
completely understood was my sole desire. To be understood is the
blissful satisfaction of my desire!” This longing to be understood is
so natural, and agrees so well with the psychological _cadre_ of the
artist, that the “specialist,” who should know how to enter into the
psychical processes of the artist, should certainly not take offence
thereat. Equally justifiable and psychologically motived are the
rancour and hatred of the artist for those who, partly from want of
intelligence and partly from personal resentment, envy, and ill will,
work to prevent his being understood.
Wagner’s hatred for the Jews, which is set forth by Puschmann as a
“delusion of persecution,” rests simply upon the fact that Wagner saw
in the Jews, especially those whose endeavours are limited to material
gain, men who had renounced ideal love--in short, his Alberich. This
feeling had no affinity with modern anti-Semitism; for, as can be seen
in his letters to Liszt, along with “the Jews” he always named “the
Philistines,” as he called the Germans who slept away their lives in
slothful dreams, and were glad if people did not disturb them--in
short, the Faffners. To these two he often added the Jesuits. “Let us
flee from this world, where there are nothing but Jews, Philistines,
and Jesuits.”
What Wagner longed for was the free, natural man, whose acts were not
determined by petty personal interests and lower impulses, and whose
life was not passed in thoughtless slumber--that is, Siegfried. There
is no delusion of persecution here; it is only the artist’s ideal. What
characterizes the delusion of persecution is the circumstance that the
patient everywhere scents persecutors, and in the most unreasonable
and typical way regards the benefits that people do him as hostile
persecutions. How grateful and happy, on the other hand, was Wagner if
he only saw that he was understood, or that anybody sympathized with
him! Thus he wrote to Liszt: “When I consider the numerous, extended,
and often very able papers which now proceed from Weimar, and contrast
them with the envious hostility which assaulted me, for example, in the
reviews of Dresden, and remember with what dire consistency they almost
effected a systematic embroiling of the public against me, Weimar seems
to me now as a blissful asylum in whose fresh air I can at last inhale
deeply and give my contracted heart room.” Nobody suffering from the
delusion of persecution writes in that strain. Such a person would have
found in the articles about Lohengrin some deep-laid plot.
Wagner’s “hatred for the Jews” is marked only in a generalized and, I
might say, a symbolized sentiment. It never extended to individuals. In
his personal commerce with men he knew how strictly to individualize,
and was very far from converting his feeling into a principle. The
proof of this is, that he was on terms of friendship with many Jews. He
intrusted the leadership of his play at the opening of the theatre in
Bayreuth to a Jew, which he certainly would never have done if he had
been suffering under the delusion that he was persecuted by the Jews.
Herr Puschmann further thinks that erotomania must be diagnosed from
Wagner’s poems: “His first great _opus_, Das Liebesverbot, glorifies
the triumph of free and open sensuality. Still, he there keeps within
the limits of decent respectability. But in his latest works the
erotic element is put into more undisguised prominence. In Tristan
und Isolde he glorifies ‘adultery,’ in the Walküre ‘incest.’” Whoever
has followed my account of Wagner’s poetry can judge for himself
whether Wagner intends therein to glorify adultery and incest. He will
perceive that in Wagner’s poems the woman never signifies the physical
woman, and that by love he never means sexual intercourse; that there
is merely an artistic embodiment of ideal sentiments, and that only
total misconstruction can lead to such conclusions as those of Herr
Puschmann. Whoever, in spite of all such commentaries, entertains the
slightest doubts upon this point may set them at rest by a passage in
a letter from Wagner to Liszt. Wagner sent his friend the score of
Siegfried after having concluded not to bring it out for a while, and
wrote: “I now impart to you readily and with good courage this poem,
for now you too no longer need to lift your eyes from it to consider
with careful glance your public. You have, for example, no longer any
need of anxiety as to what those people shall say of the ‘woman’ who,
when ‘woman’ is said, always think of their wives, or, if their power
of abstraction mounts so high, of some young lady or other.”
