The Spirit of French Music/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
WAGNER THE POET
The war, while banishing the name of Richard Wagner from the posters of our concerts and theatres has restored his works to the agenda of criticism. It has revived on the subject of the Tetralogy, Tristan, and Parsifal, controversies which might have been thought to be dead and which take us back thirty years. We have no reason to complain of that. The "sacred union" has not suffered, and truth can only gain by it. The testing of time renders easier the equitable appreciation of works of art; and in the case of Wagner's work this test has been long enough to give us the advantage of due perspective. We to-day can turn upon this vast and complex monument of poetry, music and theatrical decoration a gaze more free and clear than could our elders, when they saw it rise for the first time before their astonished and dazzled eyes. The time will come, and it will come by victory, when reasons lying deep in the fitness of things which ruled that the author of the Tetralogy must be excluded from our dramatic and musical repertories will no longer exist, and it will then be for considerations of taste to decide whether or no Wagner is to be played, or to what extent he is to be played. But the decision of which public feeling will allow in this matter, the practice that will be established, will have all the more wisdom and authority if they are inspired by a taste that is well informed and thoroughly enlightened on the nature and value of Wagner's work, and on the quality of the influence that it has exercised and is still capable of exercising in our country. By giving ourselves up to this examination with the impartiality and calm that it demands we shall, on one important question, be making beforehand our dispositions for "after the war"!
I
The question is a very wide one. I do not intend to study it here in its totality; of the two great aspects under which it presents itself, I shall only consider one. Wagner produced work both as a poet and as a musician. I will speak of the poet. I will try to characterise and judge Wagner's dramatic poems.
Beyond doubt the subject when thus limited is open to one objection. It may be said that dramas destined to be translated into music and only written with that object, form with their music a living and indissoluble whole. By separating the elements of this whole in order to make them the subject of two distinct analyses, shall we not inflict on both a sort of mutilation, shall we not deprive them of a part of their meaning?
There lies a difficulty against which we must indeed be on our guard. But that does not mean that we must withdraw the Wagnerian dramas from the test of a separate investigation. As Descartes said in effect, there is only one way of settling questions, and that is to begin by dividing them. This is especially true of such complex and many-sided questions as this. When it is intended to judge seriously a work of musical drama the first thing necessary is to study the drama by itself. Drama in music is still drama. As such it must have its own substance; it presents us with a story, characters, passions, characterisation; it rests on a certain basis of ideas. All this it should normally be possible to understand without the music; these things ought to offer in themselves an interest that is independent of the music. No doubt at a mere reading the imagination will not associate itself with this interest as keenly as might be desired; those poems will not produce the emotion or exhale the poetry which when they are heard, may be the chief attraction, and which depend above all on the music. But one to whose mind this music is familiar could not re-read these dramas without hearing the music singing in the words, without seeing the situations coloured by it. And if he gives an analysis or description of the dramatic stories of Wagner, the lines with which he draws them will find themselves quite naturally impregnated with this musical colouring, and they will not have the comparative dryness of the bare text.
This method seems undoubtedly the right one. But however much the question in general may be open to debate, there is, where Wagner is concerned, a reason of fact which imposes it on us, and renders especially necessary a previous and separate study of the Wagnerian dramas. In the very considerable influence exercised in France by Wagner's work, his dramatic poems have had their own independent share. I am quite ready to agree that they have owed their influence solely to the renown of the music which accompanied or supported them, and I admit that without its aid they would not simply as samples of German literature have succeeded in capturing the attention of Frenchmen. But once introduced within our borders by this powerful musical medium, they somehow detached themselves from it; they had their own separate success; they attained prominence by themselves. They have not lacked great admirers, nor makers of glosses and scholiasts to elucidate their mysteries. They have been read by many with gravity and in the expectation of finding great things in them. They have conquered the imagination of artists, have provided painters with inspiration, and certain poetic schools with myths and themes of meditation on which they have freely embroidered; they have even furnished the model of a form of expression for imitation. Doctrines have been sought in them; the Wagnerian conceptions have added credit or at the very least attractiveness to certain mystic ideologies, to certain religious movements arising from the same tendencies. In short, Wagner brought into France not only a music but also a literature. And this literature has had its share for the last forty years in the intellectual culture of a considerable class of Frenchmen. It has scattered a thousand germs in our mental atmosphere. The student who cares to collect in detail the evidences of its action will find matter for a big volume. I would add (and the fact must be reckoned with) that this action has been so easily spread abroad because in many respects it went hand in hand with the great Germanic influences which have been making themselves felt in our country for a century past.
