Chapter II: The Artist in Theory (3)

German dramatic art found itself between the Shakespearean play on the one side and the scenic Southern opera on the other--between the appeal to hearing, aided slightly by fancy in the representation of the scene, and the appeal to the eye alone. There were two final courses open: either, as Tieck suggested, to act Shakespeare with no more scenery than was employed in Shakespeare's own theatre, or to represent each change of scene in the plays--that is, employ the gigantic apparatus of scenic opera.

The result to the modern poet was perplexity and disillusion. The play was neither literature--as it was when men merely read it, allowing their imagination to represent the scene--nor actual, visualised drama. Hence the poet either wrote plays simply to be read, not acted, or, if he wrote for the stage, he employed the reflective type of drama, the modern origin of which may be traced to the pseudo-antique drama, constructed according to Aristotle's rules of unity. These results and tendencies are exhibited in Goethe and Schiller. Goethe, after various experiments, found his full expression in _Faust_, which makes no pretence of stage-representation, and is therefore really neither romance nor drama. _Faust_ is "the point of separation between the mediæval _romance_ ... and the real _dramatic matter_ of the future." Schiller was always perplexed by the contradiction between history and drama. The whole dilemma is this. On the one side are romance and history, with all their multiplicity of character and action: on the other is the ideal dramatic form, presenting a simple, definite action and real moving characters visibly to the eye; and a compromise has to be effected between these two. The plain truth is "that we have no drama, and can have no drama; that our literary-drama is as far removed from the genuine drama as the pianoforte from the symphonic song of human voices; that in the modern drama we can arrive at the production of poetry only by the most calculated devices of literary mechanism, just as on the pianoforte we only arrive at the production of music by means of the most complicated devices of technical mechanism--that is to say, a soulless poetry, a toneless music." With _this_ drama true music can have nothing to do.

Man, conceiving the external world, is impelled to reproduce his conceptions in art in a mode that shall be intelligible to others. This has only once been done thoroughly--in the expression of the Greek world-view in the Greek drama. The material of this drama was the myth--the Folk's mode of condensation of the phenomena of life--"the poem of a life-view in common." The Christian myth was concerned with death where the Greek had been concerned with life. It could therefore be painted or described, but not _represented_ in drama. The Germanic myth, like the Greek, was in its essence a religious intuition, a life-view in common; but Christianity laid hold of it and dispersed it into fragments of fable and legend--the Romance of the Middle Ages. What the artist had to do was to find _Man_ under all this _débris_. Now whereas the drama selects an action from a mass of actions, and limits the surroundings to just so much as will illuminate and justify this action, the romance has to enter circumstantially and at great length into the surrounding circumstances, in order to make the action and the character artistically convincing. The drama goes from within outwards, the romance from without inwards: the drama lays bare the organism of mankind, the romance shows us merely the mechanism of history; the art-procedure in drama is organic, in romance merely mechanical; the drama gives us the man, the romance the citizen; the drama exhibits the fullness of human nature, the romance the penury of the State. In the evolution that has gone on since the Middle Ages, Burgher-society has come uppermost; but it offers nothing to romance but unloveliness. Everything in life is being disintegrated past the capacity of art to reunite it; the poet's art has turned to politics, and until we have no more politics the poet cannot come to light again. As Napoleon said, the rôle of Fate in the ancient world is filled in the modern by politics; and this is what we shall have to comprehend before we can discover the true content and form of drama.

Now the myth is true for all time, and its content forever inexhaustible. Understanding it well, we see in it "an intelligible picture of the whole history of mankind, from the beginnings of society to the necessary downfall of the State." The political State lives on the vices of society; salvation and art are only to be found in the free, purely-human individual. The essence of the State is _caprice_, of the free individual, _necessity_. It is then essential for us to annul the State and create afresh the free individual. The poet who tried to portray this individual found that he was face to face with him _only as he had been shaped by the State_; he could not then portray him, but only imagine him; could only represent him to thought, not to feeling. Our drama, in consequence, has been forced to make its appeal to the _understanding_ instead of the _feeling_. Out of the mass of man's modern surroundings the poet has to reconstruct the individual, and present him to feeling, to sense, instead of to understanding. But this the poet cannot do; he can only address the understanding, and that through the organ of understanding "abstract and conditioned word-speech." "The course to be taken by the drama of the future will be a return from understanding to feeling, in so far as we advance from the mentally-conceived individuality to an actual individuality." By the annihilation of the State, society will realise its purely-human essence, and determine the free individual. And it is only in the most perfect art-work, the drama, that the poet's insight into life can find complete expression, because this drama will address not the understanding, but the feeling, through the senses. It will present the poet's view of life physically to the eye; it will be a true _emotionalisation of the intellect_. It must present things to us in such a manner that we cannot help realising their necessity. This can only be done by avoiding the by-paths of the intellect, and by appealing directly to the feeling. The _action_, then, must be so chosen as to make this appeal instinctively. Now an historic action, or one "which can only be justified from the standpoint of the State," is only representable to the understanding, not to the feeling; that is, by its very multiplicity and lack of warmth it cannot be seized definitely and quickly by the senses, but needs the combining function of thought. The true dramatic "action" must be seen at once to be the essential centre of the periphery of circumstance. Man and nature, as cognised by the understanding, are split up into fragments; it is the _feeling_ that grasps the organic unity of things, and it is from this point _outwards_ that the true drama must work. In other words, it must be generated from the _myth_.

