Chapter III: The Art of Wagner

In saying, as we may truly say, that Wagner made music pictorial, it should be remembered that there is nothing new in the aim, only in the continuity of its success. Haydn, in his "Creation," evoked landscapes, giving them precision by an almost mechanical imitation of cuckoo and nightingale. Trees had rustled and water flowed in the music of every composer. But with Wagner it may be said that the landscape of his music moves before our eyes as clearly as the moving scenery with which he does but accentuate it; and it is always there, not a decor, but a world, the natural world in the midst of which his people of the drama live their passionate life, and a world in sympathy with all their passion. And in his audible representation of natural sounds and natural sights he does, consummately, what others have only tried, more or less well, to do. When, in the past at least, the critics objected to the realism of his imitative effects, they forgot that all other composers, at one time or another, had tried to be just as imitative, but had not succeeded so well in their imitations. Wagner, in his painting, is the Turner of music. He brings us nature, heroically exalted, full of fiery splendour, but nature as if caught in a mirror, not arranged, subdued, composed, for the frame of a picture. He is afraid of no realism, however mean, because he has confidence in nature as it is, apprehended with all the clairvoyance of emotion.

Between the abyss of the music, out of which the world rises up with all its voices, and the rocks and clouds, in which the scenery carries us onward to the last horizon of the world, gods and men act out the brief human tragedy, as if on a narrow island in the midst of a great sea. A few steps this way or that will plunge them into darkness; the darkness awaits them, however they succeed or fail, whether they live nobly or ignobly, in the interval; but the interval absorbs them, as if it were to be eternity, and we see them rejoicing and suffering with an abandonment to the moment which intensifies the pathos of what we know is futile. Love, in Wagner, is so ecstatic and so terrible, because it must compass all its anguish and delight into an immortal moment, before which there is only a great darkness, and only a great darkness afterwards. Sorrow is so lofty and so consoling because it is no less conscious of its passing hour.

And meanwhile action is not everything, as it is for other makers of drama; is but one among many modes of the expression of life. Those long narratives, which some find so tedious, so undramatic, are part of Wagner's protest against the frequently false emphasis of action. In Wagner anticipation and memory are seen to be often equally intense with the instant of realisation. Siegfried is living with at least as powerful and significant a life when he lies under the trees listening to the song of the birds as when he is killing the dragon. And it is for this that the "motives," which are after all only the materialising of memory, were created by Wagner. These motives, by which the true action of the drama expresses itself, are a symbol of the inner life, of its preponderance over outward event, and, in their guidance of the music, their indication of the real current of interest, have a spiritualising effect upon both music and action, instead of, as was once thought, materialising both.

Wagner's aim at expressing the soul of things is still further helped by his system of continuous, unresolved melody. The melody which circumscribes itself like Giotto's _O_ is almost as tangible a thing as a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air, flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of the nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the whole expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than any person of the drama has ever found in his own soul.

It is here that Wagner unites with the greatest dramatists, and distinguishes himself from the contemporary heresy of Ibsen, whose only too probable people speak a language exactly on the level of their desks and their shop-counters. Except in the "Meistersinger," all Wagner's personages are heroic, and for the most part those supreme sublimations of humanity, the people of legend, Tannhauser, Tristan, Siegfried, Parsifal, have at once all that is in humanity and more than is hi humanity. Their place in a national legend permits them, without disturbing our critical sense of the probability of things, a superhuman passion; for they are ideals, this of chivalry, that of love, this of the bravery, that of the purity, of youth. Yet Wagner employs infinite devices to give them more and more of verisimilitude; modulating song, for instance, into a kind of chant which we can almost take for actual speech. It is thus the more interesting to note the point to which realism conducts him, the limit at which it stops, his conception of a spiritual reality which begins where realism leaves off.

And, in his treatment of scenery also, we have to observe the admirable dexterity of his compromises. The supernatural is accepted frankly with almost the childish popular belief in a dragon rolling a loathly bulk painfully, and breathing smoke. But note that the dragon, when it is thrown back into the pit, falls without sound; note that the combats are without the ghastly and foolish modern tricks of blood and disfigurement; note how the crowds pose as in a good picture, with slow gestures, and without intrusive individual pantomime. As I have said in speaking of "Parsifal," there is one rhythm throughout; music, action, speech, all obey it. When Brünnhilde awakens after her long sleep, the music is an immense thanksgiving for light, and all her being finds expression in a great embracing movement towards the delight of day. Siegfried stands silent for I know not what space of time; and it is in silence always, with a wave-like or flame-like music surging about them, crying out of the depths for them, that all the lovers in Wagner love at first sight. Tristan, when he has drunk the potion; Siegmund, when Sieglinde gives him to drink; Siegfried, when Brünnhilde awakens to the world and to him: it is always in the silence of rapture that love is given and returned. And the gesture, subdued into a gravity almost sorrowful (as if love and the thought of death came always together, the thought of the only ending of a mortal eternity), renders the inmost meaning of the music as no Italian gesture, which is the vehemence of first thoughts and the excitement of the senses, could ever render it. That slow rhythm, which in Wagner is like the rhythm of the world flowing onwards from its first breathing out of chaos, as we hear it in the opening notes of the "Ring," seems to broaden outwards like ripples on an infinite sea, throughout the whole work of Wagner.

And now turn from this elemental music, in which the sense of all human things is expressed with the dignity of the elements themselves, to all other operatic music, in which, however noble the music as music (think of Gluck, of Mozart, of Beethoven!), it is for the most part fettered to a little accidental comedy or tragedy, in which two lovers are jealous, or someone is wrongly imprisoned, or a libertine seduces a few women. Here music is like a god speaking the language of savages, and lowering his supreme intellect to the level of their speech. The melodious voice remains, but the divine meaning has gone out of the words. Only in Wagner does God speak to men in his own language.