II
The sources of Wagnerian literature are known. They are mythical and historical legends of Germany and the Scandinavian countries, presented to the German people in ancient and modern versions or adaptations; also romances of the Breton cycle translated or adapted as far back as the middle ages by German writers such as Wolfram of Eschenbach and Gottfried of Strasburg. These are the sources from which Wagner drew the subjects of his dramas, except that work of his youth, Rienzi. These subjects were very much in vogue in German literature in the days of his youth. The taste with which they inspired him was nothing new, it was the prevailing taste of the time. The most marked feature of this period of German literature, the period which followed Goethe and is by general agreement called the romantic period, was a great vogue for the old national literature, a great zeal for its revival. And it was not only Germany's historians, students and philologists who devoted themselves to this undertaking. Her poets, romance-writers and dramatic authors contributed to it in their own way by themselves taking from this distant source the plots and characters of their fictions. Tieck, Lamotte-Fougué, Hoffman, Novalis, Immermann, Heine, to say nothing of a legion of obscure authors, dealt with all Wagner's subjects before Wagner. They told or sang of the Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan, Parsifal, Siegfried. "There were in existence," says the learned H. Lichtenberger, "a crowd of tragedies on the Nibelungen." Thus Wagner the poet is not an independent or isolated phenomenon. He belongs to the literary school of German romanticism which covers the first half of the nineteenth century.
The works of his first period, the Phantom Ship, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin constitute as regards their inspiration and their form a distinct group in the total of his creations. But the three have enough in common to make us content with a few remarks on the last of the three.
We find in Lohengrin that part of the theme is truly poetic, stamped with real humanity and lacking in its developments neither simplicity nor grace. Take for example all the part dealing with the feelings of Elsa towards Ortrude, her deadly enemy. Ortrude has contrived a diabolical plot for the ruin and dishonour of Elsa. Unmasked and defeated she appeals to the girl's pity and begs her to restore her in the eyes of the world by reconciliation: but this is only in order to find opportunity for the hideous vengeance she is meditating. Elsa is far more sorry for her wickedness than for her misfortune (wickedness being indeed the greater misfortune), and grants her not only pity but friendship; rendered happy by love she thinks she would be ungrateful for her own good fortune if she hardened her heart even against this wicked woman. Everyone knows well the charm of the setting devised by the poet's scenic inventiveness for the expression of these feelings. The ingenuous raptures of Elsa's love for her knight have a charm no less natural and pure. And the triumph of this love in the splendour and glory of nuptial pomp provides not merely a scene and a spectacular effect; there is wafted by the pageant of these celebrations a breath of youth and untroubled enthusiasm.
Though the knights of the Grail, of whom Lohengrin is one, belong to the world of miracle, yet the terrestrial mission that they allot themselves, which often summons them far from their sacred abode to the region of ordinary mortals, has an object and a motive that appeal to the mind and heart, namely the defence of justice and oppressed innocence. That is what gives a noble and clear meaning, a moving grandeur to the magical arrival of Lohengrin; touched by the last appeal of Elsa, to whom he has already presented himself in a dream, he comes and places her under the protection of his sword and his honour. Are we to be astonished that he falls in love with her? The knights of the Grail may well have, side by side with their mystic super-human vocation, a share in human sensibility, seeing that they are grievously moved by human injustice.
But at this point arises a situation which it is difficult to treat humanly. Elsa becomes the wife of a demi-god, and it so happens that this demi-god can only prolong his sojourn on earth incognito. If his personality and origin are discovered the charm which keeps him there is broken and he must go. Accordingly he makes Elsa swear never to ask him about himself, or she will see him vanish into the air from which he came. It seems to me that at this point the theme loses dignity, savours of the childish, of the fairy story, and that it becomes impossible to develop it in a natural manner while adhering to the poetic and lofty tone of other portions of the work. Imagine not knowing to whom one is married! Might it not be perhaps with the devil, who is so clever at taking all sorts of shapes? Such a condition imposed in the name of love engenders of itself a sort of entirely physical anguish that must paralyse the sentiment. How could a young bride fail to feel the obsession of it? How should she not lend ear to all that her women neighbours would whisper to her? Elsa is not a wife whose conscience is struggling against a temptation of moral infidelity, but a little girl who has been forbidden to draw a certain curtain or open a certain door, who is haunted by the thought of doing so and does not resist it. Parody dogs the steps of this part of the story. Nietzsche, with his passion for satirising Wagner, quite saw this. "Lohengrin, or the importance of making sure of the civil status of the person one marries," is the way he puts it. It is only too easy no doubt to ridicule a fine work which offers one absurd aspect, and I readily allow that the unity of tone, sustained inspiration, and fine radiance of the music, correct or minimise in the performance the effect of disproportion and inequality resulting from this absurd element mingled with elements that are natural and noble. These defects are none the less real, and not to be shocked at this infantile aspect of the drama one must surely have an imagination that lacks culture, and is very easily pleased.