Up to a certain point the intellect can work in the selection of material, and express itself through its own organ, word-speech; but for the full _realisation_ of the action and the motives to the feeling, the organ of feeling--tone-speech--has to be called in. "Tone-speech is the beginning and end of word-speech, as the feeling is beginning and end of the understanding, as myth is beginning and end of history, as lyric is beginning and end of poetry." The lyric "holds within itself all the germs of the essential art of poetry, which in the end can only be the justification of the lyric; and the work that accomplishes this justification is nothing but the highest human art-work, the _complete drama_."

The primal organ of utterance of the inner man is tone-speech, the fundamental nature of which may be seen by removing the consonants from our word-speech. The latter is the result of the addition of prefixes and suffixes to the open sound, as distinguishing and delimiting signs of objects. In this way speech-roots were formed from the primal melody of tone-speech. In alliteration, or _Stabreim_, speech, by combining these roots according to similarity and kinship, "made equally plain to the feeling both the impression of the object and its corresponding expression, through an increased strengthening of that expression"; showed, that is, the unity in multiplicity of the object. _Stabreim's_ similarity of syllabic sounds brings a collective image to the feeling. The _Stabreim_ and the word-verse were fundamentally conditioned by that melody which is the expression of primal human feeling, because the breathing-conditions of man's organism determined the duration and segmentation of the utterance. When poetry developed along the line of the understanding instead of that of the feeling, word-speech became dissociated from its sister, tone-speech; and having lost the instinctive sense of this bond, it tried to find "another bond of union with the melodic breathing-pauses." This was done in the _end-rhyme_, which was the sign that the natural bond of tone-speech and word-speech in the _Stabreim_ had been forgotten. This line of degeneration ended in "the dreary turmoil of prose"; and the separation from the feeling was complete. We now go upon convention instead of upon conviction. We cannot properly express our emotions in our present language, for it allows us to speak only to the understanding, not to the feeling; which is why the feeling "has tried to escape from absolute intellectual-speech into absolute tone-speech--our music of to-day."

The poet, then, cannot realise his aim in modern speech, because he cannot speak directly to the feeling. Yet he must not simply work out his drama on the lines of the understanding, and then try to add expression to it by means of music. _This was the error of opera._ The emotional expression itself must _also_ be governed by the poetical aim. "_A tone-speech to be struck-into from the outset_ is therefore the organ of expression by means of which the poet must make himself intelligible by turning from the understanding to the feeling, and for this purpose he has to take his stand upon a soil on which he can have intercourse with feeling alone." We must go back, in fact, to the primal _melodic_ faculty, to which is given the expression of the purely-human; the drama must utter itself in a form that shall be the marriage of understanding and feeling, of word-speech and tone-speech.

III. Until now the poet has tried in two ways to attune the organ of the understanding--word-speech--to an emotional expression which would find its way to the feeling; through _rhyme_ and through _melody_. It was a mistake to try to import the rhythms of Greek verse into modern poetry, for these rhythms were conditioned by the gestures of the dance, and the dislocation of the speaking-accents was atoned for by melody. Our modern languages not being adapted to this ruling into longs and shorts, Greek prosody is impossible for us. Our iambic verse, for example, hobbles along mechanically, "putting grievous constraint upon the live accent of speech for the sake of this monotonous rhythm." "Longs" become "shorts," and "shorts" become "longs," simply to get the requisite number of feet into the line. On the other hand, where, as among the Romanic peoples, this kind of rhythm is not in vogue, the _end-rhyme_ has been imported into poetry, and has become indispensable. The whole line is built up with reference to this end-rhyme, as the up-stroke to the down-stroke. The result is that the attention of the ear is only momentarily won, and the poet does not reach the _feeling_, for all he does is to make understanding speak to understanding.

We have seen that word-speech and melody have travelled along divergent lines of development, and now neither can be properly applied to the other. Even where, as in Gluck's music, the composer tries to find a bond of union in the speaking-accent of the word-speech, his selection of this mere rhetorical accent leads to a disintegration of the rest of the line as _poetry_; it becomes dissolved into prose, and the melody itself becomes merely musical prose. The usual course is for the melody to do what it likes with the verse; to dislocate its rhythm, ignore its accents, and drown its end-rhyme, according to its own pleasure. The poet ought really "so to employ the speaking accent as the only determinative 'moment' for his verse, that in its symmetrical return it should clearly define a wholesome rhythm, as necessary to the verse itself as to the melody." Instead of this, we find on the one hand that many of Goethe's verses are declared too beautiful to be set to music, while on the other hand Mendelssohn writes _Songs without Words_.

