V.

Wagner concentrated upon life, past and present, the light of an

intelligence strong enough to embrace the most distant regions in its

rays. That is why he is a simplifier of the universe; for the

simplification of the universe is only possible to him whose eye has

been able to master the immensity and wildness of an apparent chaos,

and to relate and unite those things which before had lain hopelessly

asunder. Wagner did this by discovering a connection between two

objects which seemed to exist apart from each other as though in

separate spheres--that between music and life, and similarly between

music and the drama. Not that he invented or was the first to create

this relationship, for they must always have existed and have been

noticeable to all; but, as is usually the case with a great problem,

it is like a precious stone which thousands stumble over before one

finally picks it up. Wagner asked himself the meaning of the fact that

an art such as music should have become so very important a feature of

the lives of modern men. It is not necessary to think meanly of life

in order to suspect a riddle behind this question. On the contrary,

when all the great forces of existence are duly considered, and

struggling life is regarded as striving mightily after conscious

freedom and independence of thought, only then does music seem to be a

riddle in this world. Should one not answer: Music could not have been

born in our time? What then does its presence amongst us signify? An

accident? A single great artist might certainly be an accident, but

the appearance of a whole group of them, such as the history of modern

music has to show, a group only once before equalled on earth, that is

to say in the time of the Greeks,--a circumstance of this sort leads

one to think that perhaps necessity rather than accident is at the

root of the whole phenomenon. The meaning of this necessity is the

riddle which Wagner answers.

He was the first to recognise an evil which is as widespread as

civilisation itself among men; language is everywhere diseased, and

the burden of this terrible disease weighs heavily upon the whole of

man's development. Inasmuch as language has retreated ever more and

more from its true province--the expression of strong feelings, which

it was once able to convey in all their simplicity--and has always had

to strain after the practically impossible achievement of

communicating the reverse of feeling, that is to say thought, its

strength has become so exhausted by this excessive extension of its

duties during the comparatively short period of modern civilisation,

that it is no longer able to perform even that function which alone

justifies its existence, to wit, the assisting of those who suffer, in

communicating with each other concerning the sorrows of existence. Man

can no longer make his misery known unto others by means of language;

hence he cannot really express himself any longer. And under these

conditions, which are only vaguely felt at present, language has

gradually become a force in itself which with spectral arms coerces

and drives humanity where it least wants to go. As soon as they would

fain understand one another and unite for a common cause, the

craziness of general concepts, and even of the ring of modern words,

lays hold of them. The result of this inability to communicate with

one another is that every product of their co-operative action bears

the stamp of discord, not only because it fails to meet their real

needs, but because of the very emptiness of those all-powerful words

and notions already mentioned. To the misery already at hand, man thus

adds the curse of convention--that is to say, the agreement between

words and actions without an agreement between the feelings. Just as,

during the decline of every art, a point is reached when the morbid

accumulation of its means and forms attains to such tyrannical

proportions that it oppresses the tender souls of artists and converts

these into slaves, so now, in the period of the decline of language,

men have become the slaves of words. Under this yoke no one is able to

show himself as he is, or to express himself artlessly, while only few

are able to preserve their individuality in their fight against a

culture which thinks to manifest its success, not by the fact that it

approaches definite sensations and desires with the view of educating

them, but by the fact that it involves the individual in the snare of

"definite notions," and teaches him to think correctly: as if there

were any value in making a correctly thinking and reasoning being out

of man, before one has succeeded in making him a creature that feels

correctly. If now the strains of our German masters' music burst upon

a mass of mankind sick to this extent, what is really the meaning of

these strains? Only correct feeling, the enemy of all convention, of

all artificial estrangement and misunderstandings between man and man:

this music signifies a return to nature, and at the same time a

purification and remodelling of it; for the need of such a return took

shape in the souls of the most loving of men, and, through their art,

nature transformed into love makes its voice heard.