Enough of Herr Puschmann! But let it be added that this pamphlet of
the “specialist in psychiatry,” though it made a sensation in its day
before the public, was never taken seriously in psychiatric circles,
but was always considered as a thoroughly amateurish production. Twenty
years have since elapsed. Wagnerian art has now spread over the whole
globe, and numbers its adherents by the hundreds of thousands. Recently
another specialist in nervous diseases, Herr Nordau, has made the
weighty discovery that Wagner was indeed deranged and a degenerate. The
whole of Puschmann’s nonsense, at which every rational psychiatrist
laughed twenty years ago, has been furbished up anew by Herr Nordau,
and put forth as the greatest wisdom, the newest acquisition of his
scientific investigations.
For the unscientific pamphlet of Puschmann there is an excuse. At that
time, twenty years ago, although Wagner already had a great number of
warm adherents, Puschmann might still come to the conclusion that upon
matter-of-fact people Wagner’s music made an impression of absurdity;
that it was not capable of exciting an elevated feeling in anybody,
etc. In a word, he voiced the sentiments of the majority when he
assumed that Wagner’s productions were “_verrücktes Zeug_”--crazy
stuff. But things are different to-day. Understanding of Wagner’s art
is no longer so uncommon, and on every German opera stage Wagner’s
works take the lead. Not only in Germany has this success been
attained, but far beyond her borders, his renown has pressed. Even in
the New World, in far America, there are thousands of enthusiastic
Wagner lovers. How does Nordau get away from this fact? Very simply: he
says all the world is “crazy,” or, at any rate, “hysterical.” “Wagner’s
mighty influence on his contemporaries is to be explained neither
by his capacities as author and musician nor by any of his personal
qualities, ... but by the peculiarities in the life of the present
nervous temperament.... He had the good fortune to endure until the
general degeneration and hysteria were sufficiently advanced to supply
a rich and nutritious soil for his theories and his art.”[208]
From this, one might think that it were time for publishing new
text-books of psychiatry and instructing students that there is only
one “normal man” in the world--to wit, Max Nordau. Everybody who
writes, composes, or paints anything that Max Nordau does not take
a fancy to, is degenerate; and everybody who likes anything that
Herr Nordau does not, is hysterical. So long as this platform is not
universally accepted in psychiatry, Herr Nordau can not expect to
find scientific support. But whoever stands upon the universal ground
of science must admit that Herr Nordau is a perfect amateur in the
department of psychiatry. I can hardly think that anybody, even a
layman in psychiatry, although he be an opponent of Wagner’s art, can
possibly assent to Herr Nordau’s opinions; yet for the sake of justice,
we had better enter upon a brief consideration of the main points of
his deductions.
Nordau’s diagnosis is as follows: “Richard Wagner is himself alone
charged with a greater abundance of degeneration than all the
degenerates put together with whom we have hitherto become acquainted.
The stigmata of this morbid condition are united in him in the
most complete and most luxuriant development. He displays in the
general constitution of his mind the persecution mania, megalomania,
and mysticism; in his instincts vague philanthropy, anarchism,
a craving for revolt and contradiction; in his writings all the
signs of graphomania--namely, incoherence, fugitive ideation, and a
tendency to idiotic punning; and, as the groundwork of his being, the
characteristic emotionalism of a colour at once erotic and religiously
enthusiastic.”[209]
Very indicative of Nordau’s dilettanteism is his incidental way
of throwing in the most important symptoms of developed insanity,
“delusion of persecution” and “delusion of grandeur.” As proof of the
first, he adduces quite briefly the trite stories about the Jews, which
I have already sufficiently considered. Of the latter he simply says:
“His megalomania is so well known through his writings, his verbal
utterances, and the whole course of his life, that a bare reference
to it is sufficient.”[210] Nordau evidently does not know what is
meant by a delusive idea; otherwise, he could not talk so innocently.
According to him, everybody who thinks he is persecuted has a “delusion
of persecution,” and everybody who thinks he can accomplish what nobody
else can has a “delusion of grandeur.” Supposing that Wagner had really
had the degree of self-conceit which is often attributed to him--which,
as I have already shown, is far from having been the case--supposing
it to be true that he believed himself to be the greatest musician of
all the ages, to conclude from this alone a delusion of grandeur would
be unwarranted in the extreme. Overestimation of self and the delusion
of grandeur are widely different things. One may, for instance, make
pretensions to being a thoroughly expert judge of all departments of
art and science--music, painting, philosophy, and what not--so much so
as to declare that every man who dissents from one’s pronouncements
ought to be cared for as insane; yet this does not amount to a delusion
of grandeur--in the psychiatric sense of the term. No such sign of
overrating himself was displayed by Wagner. He respected and honoured
the masters of his art as much as any of his contemporaries ever did.