We shall have to deal with speech as we dealt with action and the content of the drama. Just as we took away from the action all that was extraneous and accidental; just as we took away from the content all that savoured of the State or of history, in order to reach simply the purely-human; so we must "cut away from the verbal expression all that springs from and answers to these disfigurements of the purely-human and emotionally necessary," so that only the purely-human core shall remain. Thus we shall arrive "at the natural basis of rhythm in the spoken verse, as revealed in the _liftings_ and _lowerings_ of the accent," which in turn can only find full expression when intensified into musical rhythm. The strong and weak accents must correspond to the "good" and "bad" halves of the musical bar. We must reach back through the understanding and its organ to "the sensuous substance of our _roots of speech_"; we must breathe the breath of life into the defunct organism of speech. This breath is music. The roots of words were brought into being by the Folk's primal emotional stress; the essence of these roots is the open vowel sound, which finds its fullest sensuous uplifting in music; while the function of the consonants is to determine the general expression to a particular one. The _Stabreim_ indicates to the feeling the unity of sensation underlying the roots--shows their emotional kinship. It appeals, as it were, to the "eye" of hearing, while the vowel is addressed to the "ear" of hearing. And as a man only reveals himself fully to us by addressing both eye and ear at once, so "the communicating-organ of the inner man only completely convinces our hearing when it addresses itself with equal persuasiveness to both 'eye and ear' of this hearing. But this is possible only in _word-tone-speech_. Poet and musician have hitherto each addressed no more than half the man: the poet turned towards this hearing's eye alone, the musician only to its ear." The musician will take the vowel-sounds of the poet, and display their fundamental kinship by giving them their full emotional value by means of musical tone. Here then the word-poet ends, and the tone-poet begins. The melody of the musician is "the redemption of the endlessly-conditioned poetic thought into a deep-felt consciousness of the highest emotional freedom." This was the melody that rose from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to the light of day.

When Beethoven wrote the simple melody with which he accompanies the "_Freude, schöner Götterfunken_," he was writing as an absolute musician. This melody "did not arise out of the poem of Schiller, but rather was invented outside the word-verse and merely spread above it." But in the "_Seid umschlungen, Millionen_," and the "_Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?_" he obeys the dictates of the poetic aim, and the broadening of the key-kinship leads the feeling back to the purely-human.

The kinship of feeling which the poet can only approximately express by _Stabreim_, the musician can bring to full expression by key-modulation. Take, for example, the line "_Liebe giebt Lust zum Leben_." The one emotion being expressed throughout, the musician would keep in one key. When setting "_Die Liebe bringt Lust und Leid_," however, the change of feeling at the end of the line would be expressed by a modulation; while if this line were followed by "_Doch in ihr Weh auch webt sie Wonnen_,"[351] at the _webt_ a modulation would be effected back into the original key. It is from this poetico-musical "_period_" that the true art-work, the perfected drama, must take its rise.

Melody is the horizontal surface of harmony; and in harmony "the ear ... obtains an entire fulfilling--and thus a satisfying--of its capacity for sensuous impression, and consequently can devote itself with the necessary composure to the apt emotional expression of the melody." But harmony in absolute music has existed solely for and in itself: whereas the melody ought to be conditioned by the speaking-verse, and the concurrent harmony be used for making this obvious to the feeling.

In the drama of the future there must be no characters whose only function is to swell the harmonic volume of sound; there must only be such characters as are essential in themselves to the plot. The chorus, then, "as hitherto employed in opera, ... will have to disappear from our drama." Neither the chorus nor the main characters "are to be used by the poet as a musical symphonic tone-body for making the underlying harmonic conditions of the melody perceptible." The musician, however, possesses an organ which can make plain the harmony and characterise the melody in a far superior way to that of the vocal mass. This organ is the orchestra, which is an immense aid in the realisation of the poetic aim. Until now the error has consisted in writing _absolute_ melody in opera--melody, that is, which was conditioned by the orchestra itself, not by the word-verse, and which was therefore only "vocal" melody in the sense that it was given to the voice. It ought really to come from "an announcement of the purely emotional content of the verse, through a dissolution of the vowel into the musical tone"; the verse melody in this way becoming the mediator and bond of union between word-speech and tone-speech, the offspring of the marriage of poetry and music.

The great value of the orchestra is its power of uttering the _unspeakable_, _i.e._ that which is unutterable through the organ of the understanding. It may do this in three ways--by its organic alliance with _gesture_, by bringing up the _remembrance_ of an emotion, when the singer is not giving voice to it, and by giving a foreboding of moods as yet unspoken.

All the constituents of drama have now been enumerated. It only remains to consider how they are to be knit together into a single form corresponding to the single substance. Just as the poet obtained his action by compressing all the motives into an easily comprehended content, so, for the realisation of this action, must he proceed with the composition on the same principles. The expression, like the action, must be free from the accidental, the contingent, the superfluous.

