THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA AND ITS ANTECEDENTS
We have already seen that the drama is distinguished from all other
forms of art by its essential quality of directly enacting the things
to be communicated instead of merely describing them. Since only human
things can fitly be so enacted by human beings, dramatic art is
generally identical with human art; it is the art of representing the
actions of men and women--or of deities conceived as idealized human
beings--in such a way as to reveal the motives by which they are
impelled, their characters. The adjective "dramatic" may, however, be
understood in two ways, according as our interest is centred in the
actions themselves, their contrasts and conflicts, or in the motives
or _characters_ of the persons engaged. In the former case the
drama will endeavour to represent decisive and exciting actions
passing in rapid succession before the eyes. This may be called the
spectacular drama, and its greatest master is Schiller. When Goethe is
described as "the least dramatic of all great poets" it is in this
sense that the word is used. Goethe often hankered after spectacular
effects, but was never very successful in producing them.
But if we consider the essence of a dramatic conception to lie in the
conflict of opposing motives, not necessarily discharging themselves
as action, but subdued, and the more impressive because kept under
restraint within the soul of the actor, we shall rank Goethe amongst
the very foremost of dramatic poets. Examples of what I will call the
moral drama are all Goethe's maturer plays, such as _Tasso_ and
_Iphigenie_. To this class also belong Lessing's _Nathan der
Weise_ and the representative French plays of the classic epoch.
They are, generally speaking, bad stage plays, but are extremely
interesting to read, and gain in interest the more they are studied.
In the works of the greatest of all dramatists, such as Sophokles and
Shakespeare, the spectacular and moral elements are so closely united
as to be inseparable. In the Attic drama the more striking spectacular
events had, for technical reasons, to be kept out of sight. Ajax
piercing himself with his sword, Oedipus tearing out his own eyes,
are, like the thunderstorm in _Lear_, the outcome of terrific
internal motives bursting all confines with the force of an
irresistible torrent. Our interest is centred, not in the actions
themselves, but in the motives which produced them, in the characters.
Wagner, with his conscientious habit of accounting to himself for
everything that he did, found his artistic level more slowly than do
most poets. When the stylistic crudities of his earlier productions
had been overcome, he began the work of his maturer life with
_Rheingold_, the most spectacular drama ever written. _Walküre_
and _Siegfried_ were continued in the same vein, and it is very
significant that he broke off the composition and laid the work aside
just at the monstrous dragon-fight. It is no strained conjecture that as
the difficulties of his gigantic subject accumulated he at last realized
the practical impossibility of what he had undertaken. To bring the
whole story of the fall of the ancient Germanic gods into a spectacular
drama on the scale of the _Ring_ was beyond even his mighty powers,
and in _Die Walküre_ he is like a man trying to break away from the
path which he has laid down for himself, to get rid of the cumbersome
spectacular element and let the action develop itself naturally from
within. With all its unrivalled beauties the _Ring_ as a _drama_ is a
monstrosity. It turns upon motives which are not apparent from the
actions and have to be explained in dreary and most undramatic length.
Its very foundation is wrong; its central figure, the prime author of the
new and more blessed world which is to follow, is the offspring of an
incestuous union for which there is no occasion whatever. The myth
itself has sometimes been held responsible, and it has been asserted
that Wagner had to reproduce the tradition as he received it. Nothing
of the kind is true; Wagner has altered the entire story, taking,
leaving, or altering just as he pleased. In the _Völsunga_ paraphrase of
Eddic lays, upon which the story of the _Ring_ is founded, the child of
the unnatural union is not Sigurd, not the golden hero "whom every child
loved," but the savage outlaw Sinfjötli, half wolf, half robber, one of
the most terrible creations of mythology. To conceive such a union
as bringing forth a hero whom we are expected to regard as the very
type of human nobility and guilelessness is an artistic blunder which
we can only explain by supposing that Wagner found his material
unmanageable. He was struggling with impossibilities and gave up
the attempt.
From this he turned to _Tristan_, rushing at once to the opposite
extreme. The absence of clear and decisive action in _Tristan_ is
as remarkable as the excess of action in the _Ring_. Persuaded
that the motives and characters of men must be known before their
actions can be understood, and that these can only be revealed in
music, he has given us in _Tristan_ music such as no mortal ear
ever heard before or since; but action there is little or none. He
scarcely deigns to tell even the most vital incidents of the story.
Can any one say that he has understood the events connected with
Morold and Tristan's first visit to Ireland and the splinter of the
sword from the play itself without an independent explanation? Or that
Tristan's reasons for carrying off Isolde are clear to him from
Marke's account? Without these incidents the whole story is
unintelligible, but with Wagner in his then mood they counted for
nothing in the flood of emotional material. It was in _Die
Meistersinger_ that Wagner found the final equation between impulse
and action, and the public has again judged rightly in placing that
work first among all his dramatic compositions. But the musician and
the philosopher will always turn to _Tristan_.