Which one of the great masters of music was the greatest of all the
ages the psychiatrist, as such, is not competent to say. Whoever it may
have been was probably fully aware of it, and if he ever betrayed that
consciousness, it was not a mark of insanity. But how very far Wagner
was from overestimating himself is shown in his correspondence, which
demonstrates how little he was occupied with what he had attained, and
how entirely with what he had still to strive for.
Just as any artist who leaves the well-trodden roads and breaks new
paths is exposed to every imaginable enmity and misunderstanding,
Wagner had to combat persecutions and hostilities, which, far from
being imaginary or delusive, were so real that it would have been folly
to blind himself to them; and nothing but a rare and precious firmness
of character, and an accurate appreciation of his own inward worth,
could have carried him through all his tribulations to his eventual
triumph.
He left our ruts,
But went on steadily and without deviations.
Only psychiatric amateurs--and not the most observant or wisest of
them either--can possibly mistake the self-consciousness that marks
the developed character for a “delusion of grandeur.” Stories about
boundless “vanity,” a passion for “divine veneration,” “incense,” and
so forth--easily picked up among the valets and secretaries of any
great man--have no foundation but arbitrary distortions or ignorance of
the facts. As I have already proved, Wagner asked as little from the
great public as did Goethe. In his creating alone, in his art itself,
he found satisfaction and contentment. “Believe me implicitly,” he
wrote to Liszt, “when I tell you that the only reason of my continuing
to live as long as I have done is the irresistible impulse to complete
a series of works of art which yet have the strength to live within
me. I accurately know that nothing but this creation and completion
gratifies me; and as for the performance of those works and the seeing
them from without, that I can dispense with well enough.”
The remaining lucubrations of Nordau are limited almost exclusively
to a critique, such as it is, of Wagner’s works, and are shaped by
the principle that whatever Max Nordau does not like is the work of
an insane mind. Wagner’s theoretical writings, one and all, fail to
obtain Nordau’s favour; therefore Wagner is insane. That Wagner himself
recognised that what he had to say could not be expressed by words
alone, that he saw the inflation of his own style, that his different
writings were composed for special objects, and finally that Wagner,
with the greatest “reluctance” and only when “driven by need,” betook
himself to writing--all this has little power to bend the inflexible
critic. The long and short of it is that Wagner’s writings do not
please Nordau. Hence it appears that Wagner was a “graphomaniac.” The
trifling contradiction between a man’s being a “graphomaniac” and his
writing with “reluctance” and only when “driven by need,” is apparent.
Graphomania is pretty nearly the contrary of that. But what difference
does that make? One contradiction more or less is a trifle when one is
as well supplied with them as Herr Nordau. Here is a sample of Herr
Nordau’s manner of employing criticism: Concerning Wagner’s idea of
fusing the different arts into one great whole, the musical drama,
he says: “His art-work of the future is the art-work of times long
past. What he takes for evolution is a retrogression, and a return to
a primeval human--nay, to a pre-human [!] stage.” One wonders what
put this notion into Herr Nordau’s head. Does he really believe that
“pre-human” beings composed musical dramas?