We approach the drama in a mood of expectancy, that is ministered to by the orchestra in its quality of a producer of foreboding--although this preliminary utterance of the orchestra must by no means be interpreted to mean the ordinary "overture." This expectancy is afterwards satisfied by the word-speech of the performer, lifted into the higher emotional sphere of tone-speech. The unity of content in the drama must be made evident in a unity of artistic expression; that is, the expression "must convey to the feeling the most comprehensive aim of the poetic understanding." Wherever the word-speech approaches the language of ordinary life--the organ of understanding--the orchestra must keep the expression still on the higher plane, by means of its faculty of conveying foreboding or remembrance. Yet it must assume this function not through the mere caprice of the musician, but in obedience only to the poet's aim. Unity of content and unity of expression must go hand in hand. These melodic moments of the orchestra will take their rise only from the _weightiest motives of the drama_, which are the pillars of the edifice. In this way a binding principle of musical form may be obtained which springs directly from the poetic aim, and far surpasses the arbitrary, _merely musical_ form of the old opera, which was loose, uncentralised, and inorganic.

Finally let us ask, "Has the poet to _restrict_ himself in presence of the musician, and the musician in presence of the poet?" The answer is that they ought not to restrict each other, but raise each other to higher potency, in order thus to generate the true drama. If both the poet's aim and the musician's expression are visible, the necessary inspiration of each by each has not been effected. We must not be reminded of either aim or expression, "but the content must instinctively take possession of us as a human action fully justified to our feeling." In every moment of the musician's expression the poetic aim must be contained; and this poetic aim must always find complete realisation in the musician's expression. Whereas Voltaire said, "When a thing is too silly to be said, one sings it," we now may say "What is not worth being sung is not worth the poet's pains to tell."

There is no need to assume that poet and musician must necessarily be one person. Only in the present egoistic relations of these two--who are types of the egoism of the modern State--does it seem necessary for one man to become the unit of creation.

Three nations--the Italian, French and German--have contributed to the evolution of opera; but the German language alone "still coheres directly and unmistakably with its roots," and therefore is alone adapted for the new art-work. But the practice of singing operas with German words merely translated from the French or Italian, and therefore not coinciding in meaning and accent with the music, has mis educated and demoralised German singers. In the new drama, the melody will always be conditioned by the word-verse, and singers must learn to render it intelligently, bringing out not merely the melodic sequence but the _verbal sense_ of the melody. And gesture must be employed with intelligent understanding, in order to make the orchestral moments of foreboding and remembrance[352] in their turn intelligible. But the primary condition for this new drama is a new public, that shall look at it seriously, as at an organism; a public that wants an art-work, not a mere evening's distraction. We are less fortunate than the older artists, whose audience, whatever its social faults may have been, had at least delicacy and high breeding; whereas we are ruled by the vulgar and ignorant Philistine, the characteristic product of our commercial civilisation. Yet even under the _débris_ of modern life the artist can see the primal source of things, can reach to the _human being_, to whom the future belongs.

XI

It will be seen from this summary that Wagner, though now mainly occupied with purely æsthetic ideas, was still unable to refrain from mixing these up with political and other considerations that were quite alien to them. He still believes in the "Folk" as "always ... the fructifying source of all art."[353] He is still angry--almost comically angry at times--with the richer classes, who, in the Wagnerian philosophy of that period, are always to the Folk what the aristocratic villain of the melodrama is to the poor but virtuous hero. He might have forgiven Meyerbeer for writing bad music; but he could never forgive him for being a banker. The State too is still the most persistent of bees in his bonnet. He solemnly assures us that the reason for the decline in dramatic character-drawing since Shakespeare is "the influence of the State, with its perpetual tendency to make everything uniform, and to suppress, with more and more deadly power, the might of free personality."[354] This wicked "political State," indeed, "lives entirely on the vices of Society, the virtues of which are the product of the human individuality exclusively.... The State is the oppressor of Society, in proportion as the latter turns its vicious side to the individual"; though it is a comfort to know that "the downfall of the State" is "necessary."[355]

And he is as insensitive as ever to the appeal of the other arts. All the arts except drama "merely indicate." The "only real kind of art" is the drama, because there the thing portrayed is not left to the imagination, but is presented bodily to the eye. So blind is he to the characteristic essence and charm of painting and sculpture--for painters and sculptors--that he can speak of the new drama as not only "uniting within itself all the features of plastic art," but even "carrying these to higher perfections otherwise unattainable." A "literary poem" is merely a "miserable shadow" of the real art-work.[356] In one of his letters to Uhlig he goes even further than this, actually laying it down that "plastic art must cease entirely in the future."[357] The poor practitioners of these "egoistically severed arts" are majestically swept aside: "only a true artist,--an artistic man, in fact, can understand this matter; but no other, even though he has the best will in the world to do so. Who, for instance, amongst our art-egoistic handicraft-copying, can comprehend the natural attitude of plastic art to the direct, purely-human art? I altogether set aside what a statue sculptor or a historical painter would say to this."[358]