Let us regard this as one of Wagner's answers to the question, What

does music mean in our time? for he has a second. The relation between

music and life is not merely that existing between one kind of

language and another; it is, besides, the relation between the perfect

world of sound and that of sight. Regarded merely as a spectacle, and

compared with other and earlier manifestations of human life, the

existence of modern man is characterised by indescribable indigence

and exhaustion, despite the unspeakable garishness at which only the

superficial observer rejoices. If one examines a little more closely

the impression which this vehement and kaleidoscopic play of colours

makes upon one, does not the whole seem to blaze with the shimmer and

sparkle of innumerable little stones borrowed from former

civilisations? Is not everything one sees merely a complex of

inharmonious bombast, aped gesticulations, arrogant superficiality?--a

ragged suit of motley for the naked and the shivering? A seeming dance

of joy enjoined upon a sufferer? Airs of overbearing pride assumed by

one who is sick to the backbone? And the whole moving with such

rapidity and confusion that it is disguised and masked-- sordid

impotence, devouring dissension, assiduous ennui, dishonest distress!

The appearance of present-day humanity is all appearance, and nothing

else: in what he now represents man himself has become obscured and

concealed; and the vestiges of the creative faculty in art, which

still cling to such countries as France and Italy, are all

concentrated upon this one task of concealing. Wherever form is still

in demand in society, conversation, literary style, or the relations

between governments, men have unconsciously grown to believe that it

is adequately met by a kind of agreeable dissimulation, quite the

reverse of genuine form conceived as a necessary relation between the

proportions of a figure, having no concern whatever with the notions

"agreeable" or "disagreeable," simply because it is necessary and not

optional. But even where form is not openly exacted by civilised

people, there is no greater evidence of this requisite relation of

proportions; a striving after the agreeable dissimulation, already

referred to, is on the contrary noticeable, though it is never so

successful even if it be more eager than in the first instance. How

far this dissimulation is agreeable at times, and why it must please

everybody to see how modern men at least endeavour to dissemble, every

one is in a position to judge, according to, the extent to which he

himself may happen to be modern. "Only galley slaves know each other,"

says Tasso, "and if we mistake others, it is only out of courtesy, and

with the hope that they, in their turn, should mistake us."

Now, in this world of forms and intentional misunderstandings, what

purpose is served by the appearance of souls overflowing with music?

They pursue the course of grand and unrestrained rhythm with noble

candour--with a passion more than personal; they glow with the mighty

and peaceful fire of music, which wells up to the light of day from

their unexhausted depths--and all this to what purpose?

By means of these souls music gives expression to the longing that it

feels for the company of its natural ally, gymnastics--that is to say,

its necessary form in the order of visible phenomena. In its search

and craving for this ally, it becomes the arbiter of the whole visible

world and the world of mere lying appearance of the present day. This

is Wagner's second answer to the question, What is the meaning of

music in our times? "Help me," he cries to all who have ears to hear,

"help me to discover that culture of which my music, as the

rediscovered language of correct feeling, seems to foretell the

existence. Bear in mind that the soul of music now wishes to acquire a

body, that, by means of you all, it would find its way to visibleness

in movements, deeds, institutions, and customs!" There are some men

who understand this summons, and their number will increase; they have

also understood, for the first time, what it means to found the State

upon music. It is something that the ancient Hellenes not only

understood but actually insisted upon; and these enlightened creatures

would just as soon have sentenced the modern State to death as modern

men now condemn the Church. The road to such a new though not

unprecedented goal would lead to this: that we should be compelled to

acknowledge where the worst faults of our educational system lie, and

why it has failed hitherto to elevate us out of barbarity: in reality,

it lacks the stirring and creative soul of music; its requirements and

arrangements are moreover the product of a period in which the music,

to which We seem to attach so much importance, had not yet been born.

Our education is the most antiquated factor of our present conditions,

and it is so more precisely in regard to the one new educational force

by which it makes men of to-day in advance of those of bygone

centuries, or by which it would make them in advance of their remote

ancestors, provided only they did not persist so rashly in hurrying

forward in meek response to the scourge of the moment. Through not

having allowed the soul of music to lodge within them, they have no

notion of gymnastics in the Greek and Wagnerian sense; and that is why

their creative artists are condemned to despair, as long as they wish

to dispense with music as a guide in a new world of visible phenomena.

