WAGNER AS MAN
The distinction so often made with a genius between the "man" and the
"artist" has been justly ridiculed by Wagner himself. For the truest
individuality of an artist is in his art, not when he leaves his own
proper sphere and enters one that is foreign to him. Beethoven is the
writer of symphonies and sonatas, not the suspicious friend and
unmannerly plebeian. The _man_ is the same in both relations,
_i.e._ his character remains the same, only it manifests itself
differently under changed conditions, and the difference lies not in
him, but in the point of view from which we regard him. Let us bear
this in mind in considering Wagner as he appeared away from his art.
A genius has been aptly likened to an astronomical telescope, which is
able to scan the heavens, but is useless for things close at hand. To
some extent this is true of Wagner, but less so than with most, and
not in the sense in which it has been often asserted. The attacks
which have been made upon Wagner's private character show little
discrimination, for it is a simple truth that the particular vices of
which he has been accused are just those from which he was singularly
free. No charge has been more audaciously or persistently brought by
ignorant writers or believed by an ill-informed public in England and
America than that of morbid sensuality. Just as Wagner's dramas have
been called licentious, so his character has been described as
sensual, in defiance of easily ascertainable facts. Not long ago the
discovery was made that his health had been undermined by loose living
when he was young. It is easy to invent such charges, for which there
is not a particle of evidence, and unfortunately the reader is not
always in a position to verify the authorities, and naturally thinks
that the writer must have some ground for what he says. As a rule
these statements have originated with Ferdinand Praeger's book
_Wagner as I knew him_, a book which I am astonished to see still
quoted in England, as if it were an authority. I have not seen it, and
do not know what it contains. Its character was exposed by two
Englishmen, Mr. H. S. Chamberlain and Mr. Ashton Ellis, soon after its
publication in 1892, and it was consequently withdrawn from
circulation in Germany by its publishers, Messrs. Breitkopf und
Härtel. In England and America it still seems to be widely read, and
is, more than any other single work, responsible for the false notions
that are abroad about Wagner. Sensuality, that is in the morbidly
sexual sense of the term, was no part of Wagner's character, nor could
it be of the man who justly claimed that no poet had ever glorified
women as he had done. His Sentas, Elsas, Brünnhildes, and I must add
his Isoldes, rightly understood, afford the best answer to such
accusations.
"But," it is said, "his music is unmistakably sensual." I must defer
it to a future chapter to consider how far pure music, that is, music
apart from words, is capable of expressing a specific human quality,
but may here anticipate by saying that the nature of music is to
assimilate the elements with which it is joined; the hearer may,
within certain broad restrictions, put into it whatever he likes, and
will therefore hear in it the reflection of himself. This is why
different people hear such different things in the same music. If a
man hears sensuality in the _music_ of, let us say, the second
act of _Tristan und Isolde_, it is his own interpretation.
Another hears something very different, an anticipation of eternity,
of that world beyond which the lovers are about to enter to be united
with each other and with all nature in a higher love of which all
earthly love, with its degrading garment of sensuality, is but the
debased image. The music by itself will bear either interpretation;
each hearer will find in it just that which he looks for and can
understand. But when the words are added the meaning is clear. People
are not "sensual" when death is right before them, as it is here. I do
not wish to be understood as meaning that Wagner excluded sensuality
from his works, or that he did not treat the most universal and most
ungovernable of human impulses in accordance with its character. The
drama must include everything human, and when passionate sexuality is
a necessary part of the dramatic development, Wagner no more shirks it
than did Shakespeare or any other great dramatist. But Wagner always
treats it with such consummate grace and refinement that it ceases to
be repulsive and appears in its own uncorrupted beauty, as in the
_Venus_ music and in the flower-maiden scene in _Parsifal_. Only to
the impure are the senses impure.
An unbiassed consideration of all that is known about Wagner's life
will acquit him of all the graver vices, unless a propensity for
living beyond his income be reckoned as such. Whatever his faults
there was nothing dishonourable or mean about them, and he is entitled
to the treatment that is always accorded by one gentleman to another,
whether friend or enemy, so long as he does not disgrace himself.
Surely it ought not to be necessary to insist upon this before an
English public, but it has not always been observed.
