May blessed reason preserve us from ever thinking that mankind will at
any time discover a final and ideal order of things, and that
happiness will then and ever after beam down upon us uniformly, like
the rays of the sun in the tropics. Wagner has nothing to do with such
a hope; he is no Utopian. If he was unable to dispense with the belief
in a future, it only meant that he observed certain properties in
modern men which he did not hold to be essential to their nature, and
which did not seem to him to form any necessary part of their
constitution; in fact, which were changeable and transient; and that
precisely owing to these properties art would find no home among them,
and he himself had to be the precursor and prophet of another epoch.
No golden age, no cloudless sky will fall to the portion of those
future generations, which his instinct led him to expect, and whose
approximate characteristics may be gleaned from the cryptic characters
of his art, in so far as it is possible to draw conclusions concerning
the nature of any pain from the kind of relief it seeks. Nor will
superhuman goodness and justice stretch like an everlasting rainbow
over this future land. Belike this coming generation will, on the
whole, seem more evil than the present one--for in good as in evil it
will be more straightforward. It is even possible, if its soul were
ever able to speak out in full and unembarrassed tones, that it might
convulse and terrify us, as though the voice of some hitherto
concealed and evil spirit had suddenly cried out in our midst. Or how
do the following propositions strike our ears?--That passion is better
than stocism or hypocrisy; that straightforwardness, even in evil, is
better than losing oneself in trying to observe traditional morality;
that the free man is just as able to be good as evil, but that the
unemancipated man is a disgrace to nature, and has no share in
heavenly or earthly bliss; finally, that all who wish to be free must
become so through themselves, and that freedom falls to nobody's lot
as a gift from Heaven. However harsh and strange these propositions
may sound, they are nevertheless reverberations from that future
world, which is verily in need of art, and which expects genuine
pleasure from its presence; they are the language of
nature--reinstated even in mankind; they stand for what I have already
termed correct feeling as opposed to the incorrect feeling that reigns
to-day.
But real relief or salvation exists only for nature not for that which
is contrary to nature or which arises out of incorrect feeling. When
all that is unnatural becomes self-conscious, it desires but one
thing--nonentity; the natural thing, on the other hand, yearns to be
transfigured through love: the former would fain not be, the latter
would fain be otherwise. Let him who has understood this recall, in
the stillness of his soul, the simple themes of Wagner's art, in order
to be able to ask himself whether it were nature or nature's opposite
which sought by means of them to achieve the aims just described.
The desperate vagabond finds deliverance from his distress in the
compassionate love of a woman who would rather die than be unfaithful
to him: the theme of the Flying Dutchman. The sweet-heart, renouncing
all personal happiness, owing to a divine transformation of Love into
Charity, becomes a saint, and saves the soul of her loved one: the
theme of Tannhauser. The sublimest and highest thing descends a
suppliant among men, and will not be questioned whence it came; when,
however, the fatal question is put, it sorrowfully returns to its
higher life: the theme of Lohengrin. The loving soul of a wife, and
the people besides, joyfully welcome the new benevolent genius,
although the retainers of tradition and custom reject and revile him:
the theme of the Meistersingers. Of two lovers, that do not know they
are loved, who believe rather that they are deeply wounded and
contemned, each demands of the other that he or she should drink a cup
of deadly poison, to all intents and purposes as an expiation of the
insult; in reality, however, as the result of an impulse which neither
of them understands: through death they wish to escape all possibility
of separation or deceit. The supposed approach of death loosens their
fettered souls and allows them a short moment of thrilling happiness,
just as though they had actually escaped from the present, from
illusions and from life: the theme of Tristan and Isolde.
In the Ring of the Nibelung the tragic hero is a god whose heart
yearns for power, and who, since he travels along all roads in search
of it, finally binds himself to too many undertakings, loses his
freedom, and is ultimately cursed by the curse inseparable from power.
He becomes aware of his loss of freedom owing to the fact that he no
longer has the means to take possession of the golden Ring--that
symbol of all earthly power, and also of the greatest dangers to
himself as long as it lies in the hands of his enemies. The fear of
the end and the twilight of all gods overcomes him, as also the
despair at being able only to await the end without opposing it. He is
in need of the free and fearless man who, without his advice or
assistance--even in a struggle against gods--can accomplish
single-handed what is denied to the powers of a god. He fails to see
him, and just as a new hope finds shape within him, he must obey the
conditions to which he is bound: with his own hand he must murder the
thing he most loves, and purest pity must be punished by his sorrow.
Then he begins to loathe power, which bears evil and bondage in its
lap; his will is broken, and he himself begins to hanker for the end
that threatens him from afar off. At this juncture something happens
which had long been the subject of his most ardent desire: the free
and fearless man appears, he rises in opposition to everything
accepted and established, his parents atone for having been united by
a tie which was antagonistic to the order of nature and usage; they
perish, but Siegfried survives. And at the sight of his magnificent
development and bloom, the loathing leaves otan's soul, and he follows
the hero's history with the eye of fatherly love and anxiety. How he
forges his sword, kills the dragon, gets possession of the ring,
escapes the craftiest ruse, awakens Brunhilda; how the curse abiding
in the ring gradually overtakes him; how, faithful in faithfulness, he
wounds the thing he most loves, out of love; becomes enveloped in the
shadow and cloud of guilt, and, rising out of it more brilliantly than
the sun, ultimately goes down, firing the whole heavens with his
burning glow and purging the world of the curse,--all this is seen by
the god whose sovereign spear was broken in the contest with the
freest man, and who lost his power through him, rejoicing greatly over
his own defeat: full of sympathy for the triumph and pain of his
victor, his eye burning with aching joy looks back upon the last
events; he has become free through love, free from himself.
And now ask yourselves, ye generation of to-day, Was all this composed
for you? Have ye the courage to point up to the stars of the whole of
this heavenly dome of beauty and goodness and to say, This is our
life, that Wagner has transferred to a place beneath the stars?
Where are the men among you who are able to interpret the divine image
of Wotan in the light of their own lives, and who can become ever
greater while, like him, ye retreat? Who among you would renounce
power, knowing and having learned that power is evil? Where are they
who like Brunhilda abandon their knowledge to love, and finally rob
their lives of the highest wisdom, "afflicted love, deepest sorrow,
opened my eyes"? and where are the free and fearless, developing and
blossoming in innocent egoism? and where are the Siegfrieds, among
you?
He who questions thus and does so in vain, will find himself compelled
to look around him for signs of the future; and should his eye, on
reaching an unknown distance, espy just that "people" which his own
generation can read out of the signs contained in Wagnerian art, he
will then also understand what Wagner will mean to this
people--something that he cannot be to all of us, namely, not the
prophet of the future, as perhaps he would fain appear to us, but the
interpreter and clarifier of the past.