This drama has, according to Wagner, a high philosophic trend. But there is one strange point—or rather, it is only too comprehensible—to which I cannot too emphatically draw attention. What we find infantile in his theme is precisely what he himself, when he undertakes to annotate it and bring out its philosophic meaning, thinks greatest. And those elements of invention of which we can scarcely make sense are the very ones to convey, according to him, the most precious and sublime meanings. Listen to him—this is German!
"Elsa is the unconscious, the spontaneous, in the bosom of which the conscious, thoughtful being of Lohengrin aspires to find its deliverance (or, its redemption: Erlösung); but this aspiration itself is traceable to the unconscious, necessary, and spontaneous element in Lohengrin's being, by which he feels his affinity to the being of Elsa. Thanks to the power of this 'unconscious conscience,' as I experienced it myself with Lohengrin, I arrived at a comprehension growing more and more intimate of feminine nature; I succeeded in plunging myself so completely in the feminine being that I expressed it in a manner worthy of that complete penetration in my Elsa the lover. I could not prevent myself from finding the latter absolutely justified in the final explosion of her jealousy, and it was precisely that explosion which for the first time enlightened me thoroughly on the purely human essential quality of love. This woman who, with a clear vision of what she is doing, hurls herself to her doom out of regard for the necessary essential quality of love—who, given up to the feelings of an enthusiastic adoration, wills to go under if she cannot possess her well-beloved in his entirety; this woman who, from the fact of her contact with Lohengrin was destined just so to go under, only by the same stroke to give him over to his destruction: this woman who acts thus and cannot act otherwise, who by the explosion of her jealousy passes from a state of charmed adoration to the essential plenitude of love, and who in going under reveals its essential quality to the man who did not yet understand it: this magnificent woman before whom Lohengrin was to disappear, because from the point of view of his special nature he could not understand her—this woman I had now discovered, and the first arrow that I launched towards the noble object, already foreshadowed but not known, of my discovery, was my Lohengrin, to whose loss I had to consent in order to remain true to my aim of the true feminine, which is to bring redemption to me and the entire world, when before it masculine egoism, even under the noblest form, shall have broken itself, being itself annihilated. Elsa the woman—Woman till now not understood and now understood, that very necessary essential expression of pure sensitive spontaneity—has made of me a thorough revolutionary. She was the spirit of the people, of which I too as artist felt the need, for my redemption."
You do not quite follow? But it is partly that the German language is terrible, with all those amphibious words in whose signification sensation and idea mingle and encroach on each other in a manner so confused that it is practically impossible for us to translate them; for, to the honour of our intellectual and moral civilisation we have not their equivalents in French. In this flux of invertebrate phrases, one conception, which if not clear is at any rate very strongly tendencious, yet allows itself to be discerned. Reason, knowledge, experience, deliberate thought, all the "conscious" and organised forms of our inner life, imprison us in the bonds from which we must "deliver" ourselves by some undefined yielding to the suggestions or intuitions of pure and instinctive sensibility, as man "delivers himself" of himself in the bosom of a woman, delivers himself of egoism in the bosom of love. And sensibility, emancipated from reflection is identified with what Wagner calls the "spirit of the people," an ideal of all innocence, kindness and genius.
There you have something muddy, and moreover disquieting. Let us meet it with healthy French laughter.