Similar is the charge of "ego-mania," that is, of overrating his own
importance, so often heard. There cannot be any notion of his
_over_rating his importance, for all are now agreed that his
influence, whether for good or for bad, can scarcely be overrated.
Only society requires, very rightly, that a man shall speak of himself
and his achievements with a certain reticence, leaving it to others to
judge of them. Nowhere that I know of has Wagner offended against this
very proper rule. It has so long been the practice to represent Wagner
as a man of overweening vanity, a man who tried to exalt himself at
the expense of other artists, that some in England will not believe me
when I say that there is no foundation whatever for such assertions. I
only ask of those who think there is to read Wagner's own published
writings, and to judge from them, not from what is said about him. I
do not mean to say that he did not believe with the most intense
conviction in his own idea of a new German dramatic art, uniting the
separate arts in itself, and did not proclaim it as a thing of the
first national importance; every serious reformer believes in himself
in that sense. But that is not the same thing as asserting his own
powers to realize it. With regard to these he speaks very modestly of
himself as a beginner, a pioneer only. In fact the question of his own
particular genius is, he says, irrelevant, and has nothing to do with
the other one, adding rather cynically that genius is often given to
the wrong people.
It is in this sense that I understand the famous words of his speech
after the first performance of the _Ring_ at Bayreuth, in 1876,
which have been so often quoted in illustration of his arrogance: "You
have seen what we can do; it is now for you to will. We now have an
art if you will." Namely, thus: "Germany now has for the first time an
indigenous drama, not imported from foreigners; if you accept it, try
to develop and perfect it." Or shortly: "I and my friends have done
what we can; the rest is for you to do." This seems to me the natural
meaning of the words, and agrees with all his utterances at other
times, namely, that the public must not leave it all to the artist,
but must exert itself to cooperate with him. It has latterly become
almost a fashion among some German authors to transgress all bounds of
modesty in advertising themselves. Nietzsche, for example, leaves us
in no doubt whatever as to what he requires us to think about him. But
nothing of the kind will be found in Wagner.
The charge of "grapho-mania" is scarcely worth discussion, except to
show what slender arguments have to be relied upon by those who try to
prove Wagner insane. Ten, not _bulky_ volumes, as Nordau calls
them, but volumes of very moderate dimensions, some 30 per cent. of
which are accounted for by his dramatic works, are not a very large
allowance for a man who lived seventy years, and was often under the
necessity of writing to eke out his income. They are scarcely
sufficient to be regarded as an indication of insanity. The fact is,
that Wagner, either as dramatist or as author, was not a voluminous
producer. It is the quality, the intensity, of his work that is
important, not its bulk. This is only another instance of the amazing
indifference to the most easily ascertainable facts shown by Wagner's
assailants, and of the truth that if you only assert a thing, however
nonsensical, persistently enough, there will always be some who will
believe it. I cannot be expected to go through in detail the whole
string of aberrations which Nordau finds accumulated in Wagner. They
are all of the same kind, and all equally fanciful.
The endeavours to prove Wagner a "degenerate" are professedly made in
the name of science, so often a cloak for the most unscientific
vagaries, by men who are disciples of the late Professor Lombroso of
Florence. Lombroso was a serious man of science, and many of his
investigations into the nature and indications of insanity have
permanent value, but it is certain that he went much too far, and his
views are only very partially accepted by those who are qualified to
judge of them.[5] When a theory of insanity is made to include such
men as Newton, Goethe, Darwin, and others who are generally supposed
to be the very types of sober sanity, a Richard Wagner may well be
content to remain in such company. We are reminded of Lombroso's own
story of the lunatic's reply to one who asked when he was coming out
of the asylum: "When the people outside are sane." In fact the
theories when pushed to their extreme consequences become absurd.
There is nothing discreditable to a serious student of science who in
the enthusiasm of discovery presses his inferences beyond their valid
limits, since all theory must at first be more or less tentative. Very
different is the case when these dubious theories are applied by men
with very modest scientific acquirements, or with none at all, to
injure the reputation of a man whom they dislike. We may then fairly
ask, with Lichtenberger, on which side the degeneration is more likely
to be. These are the men who bring science into discredit.