In the _Communication to my Friends_, that followed _Opera and Drama_ at an interval of a few months, he once more insists on the impossibility of the dissevered arts continuing to exist after the way to the one true art has been pointed out. "Together with the historico-political _subject_ I also of necessity rejected that dramatic _art-reform_ in which alone it could have been embodied; for I recognised that this form had only issued from that subject, and by it alone could be justified, and that it was utterly incapable of convincingly communicating to the feeling the purely human subject that alone I had in my eye; and therefore, with the disappearance of the historico-political subject there must necessarily also vanish, in the future, the spoken play [_die Schauspielform_], as inadequate for the novel subject, unwieldy and defective."[359]

Everywhere, as usual with him, he not only sees everything from his own angle, but is quite incapable of understanding how anyone else can have a different view-point. Just as he had nothing of the painter's or sculptor's feeling for painting or sculpture, so he had little of the poet's feeling for poetry. Apparently all that he assimilated from poetry was the idea; the characteristic charm of poetry,--the subtle interlacement or inter blending of idea and expression--did not exist for him. To what may be called the poetic atmosphere or aroma of words he was quite insensitive. For the poet the bare idea is next to nothing: the value of the idea, for him as for us, lies in the imaginative heat it engenders, the imaginative odours it diffuses. It is doubtful, indeed, whether there is anything either original or striking in nine poetical ideas out of ten; the poet's traffic must of necessity be for the most part with sentiments that, taken in themselves, have been the merest commonplaces for thousands of years. What difference is there, purely in idea, between "we are here to-day and gone to-morrow" and Shakespeare's

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep"?

Shakespeare's magic is in the phrasing,--not, be it remembered, a merely extraneous, artificial grace added to the idea, a mere clothing that can be put on or off it at will, but a subtle interaction and mutual enkindlement of idea and expression. For the musician that enkindlement comes from the adding of music to the words: the music does for the idea what the style does for it in the case of the poet,--raises it to a higher emotional power, gives it colour, odour, incandescence, wings. Brynhilde comes to tell Siegfried that he must die. The mere announcement of the fact is next to nothing; the infinities and the solemn silences only gather about it when the orchestra gives out the wonderful theme.

[Music:]

The pure poet, working in his own material alone, would give us this sense of illimitable sadness by the infusion into the mere idea of some remote, unanalysable wizardry of words and rhythms, as in Clough's

"Ah, that I were far away from the crowd and the streets of the city,
Under the vine-trellis laid, O my beloved, with thee!"

or Arnold's

"Hear it from thy broad lucent Arno-vale
(For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep
The morningless and unawakening sleep
Under the flowery oleanders pale)."

Wagner was blind to this super-intellectual quality in words because for him that quality was most naturally added to them by music. Speech was with him always "the organ of the intellect"; our modern speech was "utterly feelingless": the poet cannot communicate feeling because "articulate language" is capable only of "description and indication."[360] He himself was strictly speaking hardly a poet at all: he was simply a writer of words for music,--words to which the music had to add the emotional beauty that the genuine poet would have conveyed by speech alone. We are therefore not in the least surprised to learn that Wagner first of all wrote his "poems" in prose, which he then turned into rhyme or rhythm at his leisure. We possess, in _Wieland the Smith_,[361] an intended operatic libretto of his that never got past the prose stage. Having decided not to set it to music himself, he offered it to Liszt. "The poem," he writes to the Princess Wittgenstein, "is fully worked out; nothing remains to be done [_sic_] but the simple versification, which any tolerably skilful verse-maker could do. Liszt will easily find one. In the most important places I have written the verses myself."[362]

Hence all this elaborate analysis of vowels and consonant sounds is quite beside the mark. He imagines "the feeling" of a word to reside in the "root-syllable" of it,--"which was invented or discovered by the primitive emotional need of humanity" (_die aus der Nothwendigkeit des ursprünglichsten Empfindungszwanges des Menschen erfunden oder gefunden ward_). And the fountain of that emotional force in the root is the vowel sound, which is "the inner feeling incarnate" (_das verkörperte innere Gefühl_).[363] Portentous attributes are also given to the consonants, and the initial consonant is pronounced to be of more significance than the terminal. Most of this is merely fantastic. Words, especially in the hands of a poet, are not simply clothed vowel sounds; they are entities with a marvellous life of their own. The appeal of Keats's

"The same that ofttimes hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,"

has nothing whatever to do with vowels and consonants: we no more think of these than we think of vibration numbers when we listen to a succession of musical harmonies. The beauty of the lines is in the totality and the rareness of the imaginative picture they flash upon our vision; and to attempt to explain the secret of this in terms of vowels and consonants is as futile as to try to explain a flower by its physical particles.