III
Despite these explanations by Wagner, Lohengrin (and one must say the same of Tannhäuser and the Phantom Ship) presents itself as a sufficiently simple work. In it the author follows almost line for line the incidents of the old mediæval legend, heightening them with straightforward and sometimes beautiful poetic developments. We could read and re-read the text and suspect none of the extraordinary meanings which his commentary would have us discover in them. But had he thought of putting those meanings in it himself? Did he not introduce them after the work was done? There are very strong reasons for thinking that he did so. The strongest is obtained from a comparison of dates. Lohengrin is three years earlier than the year 1848. The Communication to my friends, which gives the commentary on it, is two years after that date. For anyone who knows Wagner's moral history that explains everything. The revolution of 1848 had a deep and violent influence on him, it caused a real crisis in his ideas. Till then his mental activity had been applied solely to his art; on everything else he had held the average opinions of a peaceable subject of the king of Saxony. Here we find him calling in question all received opinions and beginning I will not say to meditate but to dream about the foundations of civilisation and society. The so-called explanation of the meaning of his first dramas is in reality a manifesto of his new thoughts. But as he became from this moment a passionate theorist, without however, ceasing to be a poet, we find him no longer relegating the expression of his theories to the annotations on his dramas; he propagates them in the dramas themselves. That is the new characteristic of the Nibelungen Ring as compared with Lohengrin.
This new bent of his mind, which henceforth remained for Wagner, subject to slight variations, a definite tendency, has however no originality. It gives no evidence of any personal effort of reflection. It is a beaten track, but he follows it with as much feverish ardour as if he had hewn it out by his own initiative. He embraces his ideas with passion, but he is not in any sense their creator. He received them from the ambient air. In German philosophic and literary circles of the nineteenth century there were no ideas more widely received; the source from which he draws them occupied in German thought of that century the position of an ordinary commonplace. That commonplace consists in what might be called the cult of the primitive, in the identification of the primitive with the ideal. The supposition, or the dream, is that all the creations of thought and of the human soul, all the instutitions of human life, poetry, religion, morality, law, once had a primitive state, a primitive form, superior to all the forms they have subsequently assumed, which is the excelling type by which all the rest must be judged, and to which a return must be made.
Considered in itself this ideology is the cloudiest and vainest in the world; there is nothing corresponding to it in the reality of things. The primitive state is an entity devoid of sense. But what has no sense as an expression of the real may have some as the expression of certain tendencies. And it is easy to recognise in the ideology of the primitive the expression of the ethical and national tendencies, aspirations and pretensions of modern Germany. Up to the end of the eighteenth century Germany had felt herself and recognised herself to be a backwater of the traditional European culture of which the Latin nations received the direct heritage from Greece and Rome. At that moment, for reasons the explanation of which would require a general review of history, a fierce need of emancipation and separation took possession of her; she decided to affirm in all the manifestations of the mind her own independent personality.
Meanwhile she found herself behind other western peoples, especially the French, in civilisation, and had nothing original to set against the old common culture from which it was her pretension to emancipate herself. How was Germany to bring this situation and this ambition into harmony? There was only one way, that she should turn this very backwardness, with all that it implied of comparative rudeness and barbarism, into a boast; that she should interpret her apparent inferiority as the sign of a real superiority. And this, with the aid of her philosophers, she did. Strong in the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of whom one may say that he was to prove, though without intention, the prophet of German national thought, these philosophers furnished her with grounds for depreciation of the acquired perfections which compose an outstanding civilisation, depreciation of the learned classical discipline of reason, depreciation of politeness of taste and manners; thus providing at the same time grounds for admiration of Germany, who had kept closer to nature. This comparison, entirely to their own advantage, marked out their path for the Germans and fired them with enthusiasm. The return to Nature for them meant a return to their own nature. By discarding the artificial training to which they had too long been slaves, they would restore themselves morally to the original and first condition of humanity, and find once more its divine inspirations. Thus was formed the principle of a new culture, the starting point of a new career for philosophy, poetry and criticism. It is true that it was not particularly easy to represent the Primitive, as thus conceived, by clear cut notions. But ought it not of itself to lend itself better to a shadowy intuition? And for the purpose of appealing to this intuition, the German tongue has a resource all her own, the prefix Ur, which placed before the name of anything signifies its absolutely initial form, its remotest genesis: Ur-anfang, the beginning of the beginning: Ur-grund, the reason anterior to all reasons that can be apprehended: Ur-stimmung, the hidden state of soul underlying the state of soul of which we are conscious. Since Volk means in German "people," the German people was Ur-volk, the type of nationality intended and created by Nature, non-artificial.