Wagner, in one of his articles, speaks repeatedly of the action of the
“head” in contradistinction to that of the “heart.” He calls speech
the language of the “head” and music that of the “heart.” “The organ
of the heart is music (_Ton_), and its artistically conscious language
is the art of music.” Every schoolboy can see what is meant. A form
of speech common to all ages and all nations denotes the conative
faculties by the term _heart_, as opposed to cold, calculating,
speculative understanding--the action of the brain. But Herr Nordau
feels himself called upon to challenge this figure of speech in the
following terms: “But as his mystically disposed brain was not capable
of clearly grasping the various parts of this intricate idea, and of
arranging them in parallel lines, he entangled himself in the absurdity
of an ‘activity of the brain without activity of the heart’; ... and
finally attains to the pure twaddle of calling ‘sound’ the ‘organ of
the heart.’”[211]
We have already remarked that Nordau, in the department of psychiatry,
is a mere amateur; so that we must not expect any accurate application
of the concepts of the science in his writings. Yet, since he writes
upon the subject, it might have been hoped that he would tolerably
post himself in relation to it, and not publish things in the most
injudicious manner. Now, Herr Nordau assures us that in all Wagner’s
writings there is hardly a single page “which will not puzzle the
unbiassed reader, either through some nonsensical thought or some
impossible mode of expression”; whence one has a right to gather that
Nordau has read those writings. But if that be the fact, how was it
possible that he could totally mistake the purpose of Wagner’s art as
it is expressly and distinctly set forth in numerous places in his
writings? Wagner declares in so many words--not once, but often, very,
very often--that by the “woman” he never meant the physical, sexual
woman; that it gave him pain when anybody attributed a religious moral
to Tannhäuser, etc. But, notwithstanding these explicit declarations,
Herr Nordau sings again the long-worn-out song about the “shameless
sensuality,” and with a bombastic aping of that scientific jargon which
is defensible only so far as it insures precision of ideas, talks
of Wagner’s “erotomania.” Thus he says in one place: “It certainly
redounds to the high honour of German public morality that Wagner’s
operas could have been publicly performed without arousing the greatest
scandal. How unperverted must wives and maidens be when they are in
a state of mind to witness these pieces without blushing crimson and
sinking into the earth for shame! How innocent must even husbands and
fathers be who allow their womankind to go to these representations
of ‘lupanar’ incidents! Evidently the German audiences entertain
no misgivings concerning the actions and attitudes of Wagnerian
personages; they seem to have no suspicion of the emotions by which
they are excited, and what intentions their words, gestures, and
acts denote; and this explains the peaceful artlessness with which
these audiences follow theatrical scenes during which, among a less
childlike public, no one would dare lift his eyes to his neighbour or
endure his glance. With Wagner amorous excitement assumes the form
of mad delirium. The lovers in his pieces behave like tomcats gone
mad, rolling in contortions and convulsions over a root of valerian.
They reflect a state of mind in the poet which is well known to the
professional expert. It is a form of Sadism. It is the love of those
degenerates who, in sexual transport, become like wild beasts. Wagner
suffered from ‘erotic madness’ which leads coarse natures to murder for
lust, and inspires ‘higher degenerates’ with works like Die Walküre,
Siegfried, and Tristan und Isolde.”[212]
While Nordau passes by the most important symptoms of insanity, “the
delusion of persecution” and “the delusion of grandeur,” with startling
levity, satisfying himself with mentioning that they are “known to
everybody,” he tarries to discuss with astonishing thoroughness the
erotic element. Let us here adduce only one or two passages: “Mysticism
is, as we know, always accompanied by eroticism, especially in the
degenerate, whose emotionalism has its chief source in morbidly excited
states of the sexual centres. Wagner’s imagination is perpetually
occupied with woman. But he never sees her relation to man in the form
of healthy and natural love, which is a benefit and satisfaction for
both lovers. As with all morbid erotics (we have already remarked this
in Verlaine and Tolstoi), woman presents herself to him as a terrible
force of Nature, of which man is the trembling, helpless victim.
The woman that he knows is the gruesome Astarte of the Semites, the
frightful man-eating Kali Bhagawati of the Hindoos, an apocalyptic
vision of smiling bloodthirstiness, of eternal perdition and infernal
torment, in demoniacally beautiful embodiment.... Wagner’s Elisabeth,
Elsa, Senta, and Gertrude are extremely instructive manifestations of
erotic mysticism, in which the half-unconscious idea is struggling for
form--viz., that the safety of the sexually crazy degenerate lies in
purity, continence, or in the possession of a wife having no sort of
individuality, no desire and no rights, and hence incapable of ever
proving dangerous to the man. In one of his first compositions, as
in his last, in Tannhäuser as in Parsifal, he treats of the combat
between the man and his corruptress, the fly _versus_ the spider, and
in this way testifies that for thirty-three years--from youth to old
age--the subject has never been absent from his mind.... Siegfried,
Götterdämmerung, Tristan und Isolde, are exact repetitions of the
essential content of the Walküre. It is always the dramatic embodiment
of the same obsession of the terrors of love.”[213]
These passages may suffice. At best, they bespeak at once Nordau’s
total misunderstanding of Wagner’s artistic purpose, and his complete
dilettanteism in psychiatric matters. Of the former truth, scarcely
anybody who does not with might and main shut out the facts and is
not ignorant of Wagner’s own declarations, can be in doubt. Whoever
still insists, after the observations made above, that Wagner, in the
creation of his works of art, was thinking of the sensual, sexual
woman, simply will not understand; and there is no help for it. As to
the latter point, that a man who his whole life long never showed the
slightest indication of sexual anomalies, who lived in happy marriage
and was a tender husband and father, should be called an “erotomaniac”
solely because love is introduced into his dramas, and that “a morbid
state of excitation of his sexual centres” should be diagnosed, is the
grossest and sheerest nonsense that ever was. There is scarcely a poet
in the whole history of art whom one might not by the same token stamp
as an “erotomaniac.”