XII

One is sometimes amazed, in reading _Opera and Drama_, at the persistence with which Wagner pursues the obvious, hunting it down, as Oscar Wilde said of James Payn, with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. He is almost as elaborately absurd over his vowels and consonants as M. Jourdain. The explanation is to be sought partly in the tendency to long-windedness, the passion for pursuing every idea to the death, that was always characteristic of him,--it derived ultimately from the inexorably logical nature of his mind,--and partly from the fact that he had a very stupid public and a very stupid set of artists to educate. _Opera and Drama_ has been made both more lucid and somewhat obvious for us to-day by Wagner's own operas. If there is less need to-day to labour certain points as he does, it is because they are now such universally accepted truths that it is hard for us to imagine a time when people needed to have them driven into them at the point of a pen. Here and there his letters give us an inkling of the difficulties with which he had to contend. Few people in the middle of the nineteenth century, apparently, had any idea of real drama in opera.[364] Even the singers,--with the exception of a born genius here and there like Schröder-Devrient,--had little notion that their parts consisted of anything but so many words to be sung as brilliantly as possible. In one of his letters to Liszt, Wagner describes his horror at seeing, in the Dresden opera house, the Tannhäuser, in the "Hall of Song" scene, shouting his declaration of unholy love for Venus straight into the face of the chaste Elisabeth!--and this in spite of the composer having taken particular care to have all directions copied in full in the separate vocal parts. "What result was possible but that the public should be confused and not know in the least what to make of it? Indeed, I discovered in Dresden that the public became acquainted with the dramatic contents of the opera only by reading the text-book; that is, they only came to understand the performance by abstracting their minds from the actual performance and filling-in from their own imagination."[365] And as he hints, if these things could be done in a first-class opera house like Dresden, what hair-raising horrors must go on in the smaller theatres?

A good deal of _Opera and Drama_, then, took its rise in the immediate circumstances of the German operatic life of the early nineteenth century, and has no particular validity for the world in general to-day.[366] Other portions of it relate only or mainly to the _Ring_. For all his insistence on the necessity of alliterative verse (_Stabreim_), he virtually discarded it when he had finished with the _Ring_. The _Meistersingers_ is written throughout in rhymed verse. In _Tristan_ he employs in turn alliteration, rhyme, and unrhymed verse; _Parsifal_ fluctuates between a sort of _vers libre_ that is often as near as possible to prose, and a rhymed stanza-form for the more pronouncedly lyric portions. _Opera and Drama_, in fact, was in large part the reduction to theory of the principles of structures that were slowly taking shape within him as he pondered on the Siegfried legend. As with all great artistic creators, each subject was seen so vividly, took such complete possession of him, that it unconsciously made for itself its own inevitable form. He himself knew that it was in the _Ring_ that the theories of _Opera and Drama_ had their origin. "Even now," he writes to Uhlig, "must I learn that I should not have discovered the most important conditions for the conformation of the drama of the future had I not, as artist, lighted quite unconsciously upon them in my _Siegfried_."[367] And working backwards, as it were, from the completed work as we have it now, it is easy enough to see how the subject led him of itself to a new theory of opera. He had a gigantic saga to condense into the dimensions of a normal stage action; the most drastic economy of words was therefore necessary. As the burden of the emotional expression was to be undertaken by the music, the purely verbal portion would have to be reduced to the barest essentials consistent with making the conduct of the drama and the motives of the characters clear. And as every word had to be vital to the drama, and the musical phrase was to fit the verbal phrase as if the two had been predestined for each other from the beginning of time, each line, short as it might be, had to be packed with accents as salient as those of the music itself. This condition seemed to be most perfectly fulfilled in _Stabreim_, because there the vowel or consonant that gave definition to the word was thrown into the highest possible relief at the very moment of the incidence of the musical accent. The following quotations from the _Valkyrie_ will make this clear:

A
[Music:]

Die Betrog'ne lass auch zertreten.
Let them trample on the betrayed one.

B
[Music:]

Dass mit Zwang ich halte, was dir nicht haftet.
That by force I hold what denies thee homage.

C

[Music:]

Wer bist du, sag', die so schön und ernst mir erscheint?
Who art thou, say, who dost stand so beauteous and stern?

It was therefore, as usual, the musician in him controlling the poet, although he always strenuously denied this, and indeed his complaint against the old-time opera was that the poet was held in servitude to the musician. In each case the poet was the serf, but the terms of slavery were different. In the older opera he had to work within the limits of a set scheme that gave him little or no scope for character-drawing or for the natural evolution of a great dramatic action. In the Wagnerian opera the poet was indeed allowed to make his portion of the work worthy and consistent, but he was permitted no further scope than was consistent with the necessities of the music. If it be true that Wagner restored the poet to liberty by making the drama the end and the music the means, it was only in the sense that he first of all made the drama of the dimensions and the pattern that music required. Beyond these dimensions, away from that pattern, it could not be allowed to go.