With the idea of the primitive were closely associated those of the popular (volkstümlich), the spontaneous (unwillkürlich) and the unconscious (unbewusst). These concepts are practically interchangeable. The creations of culture are aristocratic and deliberate creations. The creations of nature are the work of all, they are produced artlessly, by a collective, unconscious and spontaneous generation. With an extraordinary lack of taste German criticism persisted in finding these common characteristics in poetical compositions matured in stages of civilisation so unequal, and belonging to such different antiquities as the Nibelungen, the Bible, and the poems of Homer. They did so simply on the ground that these works were the most ancient in date that had been transmitted to us by the various national literatures to which they belonged.
One might discuss the limits of the influence, in any case very wide, exercised in Germany by these conceptions. But the discussion would be without interest for us, since, so far as Richard Wagner is concerned, this influence was unlimited. It would be impossible to be more subject to it than he was. He was absolutely possessed by it. He may have subsequently discovered other ideas; he may have changed, I will not say his principles (how attribute principles to a mind of this quality, all passion and mobility?) but at least his sentiments, impressions and impulses. His faith in the primitive and its ideal value adapted itself to these successive orientations; by doing so it took on some new tints but was not weakened. If anyone has found in his theoretical writings as many as thirty lines in which the following expressions do not recur ad nauseam, I should like to see them: rein menschlich (purely human), urmenschlich (primitively human), willkürlich and unwillkürlich (deliberate and spontaneous), unbewusst (unconscious). With these words, which do not mean much, Wagner imagines he has said all there is to be said.
It is true that I have traced to the national passions of the German people, if not the very origin of this ideology, at least the unprecedented favour that it enjoyed. And on the other hand the Wagner of 1848 appears to us to be far removed from nationalist preoccupations. He is as he says "utterly revolutionary." There is no contradiction in this. The ideology of German nationalism, and the revolutionary ideology (which must on no account be confused with the positive and definite ideas of reform contained in the programme of such and such a political revolution) start from the same point; they are to say truth the same ideology, considered in two different applications and lending itself with equal facility to either. In what name does Germany attack the tradition of the old European and classical culture? In the name of the inspirations of primitive humanity. In what name does the spirit of revolution attack institutions and laws in general? In the name of primitive rights. The kinship of these two movements of ideas is very close and obvious, and it explains why, among the nations of Europe, Germany is the only one in which the revolutionary spirit has not weakened the national spirit. For the great welders of imperial unity, when they have become the masters of public opinion, it is an undertaking based on nature and the affinities of things to turn the current of one of these ideas into the other, to attract the revolutionary movement into the nationalist movement, and to capture for the profit of the latter the moral energies and forces of sentiment engaged in the first. At the point of history with which we are now concerned, this work is only faintly foreshadowed. The revolutionary spirit which stirs Wagner is still cosmopolitan. But there would not be many changes to make in the terms of his message to convert the writings containing its expression into regular manifestos of proselytic Germanism.
IV
Being the work of the ideologue as much as of the poet, the Nibelungen Ring or Tetralogy generally passes for a very obscure composition. And I am far from saying that its reputation is not well-earned. This drama in four dramas would deserve that opinion even if the author had not put into it other conceptions that are anything but clear besides those which I have just sketched. But if these conceptions provide the Ring with its principle and dominant themes, they do not constitute it entirely. There are several others added, which seem to me to have a relation with those first ones analogous to that of musical variations with their theme. Taken all together they form a sort of universal system embracing the totality of things human and divine. And it is indeed true that some parts of this system are calculated to reduce the most resolute exponent of it to despair.
The Ring, then, is obscure. But is it unique in its obscurity? I think not, and I am astonished that among the aspects it presents this is the only one usually emphasised. Side by side with its symbolic meanings, which themselves are only partially, not wholly, wrapped in darkness, it offers us a story that is very clear and easily understood as soon as one stops looking too eagerly for symbolism. Its clearness is of two sorts according to which of two themes one chooses to study. One is the sort of clearness which is proper to fanciful stories and fairy tales, and one could not ask for anything more vivid, seeing that it satisfies the mind of a little child. The other is somewhat out of range of the young, but is no more difficult to understand than a novel or drama in the fashion of 1830, a novel or drama by Georges Sand or Dumas, such as Lelia, Indiana, Jacques or Antony, inspired by the defence of free love and the rights of nature against the slavery and prejudice of marriage and laws. It does not really aggravate the difficulty, that the characters in this romance instead of being taken from the lower-middle classes of France and Germany are taken from Germanic mythology and prehistoric legend; especially when, from above the clouds or out of the abysm of time they address us in the language in use yesterday or the day before and quite familiar to us. In these two senses the Ring is a very clear work. The fantastic on a vast scale, a chain of wonderful stories put on the stage, and a romance modelled on the old romantic theses of sentimental anarchism, the whole mixed with certain riddles of metaphysical terminology, that for my part I think are only too easily deciphered, such are the elements of which the invention of the Tetralogy is composed.
