ON CERTAIN OBJECTIONS TO THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA
In this chapter I propose to consider certain criticisms which are
often made on Wagner's treatment of the drama, which differ from some
of those mentioned before, in being intelligible and worthy of
respect, since they have not been made maliciously or through
ignorance. In so far as they are invalid they rest upon
misunderstandings which can easily be accounted for by Wagner's
unparalleled originality, by the novelty of his art, necessarily
involving a wide departure from the classic standards by which alone
the critic can form his judgment. To comprehend his work we must give
up many of those cherished canons which hitherto have passed
unquestioned.
Wagner's _Tristan_ has often--even by Lichtenberger--been
described as a philosophic work; and as abstract thought or
philosophy, it is said, is foreign to art, a work which admits it must
be condemned. Let us first understand what is meant by philosophy. It
is surely a train of thought in the mind of the spectator, not in the
object which he contemplates. Anything in the world may be the subject
of philosophic thought, or may suggest it; there is plenty of
philosophy to be drawn from a daisy, but we do not therefore call a
daisy a philosophic flower. So, too, we may philosophize about
Wagner's _Tristan_, but the philosophy is our own; it is not in
the work. What is meant no doubt is that the work itself is not a
concrete reality, but an exposition of an abstract conception.
Philosophy has only herself to blame if abstractions are in the naïf,
ordinary mind opposed to realities, for it is unhappily true that
nearly the whole of our current philosophy does consist of
abstractions which are mere "Hirngespinnste," rooted in words and not
in nature; philosophy itself has in art become a term of reproach from
being associated with unreality. We must, however, distinguish between
notions which are real but difficult to grasp and those which cannot
be grasped, because there is nothing in them, and this distinction
cannot be made without thought and labour from which the ordinary mind
shrinks, being too indolent or indifferent. Poetry is not opposed to
philosophy, and is not the less poetry when it concerns itself with
those higher notions which are outside the range of our more ordinary
comprehension, [Greek: ho¯s philosophias ousaes megistaes monsikaes].
Both poetry and philosophy deal in abstractions, only in both the
abstractions must be true, i.e. must be true general statements of
ideas found in nature; when this is the case poetry and philosophy
are indistinguishable, except by mere external and conventional
features. Under which heading are we to class, for example, Plato's
_Republic_? Or the _Upanishads_? or the book of _Job_? They
are generally thought of as philosophy, but all who have even partially
understood them will feel their poetic spell. Or if we take our greatest
poems, to mention only some of those most familiar to us: _Paradise
Lost_, Goethe's _Faust_ or Marlowe's, Tennyson's _In Memoriam_,
Fitzgerald's _Rubáiyát_--all of these might be just as well classed under
philosophy as under poetry. Only untrue philosophy is unpoetical, that
which has grown out of the reason of man. Abstractions manufactured
by human reason are no more philosophy than an account of centaurs
and gryphons is natural history. They are not to be found in Wagner's
_Tristan_.
The particular philosophy which Wagner's _Tristan_ is supposed to
set forth is that of Schopenhauer. But Schopenhauer's doctrine of
Negation of Will or Nirvâna--for it is identical with that of
Buddhism--is a negation of existence itself absolutely. The man who
puts an end to his own life does not attain Nirvâna; he is not
dissatisfied with life in itself, but only with its conditions, and he
passes through the endless cycle of Samsâra until the moment arrives
when, sickened with the wearisome struggle, he longs for complete
annihilation. The lovers in _Tristan_ look forward to a renewed
existence beyond the grave, in the "realm of night," where, freed from
the trammels of the senses their love will endure, purified from the
pollution of human lust in glory undimmed by the sordid conditions of
human life.
Sehnen hin zur heil'gen Nacht
Wo ur-ewig einzig wahr
Liebes-Wonne ihm lacht.
Such a future life would with Schopenhauer only be a renewal of the
misery of existence in another form. It is the Christian, not the
Buddhist, way of feeling that inspires the lovers. Christianity starts
from the insufficiency and misery of human life, but contemplates
redemption therefrom by love, whereas Buddhism conceives of no
possibility of redemption. Its release is annihilation, and it is a
religion of despair, not of hope.
It would be interesting, if it did not take us too far from our
present subject, to compare this conception of love with that of
Sokrates as set forth in the _Symposium_ of Plato. Sokrates
believed fully in immortality, but wisely refrained from speculating
on the conditions of existence after death. His _Eros_ is
confined to this life, but none the less he treats it as a divine
gift. Love is the mediator and interpreter between gods and men; and
love of the beautiful, which manifests itself in the procreation and
love of offspring, is the desire for immortality, the children being
the continuation of the immortal part of their parents.[29] This is
the lower mystery. The higher, which is not revealed to all, is the
gradual expansion of love until it comprehends the eternal Idea. The
beauty which we love in the individual becomes a stepping-stone from
which we may rise to the love of all beautiful things, passing from
one to many, from beautiful forms to beautiful deeds, from them to
beautiful thoughts, laws, institutions, sciences, until we contemplate
the vast sea of beauty in the boundless love of wisdom, a beauty which
does not grow and perish, but is eternal. There could be no finer
commentary on Wagner's _Tristan_ than this wondrous speech of
Sokrates in the _Symposium_.
[Footnote 29: It is worth noting in passing how this beautiful
conception of Plato coincides with views expressed in our own day by a
scientific man of the highest distinction, the foremost living
representative of Darwinian evolution, Professor Weismann. See his
_Essays on Heredity_.]