That the musician in Wagner ruled the poet is plain enough to us now, but it was always denied by Wagner himself. In the _Communication to my Friends_, that elucidates so gratefully for us so many dark passages in _Opera and Drama_, he is persistently blind to the fact that is obvious enough to everyone else. As far as _Rienzi_, he tells us, he had taken his operatic subjects from ready-made stories, while with the _Flying Dutchman_ he struck out a new path, framing his own libretto out of the simple unpolished outlines of a folk-saga. "Henceforward," he goes on to say, "with regard to all my dramatic works I was in the first instance _Poet_, and only in the complete working out of the poem did I become once more _Musician_. Only," he rather naïvely continues, "_I was a poet who was conscious in advance of the power of musical expression for the working out of his poems._"[368] Quite so: when a subject took possession of him he would see it all in terms of musical expression and development; and unconsciously the poem would be so planned as to provide the needful framework, and no more, for the musical emotion. Later on, after arguing that music is the emotional expression _per se_, but that it can only ally itself with words that contain the possibility of emotion, he once more lets us see that it was the musician in him that determined his choice of subject and the manner of its treatment. "What I perceived, I now looked at solely with the eyes of music [_nur aus dem Geiste der Musik_]; though not," he rightly points out, "_that_ music whose formal rules might still have embarrassed my expression, but the music that was complete within me, and in which I could express myself as in a mother tongue."[369] Granting that the musical world from the centre of which he wished to pour himself out upon poetry was not that of the stereotyped operatic composer, the fact remains that it was from the centre of music itself that the outpouring was to come. And we may further grant that "it was precisely by the facility of musical expression" he had acquired that "he became a poet." What had happened in the interval between _Rienzi_ and the _Flying Dutchman_, and still more in the interval between the _Flying Dutchman_ and the _Ring_, was that his musical sense had so enormously expanded that it was now capable of weaving a continuous emotional tissue of its own,--a tissue, however, that required the framework of poetry to make it definite. He was right; it was of the musician in him that the poet was born. And it was the musician insisting on the dramatic "stuff" being reduced to its pure essentials that led him to reject the wide-spreading romance and history, and to seize upon the myth, in which a human content was presented in the simplest possible form.

XIII

The musician, then, being at the basis of all his æsthetics, all his theories of opera and drama, the question arises, what sort of a musician was he? He was the spiritual son of Beethoven; a remoter ancestor was Bach. This is the cardinal fact in the psychology of Wagner; and it will need to be examined in all its bearings.

Wagner was one of those dynamically charged personalities after whose passing the world can never be the same as it was before he came--one of the tiny group of men to whom it is given to bestride an old world and a new, but to sunder them by a gulf that becomes ever more and more impassable; one of the very few who are able so to fill the veins of a whole civilisation with a new principle of vitality that the tingle of it is felt not only by the rarer but by the commonest spirits--some new principle from which, whether a man likes it or not, he will find it impossible to escape. Wagner is probably the only figure in the whole history of music of whom this can be said. Bach created no such upheaval. He counts for next to nothing in the music of his own day and that of the two generations that followed him. He did not make a new world in music: rather had a new world to be made before men's eyes were competent to take the measure of that towering stature, or men's hearts quick enough with life to respond to the profound humanism of that great soul. We were not fit for Bach until Beethoven and Wagner--and Wagner, perhaps, even more than Beethoven--made us so. Beethoven, again, had it not been for Wagner, would probably not have meant as much to us as he does now, or become the fertilising force he is in modern music; and even that fertilisation is effected through Wagner's work rather than along lines in continuation of Beethoven's own. If anyone doubts this, let him ask himself what new spirit of enduring vitality and power of propagation has come out of the classical symphony pure and simple. Not Brahms, assuredly, great as he is: "arrested development" is written large upon the forms and the ideas of all the music that has come out of Brahms's symphonies as clearly as upon those symphonies themselves. So far as modern instrumental music has developed in humanity of utterance or in breadth of structure, it is from assimilating from Beethoven, through Wagner, just the urgent poetic spirit that Brahms passed by in Beethoven,--the spirit of which Beethoven was himself only dimly conscious, but which Wagner from the beginning saw to be inherent in him, and which he distilled from the general tissue of Beethoven's work and used in a new form for magical results of his own. The only explosive force in music at all comparable in general to Wagner was Monteverdi. But Monteverdi came a couple of hundred years too soon. The world was not ready for him--it is hardly a paradox to say that he was not ready for himself--and his explosion mostly spent itself in a desert. Wagner had first-rate luck in this as in everything else in his life that really mattered to him as an artist; not only had he the right dynamic spark within him, but he was born into an atmosphere made electrically ready by the passionate soul's cry of Beethoven. The explosion came--a cataclysmic upheaval, leading to a new geological formation, as it were, in music, new geographical delimitations, a new fauna and flora.