I will summarise its story in as consecutive a manner as possible.
In the luminous depths of the Rhine, the gnome Alberich pursues the water-sprites who elude him and mock him, springing from rock to rock. But while thus disporting themselves they neglect to guard the divine treasure entrusted to them, comprising Gold, the Ring and the Helm; the Ring is capable of procuring for its possessor the sovereignty of the universe; the Helm is the instrument of all metamorphoses. The dwarf, forced to abandon the pursuit of the fair daughters of the wave, and preferring the joys of greed and power to those of unattainable love, gets possession of these magic objects. Changed into a monster he thinks he is secure against robbers. But he has reckoned without Wotan, the master of the gods, who on the advice of his gossip Loge (the Mercury of Nordic mythology) comes to the cave of Alberich, and defies him to change himself into a toad; the fool immediately does so, and the two robbers take advantage of it to lay hands on the treasure. Why did Wotan covet it? Because he needed it to reward the two giants who had built for him the celestial palace of Valhalla; he had promised them, (the trifler!) as payment, his tempting step-sister, Freia, the Venus of this Olympus; intending of course to send the louts about their business when on the termination of their task they should come to take delivery of the prize. But by the wise counsel of the far-seeing Erda, goddess of the earth, who emerges from the ground as far as her waist to gain his hearing, Wotan renounces this blackguardly action which would be fatal to the race of gods, and in exchange for Freia offers the giants the treasure of Alberich. It is exchanging one knavery for another, robbing a robber.
From this moment Wotan has lost his divine felicity. Does he not carry, inscribed on the handle of his lance the "Runes" of loyalty, the protective maxims of the Laws and Contracts? By violating them he has shattered the foundations of the universal order which depends upon his sovereign will, and how can he atone for this violation, having himself sanctioned it by a new contract? In inextricable trouble of conscience he goes to consult Erda in the bosom of the Earth, and to lend charm to a conversation of which the subject must have been rather vague—judging from what we learn of it from the Wagnerian Tetralogy—he presents her with nine beautiful daughters all at once; these are the Valkyrs, Warrior goddesses, whose mission it is to be to bring back the brave who have fallen in battle and escort them to Valhalla, to the court of the gods. The upshot of the consultation with Erda is that it is beyond the power of Wotan to make amends for the iniquity accomplished; reparation can now only come from the race of men. But the god does not trust himself to the powers of an ordinary man for the re-establishment of the order which his divine follies have destroyed. Though it is hardly playing fair (but is he not a cheat by nature?) he thinks it well to have a hand in the business. He unites himself to a mortal in order to give the earth a breed of exceptional men, of heroes. These are called the Wälsungen. Wotan leaves them to their own resources, and their fate is hard. These sons of heaven and of the light are pursued by the hate of Alberich and his ugly kinsmen and brood, which comprises all beings who are led by cupidity and servile instincts and is consequently very numerous. One of them, Siegmund, finding in the wife of the wicked and brutal Hunding his sister Sieglinde, from whom he was separated while still a child, and who has been married by force, frees her and woos her. This deed of high emprise seems to promise others; for Siegmund is possessor of a wonderful sword, which Wotan (who cannot make up his mind to play straight) had planted in the trunk of a certain ash tree, knowing that his descendant alone would be strong enough to wrench it out. Moreover Siegmund is protected by the Valkyr Brünnhilde, her father's favourite, who is admitted to the secret of his wishes and intimate thoughts. She prepares to support him in his coming fight with Hunding, whose defeat is therefore certain.