Herr Nordau might by the same right just as well have diagnosed a
number of other symptoms from Wagner’s poems. Why, for example, does
the great musician not suffer from pyromania on the ground of the magic
fire in the Walküre? Why does Nordau not declare him a kleptomaniac,
in view of the numerous thefts in Rheingold? There would have been
quite as much sense in either diagnosis as in that of erotomania
from Tannhäuser. Perhaps Herr Nordau has overlooked these symptoms,
and perhaps he will do us the pleasure, in the next edition of his
Degeneration, of dishing these up as the latest achievements of his
scientific researches.
Nordau has made the important discovery that Wagner was born to be a
painter, and only missed his vocation in consequence of his morbid
impulses. “Wagner is no comedian,” he says, “but a born painter. If
he had been a healthy genius, endowed with intellectual equilibrium,
that is what he would undoubtedly have become. His inner vision would
have forced the brush into his hand, and constrained him to realize it
on canvas, by means of colour.... He did not understand his natural
impulses. Perhaps, also, with the feeling of his own deep organic
feebleness, he dreaded the heavy labour of drawing and painting, and,
conformably with the law of least effort, his instinct sought vent
in the theatre, where his inner visions were embodied by others--the
decorative painters, machinists, and actors--without requiring him to
exert himself.” Did anybody ever hear more luxuriant nonsense? A man
who thinks the labour of painting too severe, takes up the musical
drama, composing himself both the verse and the music, and thus escapes
hard work! Is it possible to make a serious answer to such silly talk?
Equally astounding is the self-complacency with which Nordau passes
judgment upon Wagner’s music. I, too, am of the opinion that the
judgment of art, especially of those arts which appeal to the sensitive
heart, is not only open to the theorizing professional, but that the
direct sentiment of the unprejudiced layman ought to be its touchstone.
Wagner himself gives expression to this thought in the Meistersinger,
where Hans Sachs says:
Yet once a year I should think it wise
That the rules themselves should be tested
Whether in custom’s stupid rut
Your force and life ye were not losing:
Now whether ye of Nature
Be yet upon the right track
Can tell you only
He who knows nothing of tabulature.[214]
But when a person who “knows nothing of the rules of the mastersingers”
declares both the judgment of an innumerable multitude of experienced
masters and the sentiment of hundreds of thousands to be “morbid,”
solely because he himself thinks and feels otherwise than they, he only
pronounces judgment upon himself.
It is well known that Wagner revolutionized the form of opera music.
He banished the disconnected interpolated arias, put a stop to the
inartistic license of singers in the _recitativo_, introduced a
continuous music corresponding to the dramatical treatment and idea,
and endeavoured through this music to express that for which the spoken
word was inadequate. Of this innovation Nordau says: “It is a product
of degenerate thought; it is musical mysticism. It is the form in which
incapacity for attention shows itself in music.” After having, in the
remainder of his criticism, illuminated in a similar way the theory
of Wagner’s music, the _Leitmotive_, the “unending melody,” etc.,
he reaches the conclusion that Wagner, “in the inmost depths of his
nature, and by virtue of his organic constitution, was not a musician,
but a confused mixture of a poet feeble in style and a painter
lazy of brush, with a Javanese ‘Gamelang’ accompaniment buzzing in
between.”[215]
Concerning the theory of Wagner’s art, others may dispute with Nordau,
if it seems worth their while. But as to the psychiatric lucubrations
by which he reaches the conclusion that Wagner was insane and a
“degenerate,” I believe that I have characterized them sufficiently,
and that I may spare myself a more minute examination thereof.