He had access to Beethoven's heart: and from the blood in Beethoven's veins he won the strength both for his own new expression and his new freedom of form. It is one of the things we should be constantly thanking Providence for that the natural man in him insisted on making its own world in its own way. Busoni, in his suggestive _Entwurf einer neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst_, has remarked upon the curious formalism of most music, even the greatest. Here is an art fortunate enough to be free from all material factors: it is, as Busoni says, simply "sounding air," and is therefore presumably capable of a freedom of handling that should be the despair of workers in the other arts. Perfect freedom has yet to come; looked at from the heights, even giants like Bach and Beethoven and Mozart are seen to be loaded with chains of their own and their fellows' forging, and to be performing the same timid evolutions again and again in one small corner of a field, while glorious leagues of unexplored country unroll themselves all around them. Bach and Beethoven enriched music by a sort of intensive culture of an inherited estate. Wagner was really the first to leap the fences and break down the gates and send his ploughshare deep into the bowels of a new earth. Almost from his earliest years he had an instinctive sense of the great force of emotional liberation that was struggling for an outlet in Beethoven's music. He was probably the only man in Europe to be aware of it and its tremendous significance for the future. There were plenty of men who felt the greatness of Beethoven; but not one of them, apparently, saw him as Wagner did. It is evident that people like Mendelssohn and Robert and Clara Schumann, for example, with whom he talked much in the 'forties, had no inkling that out of the spume of this eager, restless mind the future of music was to be born. To them his far-darting talk about Beethoven was apparently no more than the interesting speculations of a clever but slightly eccentric visionary. From the first he fastened upon the seminal essence of Beethoven's later work--the attempt of a great soul, hampered somewhat by a transmitted form, to pour out an endless fund of quasi-dramatic emotion in music. The problem that lay before Wagner was how to release this fund of emotion, to give it wings that would carry it over the whole field of human life, to give it a new and more wonderful articulation. After years of struggling he found his way to the light. It was one of the extremely lucky "throws" of nature--a throw she will probably not achieve again for generations--that within the musician who had this unique vision of a music infinitely human and perfectly free there was a dramatist capable of providing the definite framework upon which the indefinite musical emotion could be woven into firm, coherent shapes. His theory that purely instrumental music had shot its last bolt with Beethoven, and that the choral ending to the Ninth Symphony is the unconscious, instinctive cry of the musician for the redemption of music by poetry, is the soundest of æsthetics if we do not take it too literally. Music _did_ need this fertilisation by poetry if it was to win a new procreative power. Agreeable music has been made, and will continue to be made, by the passionless, disinterested weaving for its own sake of beautiful strands of tone. But great music must go deeper than this, and the deeper it goes the closer it comes to the heart; and our name for the necessities of the heart is poetry.

XIV

Having thus summarised the attitude of Wagner to Beethoven and to poetic music in general, let us proceed to fill in the details of the theory, allowing Wagner, wherever possible, to speak for himself.

He has set forth his views upon Beethoven with the greatest positiveness in his letters to Uhlig, and much more lucidly there than in _Opera and Drama_.[370] He saw in Beethoven's music the struggle to express a definite poetic idea in an abstract form that necessarily made the communication of the nature of the idea itself impossible. He always protested against the current fashion of performing Beethoven's symphonies as if they were nothing more than agreeable or exciting musical patterns. They were tone poems, and could mean nothing to the hearer unless the poetry at the core of them was made clear. "The essence of the great works of Beethoven," he writes to Uhlig, "is that they are only in the last place _Music_, but contain in the first place a poetic subject. Or shall we be told that this _subject_ is only taken from music itself? Would not this be like saying that the poet takes his subject from speech, and the painter his from colour? The musical conductor who sees in one of Beethoven's tone-works nothing but the music, is exactly like a reciter who should hold only by the language of a poem, or the explainer of a picture who could not get beyond its colour. This, however, is the case with our conductors, even in the best instances--for many do not even so much as understand the music; they understand the key, the themes, the working of the parts, the instrumentation, and so on, and think that with these they understand the whole of the content of the tone-work."[371] And again: "The characteristic of the great compositions of Beethoven is that they are veritable poems, in which it is sought to bring a real subject to representation. The obstacle to their comprehension lies in the difficulty of finding with certainty the subject that is represented. Beethoven was completely possessed by a subject: his most significant tone pictures are indebted almost solely to the individuality of the subject that filled him; the consciousness of this made it seem to him superfluous to indicate his subject otherwise than in the tone picture itself. Just as our literary poets really address themselves only to other literary poets, so Beethoven, in these works, involuntarily addressed himself only to tone poets. The absolute musician, that is to say the manipulator of absolute music, could not understand Beethoven, because this absolute musician fastens only on the 'How,' and not the 'What.' The layman, on the other hand, could but be completely confused by these tone pictures, and at best only receive pleasure from _that_ which to the tone poet was merely the material means of expression."[372]

Wagner recognised, however, the difficulty of grasping a poetic subject that had not been revealed by the composer, and held that it could only be divined by a poetic musician of the same kind. "If no special poetic subject is expressed in the tone speech, it may undoubtedly pass as easily understandable; for there can here be no question of _real_ understanding. If, however, the expression of the tone speech is conditioned by a poetic subject, this speech at once becomes the most incomprehensible of all, unless the poetic subject be at the same time defined by some other means of expression than those of absolute music.

"The poetic subject of a tone piece by Beethoven is thus only to be divined by a tone poet; for, as I remarked before, Beethoven involuntarily appealed only to such, to those who were of like feelings, like culture, aye, well-nigh like capability with himself. Only a man like this can make these compositions intelligible to the laity, and above all by making the subject of the tone poem clear both to the executants and to the audience, and thus making good an involuntary error in the technique of the tone poet, who omitted this indication. Any other sort of performance of one of Beethoven's veritable tone poems, however technically perfect it may be, must remain incomprehensible in proportion as the understanding is not facilitated in the way I have suggested."[373]