But while these things are happening on earth, there are storms in heaven. Strife is muttering in the household of the gods. Wotan has to endure the reproaches of his wife Fricka (the Juno to his Jupiter) a narrow and harsh personality, who asks him if he is now going to make himself the abettor of incest, and ruin by his divine authority the old morality. In vain poor Wotan groans and protests. The Runes are there, he must obey. Inhuman though this task may appear to him, he must accomplish it. At the very moment when Hunding is about to succumb to the blows of Siegmund who is covered by Brünnhilde's shield, he joins the fray, and with the shock of his lance breaks the magic spear of his grandson, and Hunding then deals him a mortal blow. But the clown in turn falls stricken by a glance from the god; it now only remains for the latter to chastise the rebellion of his daughter. She as we understand was only rebellious in having conformed to the real wish of her father, in having acted according to Wotan's will. He prepares to banish her from the race of immortals. But at her entreaties he consents to a modification of the punishment. He will send her to sleep in the midst of the forest and will surround her slumber with a barrier of fire. Brünnhilde shall belong to none but the man who is bold enough to come through the fire, to the man "Who knows not fear." Will he not indeed deserve such a conquest? And will it not be worth while, for the love of this gay fellow, to become a mere mortal?
The unfortunate Sieglinde forsaken in the woods dies while bringing into the world Siegmund's child: Siegfried. She has had the help of the dwarf Mime, a skilful blacksmith, a brother of Alberich; he is still smaller and uglier than he, but far more mischievous. On her death-bed she has entrusted to Mime, with her son, the fragments of the wonderful sword collected beside Siegmund's corpse. Sigefried is reared by Mime, that is to say he is not reared; he grows like a wild plant or a young animal—he knows nothing of society, mankind or laws; he is pure spontaneity, nature itself in its unfettered expansion. Despising Mime, who does not exist in his eyes, he only knows himself and the sky; he therefore possesses instinttively all the virtues, not forgetting muscles of iron; he is intrepid, kind, generous, charming, delicate, chivalrous; all this is as natural to him as breathing. In short, he, Siegfried, is the man expected, the man at once summoned and feared by Wotan, who is to free and redeem the world from the antique laws to which Wotan holds it subject, not without feeling weariness and disgust.
Mime also has views on his nursling, whom he regards as a great simpleton. With arms like his to wield the magic sword, it should be mere child's play to Siegfried to slay the giant Fafner, who in the guise of a hideous and formidable dragon passes his life sprawling over the treasure of which he is now the possessor. Once the feat is accomplished, it will only remain for the cunning dwarf to offer the youth a certain refreshing draught that will send him to sleep for eternity, and to appropriate the Treasure himself. However, Mime is powerless to weld together the fragments of the spear, the metal being too hard for his strength. Siegfried does it with ease; he slays the dragon, despatches Mime who offers him the draught, and while lying stretched on the grass in the forest hears a bird singing, and is quite bewildered to find he understands its song. It is the dragon's blood with which he has been splashed that gives him this power. The bird reveals to him among other secrets the value of the treasure and the existence of the maiden surrounded by fire. Siegfried rushes to undertake this conquest. In vain Wotan presents himself before him to bar the road with his lance. Siegfried cuts it in two, even as Wotan had done to Siegmund.
I hasten over the last part of the story. Siegfried devotes himself to his mission of liberation, and leaves Brünnhilde, to whom he will return from time to time to rest after his exploits. He reaches the court of the princes of the Rhine. One of them, Hagen, the bastard son of Alberich, gives him to drink a philtre of forgetfulness. Brünnhilde fades at once from his memory, and he marries Gutrune, sister of the king Gunther. The latter has heard of the divine maid shut in by a circle of fire, and dreams of making her his wife. Siegfried offers to win her for him and bring her to his court; he will borrow Gunther's features, using the magical power of disguise which the helm gives him. This is accomplished and produces a domestic tragedy. Brünnhilde, Gutrune and Gunther believe themselves betrayed by Siegfried—for he alone (with Hagen) knows his good faith. Hagen slays him out hunting by striking him on the only vulnerable spot in his body, which has been revealed to him by Alberich. Then the truth is divulged to all, and Brünnhilde climbs on to the pyre prepared for the body of her first and true husband. I must not forget to mention that Siegfried strolling on the banks of the Rhine had been importuned by the water-spirites to return to them their treasure, and had readily done so. Thus he had finally made amends for the original iniquity. And that I suppose is the reason why there was nothing left for him but to die. With him die the gods, Valhalla falls, and all are hurled into the waters of the river. Siegfried has existed for no other purpose than to free the universe from the ancient servitude of of Gold and the Laws, and by that very fact belongs to the reign of Gold and the Laws, and must disappear with it, together with the gods who upheld it. He has no justification for existence in a universe in which will shine the spendour of an entirely new law; this Brünnhilde on her pyre announces will be the law of Love. That is what I make of this conclusion, what I seem to discern in the dust of the ruins of Valhalla.