[Footnote 5: For a very fair estimate of his work, see an article in
the _Times_, October 20, 1909.]
It would not have been worth my while to dwell at such length upon the
calumnies of irresponsible writers did I not know that they represent
the popular opinion among the less well-informed in England of to-day,
as in Germany thirty or forty years ago. They begin with people who
ought to know better, and in time find their way into the magazines
and popular literature of the day, to be greedily read by a public
which, next to a prurient divorce case, likes nothing so well as
slander of a great man. We have heard much of late years about the
decadence of the English Press, but editors know very well the public
for whom they cater.
That Wagner's was one of those serene and universally lovable
characters who live at peace with God and man it is far from me to
wish to convey. Such men there are, and women, who seem lifted above
the meaner elements of human existence, without envy, without
reproach, untouched by its iniquities, unsullied by its vileness. Pure
themselves and self-contained they see no guile in others, or if they
see it they notice it not. Who has not met with such? who has not felt
their power? When such innate purity of soul is united with high
intellectual gifts we have the noblest creation of nature, and to have
been called "friend" by one such is the highest honour that life has
to offer.
But Wagner was not one of these. His was a stormy spirit--"The
never-resting soul that ever seeks the new." He likens himself to a
wild animal tearing at its cage and exhausting itself with fruitless
struggles. He could not make terms with falsehood and sophistry, or
leave them to perish naturally, but lived in ceaseless defiance of
them. He was a man who inspired intense, devoted love, or intense
hatred, according to the people with whom he was dealing. With his
moral character in itself we have indeed no concern, but it seems
necessary to explain why so many high-minded men who knew him
intimately, and loved him passionately, at last fell away from him.
The common theory of Wagnerites, that they were actuated by petty
motives of jealousy, and the like, cannot be entertained for a moment.
With Nietzsche it may well be that ill-health and drugs had begun
their fatal work in 1876; they may account for the violence of his
anti-Wagnerian writings, but surely the cause of his aversion lay
deeper. Similarly with Joachim. Even the noble Liszt, who had stood by
him and battled so bravely for him through the years of his deepest
distress, though he never failed in his admiration of Wagner's art,
seems to have cooled towards him personally when he was in prosperity.
His staunch band of Zurich friends one and all became to some extent
estranged after his exile was annulled. His acknowledged hasty temper
will not account for it; hastiness wounds, but in a generous and
ardently loving nature it does not estrange.
The cause is, in my belief, not far to seek. It lay in the domineering
spirit which is so noticeable in every act of his life, every page of
his writings. His life was his art. He was above all things a man of
action, and all who belonged to him in any relation whatever had to
serve him in his art or cease to be his. His power must be absolute;
talents, energies, life itself if necessary, must be surrendered to
the service of that one supreme purpose. Many were the men and women
who did not flinch from the sacrifice. I need only mention musicians
like Richter, Cornelius, Porges, literati like Glasenapp and Wolzogen.
Many, especially women, were ready to fling to the winds all thought
of personal wellbeing, and life itself. Cosima, to save him and his
art, sacrificed every worldly consideration. Ludwig of Bavaria did the
same, and brought his country to the verge of revolution. Singers,
like Hedwig Reicher Kindermann, literally gave their lives for him.
And no less than this did he exact from all who aspired to be his
disciples and supporters.
But Nietzsche's was a different character. He was Wagner's peer, and,
though thirty years his junior, had his own purposes to follow.
Nietzsche was, as he afterwards realized, under a delusion from the
first. His highly organized musical nature had been taken captive,
intoxicated by Wagner's music. But Nietzsche was a thinker, and it is
contrary to the natural order that the man of thought should serve the
man of action. Nietzsche was incapable of serving Wagner's art and had
to leave him.