It is true, however paradoxical it may seem, that Wagner's very
stupendous power is itself a source of weakness; it is too great for
more limited minds to grasp. If love is really the one divine fact of
human existence, to which all else is as nothing; and if at the same
time a pure and burning love resolutely followed of necessity leads to
destruction, then how are we to live at all? Is this life to count for
nothing? I shall not attempt to answer this question. I cannot bring
the truth that all noble and generous actions are bound to end in
failure, to bring death upon their doers, within the scheme of a
divinely ordered universe. I will only observe that it is a truth
tacitly acknowledged by all who compose tragedies or take pleasure in
witnessing them. How else could we endure to contemplate the failure
and destruction of a Lear, a Wallenstein, a Deianira, an Antigone?
Here our attempts to extract philosophy out of the Tristan drama must
cease. My only purpose has been to show that its abstractions are warm
with the living breath of reality, and whatever is beyond this must be
left for the student to carry out for himself, from the point of view
of his own mind. Such exercises are interesting and salutary to the
philosophic mind, but for minds trained in the modern formulas of
"self-interest" and "liberty" they are only possible after a complete
reconstruction of the foundations of knowledge, a "revaluation of all
values."
The decisive part played by the magic love-potion has given rise to
much comment. Hostile critics ridicule it, and condemn the whole work
as turning on an absurdity, while those who are favourable try to
explain it away, but their explanations have always seemed to me more
unnatural than the thing explained. Why may we not accept it as it is
evidently intended? In art at least, rationalism has not yet--thanks
perhaps to Shakespearian traditions--prevailed so far that we must
exclude supernatural motives altogether. Wagner could scarcely have
used the myth and the names of Tristan and Isolde without introducing
the philtre with which they have always been associated. It would be
just as reasonable to explain away the ghost in _Hamlet_ as the
love-potion of Isolde; if we accept one we can accept the other, for
in both the prime mover of the tragedy is supernatural. Lessing, in
comparing the ghost of Hamlet's father with the ghost of Ninus in
Voltaire's _Semiramis_, has some remarks which are equally valid
for all supernatural motives in the drama. The principle which he
evolves is that a supernatural being to be admissible must interest us
for its own sake as a living and acting personage; in other words, it
must be an organic portion of the play, not a mere machine brought in
for stage effect. "Voltaire treats the apparition of a dead person as
a miracle, Shakespeare as a perfectly natural occurrence." I do not
think that the difference between what is allowable and what is not
could be more clearly put than in this last sentence. We are not
obliged to believe that the potion is the sole cause of their love;
that they hated each other as deadly enemies at one moment and became
lovers at the next. Such a notion would be altogether too crude. We
are justified in supposing that behind Isolde's rage and Tristan's
disdain there lies a deeper feeling, as yet unconfessed but
sufficiently deep-rooted to endure when the anger of the moment has
passed away, and that this is what is effected by the draught.
A very marked characteristic or mannerism of Wagner's dramas is the
tedious length of explanation in some scenes or soliloquies, and they
have often been severely criticized. There is one in _Tristan_,
King Marke's speech at the end of Act II., and I may say at once that
after all that has been said the objections cannot be entirely set
aside. It numbers nearly two hundred bars in slow tempo, and takes
about ten minutes. The argument generally used in defending it is that
the action is laid within, and the interest is in the music. But the
objection--to me at least--is not that the action is at a standstill,
but that the scene is undramatic, and much of it unmitigated prose.
The action has stood still nearly all through the act, but no one
would wish to miss a bar of any other portion. The king's reproaches
of his friend and vassal for his treachery, and the music with its
gloomy orchestration, mostly of horns, bassoons, viola, and lower
strings, with occasional English horn, and the deepest notes of the
clarinet interspersed with wails of the bass-clarinet, are profoundly
touching and proceed naturally out of the situation. Had there been
nothing more than these it might have been much shorter, but Wagner
has taken the occasion to try to throw some light upon the
circumstances that preceded the events of the play. If they were to be
told they should have been told earlier. Here we have forgotten our
perplexity at the beginning and are now thrilled with the situation,
not at all in the mood for hearing explanations. Nor does it really
explain; if the hearer does not already know why Isolde was brought to
be the bride of King Marke, he will scarcely learn it from Marke's
speech.
When I spoke just now of Wagner's predilection for long soliloquies
and prosy explanations as a mannerism, I do not think that I was
expressing myself too strongly. Thus in _Die Walküre_, in Wotan's
long speech to Brünnhilde in Act II., he sketches the main events of
_Das Rheingold_. In _Siegfried_ the amusing riddle scene, a
reminiscence of the Eddic _Alvísmál_, seems intended to relate
events which have gone before. In _Götterdämmerung_ it is
Siegfried who just before his death tells the story of the preceding
evening.[30] In _Parsifal_ Gurnemanz explains all the circumstances
to the Knappen. How undramatic are these explanations we shall
realize when we compare them with such soliloquies as Tannhäuser's
account of his pilgrimage or Siegmund's story of his life, which, though
equally lengthy, keep us spellbound from the first bar to the last,
because they directly lead up to and form part of the scene which is
actually before us. Tannhäuser's wild aspect and manner, Siegmund's
desolation and longing for community with other human beings, are in
direct connection with the story told.
[Footnote 30: From which we may conclude that Wagner when composing
the tetralogy contemplated the separate numbers being sometimes
performed singly. For this the explanations are again inadequate. Much
better it would have been to provide at the performance a short
printed or spoken introduction, a plan which in my humble opinion
might well be adopted in most plays.]
I am, of course, only expressing an individual opinion, because I feel
bound in giving a full account of the work to say how it appears to
me; others may very probably feel it differently. It matters little.
Even if I am right in thinking that Wagner has miscalculated the
effect on the stage, _Tristan_ will still remain a work
immeasurably superior to a thousand that are faultless.