There are four principal epochs in which the drama has been a
flourishing reality in Europe. They are: 1. In Athens in the fifth
century B.C. 2. In Elizabethan England. 3. In Spain in the seventeenth
century. 4. In France under Louis XIV.
Of the influence of the Elizabethan drama upon the Wagnerian drama it
is difficult to speak to any good purpose. Shakespeare is the common
heritage of all German dramatists, Wagner as well as others, and it is
not too much to say that the enthusiasm for Shakespeare which began
towards the end of the eighteenth century was the stimulus which
roused the German nation to create a drama of its own. It is enough
for the present if we note that the Elizabethan drama is
characteristically human and popular. True, the Elizabethans revel in
courts and high society, as do the populace; they represent kings and
rulers as they are beheld from outside, and there is always a
"Sampson" or "Gregory," or "Citizen" or "Merchant" ready as a chorus
to express with great shrewdness his opinion of the doings of his
betters.
For an opposite reason we may pass over very shortly the French
classical drama, namely, because it does not seem to have weighed with
Wagner at all. Corneille, Racine, and their contemporaries are little
mentioned in his writings; certainly he shows no enthusiasm for their
art. Yet the influence of the French stage was by no means a
negligible quantity in the development of the German drama.
It was Lessing who in the trenchant prose of his _Hamburger
Dramaturgie_ first revolted against the French domination, the
strength of which may be judged from the list there given of works
performed in the Hamburg theatre from April to July 1767. Of the
fifty-two plays there enumerated, fifteen were German, thirty-five
French, and two from other languages--only one being English. In
itself the French influence was not altogether for evil; what was bad
was the unlimited sway of a foreign art. The French sense for elegance
of form is far more acute than that of either Germans or Englishmen,
but with the Louis Quatorze dramatists it had degenerated into
pedantry. The "Unities," rightly understood, are a very important
feature of every drama. Aristotle has treated this much vexed question
with his customary Hellenic moderation. Inner unity is an
indispensable qualification of every work of art; dramatic unity is
technically called Unity of Action, that is, the mind must be able to
receive the work as a whole, and it must have a beginning, a middle,
and an end. Only nature is at once varied and eternal. Out of this
_may_ proceed the Unities of Time and Place, but so far from
being obligatory they were not even always observed in the Greek
tragic drama itself, where they seem specially called for by the
presence of the chorus and where the fact that a dramatic performance
was always a competition made some restrictions binding upon all
competitors necessary. Aristotle's only rule about time is that the
length must be such that it can be easily comprehended (_Poet._,
vii. 1450_b_), and he adds in a general way that in his day
tragedy generally tried as far as possible to keep within one
revolution of the sun, or thereabouts (_Ib._, v. 1449_b_).
Of the third Unity, that of Place, he says nothing at all.
Aristotle's eminently practical generalizations of the features of the
drama as it existed in Athens in his day were exalted by the French
dramatists of the seventeenth century into rigid inviolable laws, and
a dramatist would in a doubtful case think it necessary to demonstrate
to his public in a special discourse that he had not been guilty of
any breach of the law in this respect! The authority of the supreme
law-giver was incontestable; the only question was how to interpret
his enactments. Does, for example, "one revolution of the sun" mean
twelve hours or twenty-four? This and other such weighty matters were
subjects of warm controversy. Lessing's mind was critical rather than
creative; he, too, was an enthusiastic student of Aristotle, and read
with far truer artistic intelligence than Corneille. The criticism of
his _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_ cleared the way for the great
creative poets of the end of the eighteenth and first half of the
nineteenth century. It was a period of experiment, both in
subject-matter and in form. The latter hovers between that of classic
tradition and the licence of Shakespeare, while the subjects are
generally taken from foreign history or from Greek mythology; only
occasionally, as in _Götz von Berlichingen_ and _Wallenstein_, from
German history. The entire dramatic movement of this period is an
endeavour to find a workable compromise between the classic and
the Elizabethan drama, an endeavour which attained a fair measure
of success a little later in the superb classic tragedies of Grillparzer.
Still, noble as were its achievements in this direction, the German
nation had higher aims. As it gained in self-consciousness and
conceived its own artistic ideals it could not but feel itself worthy to
bring forth an art characteristically its own. Till now the only
indigenous German art had been instrumental music, and the stupendous
achievements of a Bach, a Haydn, a Beethoven must have helped to
bring home to the Germans the artistic capabilities latent within them.
The decisive step in German art was taken by Richard Wagner, whose
appearance is like a world-catastrophe. In one vast flood, comparable
only to the tide of his overwhelming music, all that was trivial and
experimental was swept away. What was strong enough to swim in the
tide was invigorated and strengthened; Goethe, Schiller, Kleist,
Grillparzer, Weber, Mozart, Beethoven, and their compeers are both
better performed and better understood now than they were before
Wagner's appearance, but all the second-rate has perished. The days of
experimenting have passed; the danger now threatening German art is
not from abroad, but is within itself, from those of its own body who,
just when the only hope lies in sobriety and self-restraint, are
goading it on the career of intoxication.