Was this a fault in Wagner? Who shall say? If it was, it was a fault
which he shared with every earnest reformer who is not content with
preaching, but enforces his precepts with action. Reform is no
plaything; it cannot be achieved by listening to the well-meant advice
of friends who know no higher goal than personal success, who have no
glimmering of the motives that impel a great soul, who would fain tell
the thunderbolt where it shall strike. Every great man lives alone; he
has no friends and no disciples. His equals follow their own ends; his
inferiors cannot breathe in the regions where he dwells. He must rely
upon himself. Without this full dominion Wagner would not have been
himself; he would never have founded Bayreuth, never have had his
greater works performed, never even have composed them. And this
brings us to the most conspicuous feature of his character, the centre
of everything, namely, his uncompromising sincerity and truthfulness,
qualities so magnificent in him that I doubt whether they have ever
been equalled in any other, qualities which show Wagner no less great
"as man" than he is "as artist."
It is certain--and no one knew it better than himself--that Wagner
might easily have been successful from the first if he had liked. He
might have been wealthy, popular, petted by the great, have lived in
the luxury that he loved, at peace with all the world, if he had only
consented to traffic with his art and to produce what the public
wanted. For assuredly his talent for writing operas on the old lines
was not inferior to that of Meyerbeer or Rossini. His _Rienzi_
was the greatest immediate success of his whole life when grand
operas, of which it is the type, were fashionable, and a few more
works of the kind would have raised him above all anxiety for his
livelihood. This can scarcely be questioned now; it has been asserted
again and again by those who most hated him, and who were in the habit
of denouncing him as "past help" because he refused to listen to them.
To do so he would have had to sacrifice all that he held sacred. He
had "hitched his waggon to a star," and deliberately chose poverty,
exile, public calumny and ridicule, domestic unrest, rather than allow
the purity of his art to be sullied by departing for an instant from
the ideals after which he strove. Witness the events of the fateful
seventies, when his financial straits were perhaps at their worst,
when all the powers of Germany, statesmen, theatrical Intendants,
press, singers, seemed in league together to thwart the project of
Bayreuth upon which his all depended; when even King Louis of Bavaria
cooled for a time; when Bülow and Liszt had withdrawn their help, and
Nietzsche had seceded in horror and despair; when the first effort of
Bayreuth had left a ruinous debt, and the failure of the
_Patronat-Vereine_ shut off the last faint ray of hope. Well
might the _Meister_, now advancing in age, have thought of
accepting one of the dazzling offers which repeatedly reached him from
Russia, from America, from Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, and other places.
But he only saw in them lures to tempt him into degrading his art by
commercial speculation with all its paraphernalia of advertisement and
other sordid abominations. Never once did his courage falter; no
thought of any concession, however small, however seemingly
reasonable, which he held to be dishonourable to his art ever found a
place in his mind. The surrender of _Die Walküre_ alone would
probably have turned the tide in his favour, and he was pressed for it
by most of the great theatres, but in vain. To mutilate the
_Ring_ was in his opinion to dishonour it and prepare the way for
its being misunderstood. So far from adopting any one of the many
courses which could not fail to lead to success and popularity we find
him occupied during this time in coaching singers personally, in
building his theatre, and devising schemes for a school of technique
where musicians, and especially singers, could learn the true methods
of their art, naturally--though perhaps imprudently--believing that
before his works could be understood as he meant them they must be
rightly represented. Without funds! without patronage! with nothing
but his own determined will! Can we wonder that the world's head was
turned by such a gigantic personality?
Let those who call Wagner self-willed and perverse because he could
not conform to _their_ notions of what is right for an artist,
who attempt to measure an infinite mind by the paltry canons of
self-interest, reflect upon the harvest that we are now reaping from
his unswerving loyalty to his art. To him alone, and to the conductors
whom he trained, do we owe the almost perfect performances of our
modern orchestras. It has been truly observed that Wagner's own
immensely difficult works are better performed at the present day than
were the far easier works of his predecessors before he came. The
Richters and Mottls and Schuchs of our day are a very different race
from the Reissigers and Lachners and Costas of a past generation. It
was Richter who taught us in London how a symphony of Beethoven ought
to sound; before he came, performances were approved which the present
day would not tolerate. He, as well as his great compeers, was brought
up in the school of Wagner, the essence of which lies in
_correctness_, in rendering the work as the composer intended it,
with conscientious attention to every detail, not only of notes, but
of rhythm, tempo, phrasing, dynamics, instead of the slovenly muddling
which then passed for breadth of style, and the substitution of the
conductor's own subjectivity for that of the composer. It has been
well expressed in a few incisive words by one of the greatest of the
school: "The privilege of an interesting subjectivity is given to few,
its expression will always give evidence of that instinctive logic
which is a necessary condition of intelligibility."[6] Call Wagner
perverse, dislike his art, say that his dramas are chaos and his music
discord--all this you have a right to do; but you cannot refuse your
homage to his rectitude of purpose, his courageous and resolute
struggle for the ideals which were before him.