Talent may develop as much as may be desired: it either comes too late

or too soon, and at all events out of season; for it is in the main

superfluous and abortive, just as even the most perfect and the

highest products of earlier times which serve modern artists as models

are superfluous and abortive, and add not a stone to the edifice

already begun. If their innermost consciousness can perceive no new

forms, but only the old ones belonging to the past, they may certainly

achieve something for history, but not for life; for they are already

dead before having expired. He, however, who feels genuine and

fruitful life in him, which at present can only be described by the

one term "Music," could he allow himself to be deceived for one moment

into nursing solid hopes by this something which exhausts all its

energy in producing figures, forms, and styles? He stands above all

such vanities, and as little expects to meet with artistic wonders

outside his ideal world of sound as with great writers bred on our

effete and discoloured language. Rather than lend an ear to illusive

consolations, he prefers to turn his unsatisfied gaze stoically upon

our modern world, and if his heart be not warm enough to feel pity,

let it at least feel bitterness and hate! It were better for him to

show anger and scorn than to take cover in spurious contentment or

steadily to drug himself, as our "friends of art" are wont to do. But

if he can do more than condemn and despise, if he is capable of

loving, sympathising, and assisting in the general work of

construction, he must still condemn, notwithstanding, in order to

prepare the road for his willing soul. In order that music may one day

exhort many men to greater piety and make them privy to her highest

aims, an end must first be made to the whole of the pleasure-seeking

relations which men now enjoy with such a sacred art. Behind all our

artistic pastimes-- theatres, museums, concerts, and the like--that

aforementioned "friend of art" is to be found, and he it is who must

be suppressed: the favour he now finds at the hands of the State must

be changed into oppression; public opinion, which lays such particular

stress upon the training of this love of art, must be routed by better

judgment. Meanwhile we must reckon the declared enemy of art as our

best and most useful ally; for the object of his animosity is

precisely art as understood by the "friend of art,"--he knows of no

other kind! Let him be allowed to call our "friend of art" to account

for the nonsensical waste of money occasioned by the building of his

theatres and public monuments, the engagement of his celebrated

singers and actors, and the support of his utterly useless schools of

art and picture-galleries--to say nothing of all the energy, time, and

money which every family squanders in pretended "artistic interests."

Neither hunger nor satiety is to be noticed here, but a dead-and-alive

game is played--with the semblance of each, a game invented by the

idle desire to produce an effect and to deceive others. Or, worse

still, art is taken more or less seriously, and then it is itself

expected to provoke a kind of hunger and craving, and to fulfil its

mission in this artificially induced excitement. It is as if people

were afraid of sinking beneath the weight of their loathing and

dulness, and invoked every conceivable evil spirit to scare them and

drive them about like wild cattle. Men hanker after pain, anger, hate,

the flush of passion, sudden flight, and breathless suspense, and they

appeal to the artist as the conjurer of this demoniacal host. In the

spiritual economy of our cultured classes art has become a spurious or

ignominious and undignified need--a nonentity or a something evil. The

superior and more uncommon artist must be in the throes of a

bewildering nightmare in order to be blind to all this, and like a

ghost, diffidently and in a quavering voice, he goes on repeating

beautiful words which he declares descend to him from higher spheres,

but whose sound he can hear only very indistinctly. The artist who

happens to be moulded according to the modern pattern, however,

regards the dreamy gropings and hesitating speech of his nobler

colleague with contempt, and leads forth the whole brawling mob of

assembled passions on a leash in order to let them loose upon modern

men as he may think fit. For these modern creatures wish rather to be

hunted down, wounded, and torn to shreds, than to live alone with

themselves in solitary calm. Alone with oneself!--this thought

terrifies the modern soul; it is his one anxiety, his one ghastly

fear.

When I watch the throngs that move and linger about the streets of a

very populous town, and notice no other expression in their faces than

one of hunted stupor, I can never help commenting to myself upon the

misery of their condition. For them all, art exists only that they may

be still more wretched, torpid, insensible, or even more flurried and

covetous. For incorrect feeling governs and drills them unremittingly,

and does not even give them time to become aware of their misery.

Should they wish to speak, convention whispers their cue to them, and

this makes them forget what they originally intended to say; should

they desire to understand one another, their comprehension is maimed

as though by a spell: they declare that to be their joy which in

reality is but their doom, and they proceed to collaborate in wilfully

bringing about their own damnation. Thus they have become transformed

into perfectly and absolutely different creatures, and reduced to the

state of abject slaves of incorrect feeling.