There remain the Hellenic and the Spanish dramas. Wagner's true
spiritual progenitors were Sophokles and Calderon. Different as are
the creations of two such widely separated epochs in their external
physiognomy, they possess one vital characteristic in common. In both
man is the instrument of higher powers; whether they be, as in the one
case, Zeus or Ate, or, as in the other, Honour or Christian faith,
matters little. These are the real actors, impersonated in flesh and
blood in the heroes.
An Englishman who, like myself, is ignorant of the Spanish language
and people can never hope to understand, still less to expound, their
literature. The Spanish drama is largely dependent upon subtleties of
metre and diction which cannot be reproduced in translations, and it
is inspired by motives very different from our own. Our watchwords are
"self-interest," "freedom," "progress"; those natural to the Spaniard
are "honour" and "Catholic Christianity." No great people has been so
uniformly true to the traditions of its nationality as the Spanish.
Alone among the nations Spain has refused to assimilate the
rationalist formulas fashionable in other countries; she has preferred
to relinquish her foremost place in the European commonwealth rather
than her ideals. To us the policy of Philip II appears as perverse as
the notions of honour and Christianity appear extravagant in Spanish
dramas; the reason is that we are not Spaniards, and we read their
history through the spectacles of rationalist historians. But if we
once concede their fundamental notions as they understand them, we
must acknowledge that Spanish history and Spanish art proceed directly
out of them more logically, more naturally, than in those nations
which are continually being drawn aside, now this way, now the other,
by the political notions and passing philosophies of the day.
Wagner made his first acquaintance with the Spanish drama in the
winter of 1857-58, when engaged on the composition of _Tristan_,
and at once seized its character with the sympathetic insight of
genius. His remarks in a letter to Liszt written at this time[25] are
so noteworthy, and bear so directly upon the work with which we are
concerned, that I will add a translation of a portion of the letter:
I am almost inclined to place Calderon by himself
and above all others. Through him, too, I have learned
to understand the Spanish character. Unprecedented,
unrivalled in its blossom, it developed so rapidly that
its material body soon perished, and it ended in
negation of the world. The refined, deeply passionate
consciousness of the nation finds expression in the
notion of _honour_, wherein its noblest and at the same
time its most terrible elements unite to a second
religion. Extremes of selfish desire and of sacrifice
both seek to be satisfied. The nature of the "world"
could not possibly find sharper, more dazzling, more
dominating, and at the same time more destructive,
more terrible expression. The poet in his most
vigorous presentations has taken for his subject the
conflict of this _honour_ with the deep human feeling of
_sympathy_ (_Mitgefühl_). The actions are dictated by
"honour," and are therefore acknowledged and
approved by the world, while the outraged sympathy
takes refuge in a profound melancholy, the more telling
and sublime for being scarcely expressed, and revealing
the world in all its terrible nullity. Such is the wondrous
and imposing experience which Calderon presents
to us in magic creative charm. No poet of the world
is his equal in this respect. The Catholic religion
intervenes as a mediator, and nowhere has it attained
greater significance than here, where the opposition
between the world and sympathy is pregnant, sharp,
and plastic, as in no other nation. How significant
too is the fact that nearly all the great Spanish poets
in the latter half of their lives retired into the Church,
and that then, after complete ideal subjugation of
life they could depict that very life with certainty,
purity, warmth, and clearness, as they never could
before when actively engaged in it. Their most
graceful, most whimsical creations are from the time
of their clerical retirement. Beside this paramount
phenomenon all other national literature seems
insignificant.
[Footnote 25: No. 255 of the _Collected Letters_.]
Wagner knew Greek, but seems to have read his Aeschylos and Sophokles
in the excellent translation of Donner. From his seventeenth year
onwards, his exclusive occupation with music and the drama left him
little time for the study of classics. Yet he was a born classic. In
the earlier period of his school life, when at the _Kreuz-Schule_
in Dresden he showed remarkable aptitude for Greek, and translated
half the Odyssey into German as a voluntary task when he was about
thirteen. Unfortunately in the next year his family moved to Leipzig,
where his zeal was checked by the pedantry of schoolmasters, and his
studies soon began to take another direction, but throughout his life
he remained ardently in sympathy with Hellenic culture. His remarks on
the Oedipus tragedies of Sophokles are well worthy the attention of
those who value the poetry above the letter of a work. He was
attracted to the Spanish and to the Hellenic drama because they were
akin to himself. He was himself cast in a tragic mould, in that of the
heroes of Aeschylos, Sophokles, and Calderon. Prometheus suffering
torments rather than submit to the will of an iniquitous ruler is
Wagner voluntarily sacrificing all that made life dear to him rather
than adopt the conventional falsehoods of society. He is Prince
Fernando suffering disgrace and imprisonment rather than betray his
country. He is Tristan and Isolde going willingly to death rather than
sully their honour.