[Footnote 6: I have translated rather freely so as to give the general
sense, as von Bülow's German is not always very easy to follow. It
will be found in his comments upon Beethoven's _Fantasie_, Op. 77.]
This is the secret of what is known as the modern German spirit--close
attention to every detail, faithfulness to the work in hand, with the
conviction that no part of the organism is so trifling as not to be
vital. This it was, and not bookish education, that inspired the
German army in its victories of 1870-71; this spirit it was that
enabled the Meiningers in 1882 to fill our Drury Lane Theatre to
overflowing with performances of our own Shakespeare in a foreign
language. At the present day it still continues to actuate German
trade and German handicrafts, while we English in our blindness think
to dispose of it by cant phrases and sneers.
To the nearer friends of his home-circle Wagner's personality must
have been singularly attractive, from the intelligent sympathy which
he showed with everything human, and from the irrepressible gaiety
which never forsook him for long. In times of stress it helped those
around him to tide through the most crushing disasters.
Genius is not a thing apart by itself, severed from the rest of the
world. Its one distinguishing mark is its intense humanity. If I may
speak in paradox, the true poet is more truly ourselves than we are.
The astronomical telescope is constructed upon the same principles as
the terrestrial one, only it is more powerful and more perfectly made.
Not only the lenses, but all the details of the mechanism are more
highly finished; more thought and more labour are bestowed upon them;
the parts are more skilfully co-ordinated together; it is a better
instrument. We do wrong to genius in connecting it with mental
aberration; it is more normal, more perfectly human, than we are; more
human in its virtues, in its faults, in its follies, above all, in its
consummate beauty; only with its greater perfection the organism
becomes more delicate, and is more easily injured. For genius is
exposed to heavier strains than we are, because it is in uncongenial
surroundings. If one part happen to be imperfect, if, as we say, "a
screw be loose," the injury is more serious than in ordinary natures,
and the exquisite adjustments may suffer in the rude handling of a
stupid and clumsy environment, wrecking the whole system. This, and
not natural proclivity, is the reason why genius so often shows a
tendency to eccentric and abnormal conduct. The fault is with society,
which feels instinctively that those who rise too high in excellence
must be crushed. And this is the theme of every real tragedy. Othello,
Lear, Njál, Grettir, Clarissa Harlowe, the Maid of Orleans, Antigone,
Prometheus, and, as I hope to show, Tristan and Isolde, these are but
a few among those who must perish from no fault in themselves, but
because they are too noble for their surroundings.
"The greater the man, the greater his love." We should not set the
genius on a pedestal to be first gaped at and then ridiculed. He needs
before all else our love and our sympathy; for his nature is
essentially that of a child, and, childlike, he craves for human love
as the first necessity of his life. To those who set up an idol of
their own fancy and worship that as his image, he will be cold and
repellent, but to those who know him as he really is he will return
their love with all the warmth and purity of his childlike nature. Two
things are intolerable to a healthy-minded child--rough brutality and
mawkish caressing; Wagner was fated to endure a full share of both. It
is touching to read of Wagner's simple affection for those who were
around him in humble capacities. Every one who has read his life knows
of his kindliness to his domestic servants. Now it is the village
barber who is "gar zu theuer," now his gondola-man in Venice. His love
for animals has been perhaps too much dwelt upon by his biographers,
but it is very characteristic.
Mankind is not divided into Wagnerites and anti-Wagnerites; nor is it
divided into Romanists and Protestants, nor into theologians and
rationalists, nor into Tories and Radicals, nor into any other of our
familiar party divisions. The true division is into great men and
small, lovers of truth and sophists, honest men and thieves. Thieves
and sophists wrangle, but the great and true "join hands through the
centuries," and between them is eternal peace.