V
The subject matter of these stories was borrowed by Wagner from the old Germanic-Scandinavian poem of the Nibelungen. One can understand the attraction it must have exercised, apart from all philosophic and symbolic aims, on a composer of operas the bent of whose mind led him in the direction of spectacular opera. For such is indeed the trend of Wagner's mind, at any rate such is one of the faculties that constituted his genius; he has a passionate taste for theatrical decoration and the composition of scenic effects; he adores their fascination, and he has a wonderful aptitude for their processes and artifices. Initiated early in all the mysteries of the boards by his step-father, Geyer, who was both an actor and a decorative painter, he was able to apply confidently his rare powers of imagination to scenic inventions: he would have made his fortune as a promoter of pantomimes if he had not been a great musician. Among the attractions which he found in the fable of the Nibelungen, not the least was the quality of the scenic effects to which it lent itself. The under-water Rhine caves, with the gambolling of the water sprites, the palace of the gods in the clouds, the cavern of the Nibelungen and the metamorphoses of Alberich, the rides of the Valkyrs, the combat of Siegfried and the dragon, Brünnhilde sleeping surrounded by a rampart of flames, the crumbling of Valhalla and its fall through space, all these combinations of marvels and landscape, of magic and nature, lent themselves to rich and wondrous imagery mounted on cardboard and wire, and promised rich entertainment to the eyes of spectators.
It is true that we French have also had spectacular opera, under the name of opera-ballet, and the works of the greatest and most exquisite of our musicians, Rameau, belong partly to this class. But the element of the marvellous in Rameau's operas is taken from classical mythology, that is to say from the most imaginative and most artistic nation in the world, from the inventions of the greatest poets of antiquity, Hesiod, Homer, Vergil, Ovid; it is permeated throughout with humanity, grace, irony and wit. The traditional figures and images by which it is represented are full of style, having been modelled by the genius of the Italian painters of the renaissance. The marvellous element in Wagner is taken, and taken raw, from a barbarous literature. It has indeed its own savour and colour; it is by no means lacking in a certain heavy humour. But it has a character of exaggeration and childishness, and the result is that for French taste (and we have I take it no reason for abjuring in honour of Wagner a taste which is our pride) it would be more in place at the Châtelet theatre, where we take our children, than in works that aim at grandeur of style and nobility of moral impression. We should take far more pleasure in it did not the author by mixing philosophy with it ask us to contemplate such scenes in a more serious spirit than is possible for us who are not Germans. This combination of philosophy and machinery, of the abstract and string-pulling, makes us want to laugh. But Frenchmen and Germans do not laugh at the same things. The fantastic element when it represents something philosophic or historic is regarded gravely by the Germans, especially if it is on a "colossal" scale. It makes them think.
Let us recognise, however, that all this decorative part of Wagner's operas has not merely a perceptible attraction. It has also an element of poetic value if not in itself at any rate in the allurements that it holds out to the richest inspirations of the musician. Wagner as a musician excels in painting great landscapes; or more exactly in evoking for the imagination the hidden springs and profound rhythms of the natural forces manifested in the powerful undulations of a river's volume, the graceful or majestic course of the clouds, the murmurs of the trees, the play of light and shadow. His fantastic scenes are developed in the midst of these phenomena of nature, which may be said to take no less important a part in them than the characters themselves.
Yet it is very necessary that the latter should hold their own place in the scheme. Whatever influence picturesque or musical considerations may have had on the turn given by Wagner to the story of the Nibelungen, he was bound, since he was making a drama out of it, to be pre-occupied with representing human nature. But to what extent could this preoccupation he reconciled with the double intention guiding the artist's pen, to display a scene of fantasy and to symbolise ideas? Characters who must at one and the same time take part in marvellous deeds of fable, and incarnate abstract ideas, surely cannot possibly preserve to any extent worth mentioning the liberty of feeling and thinking like natural beings. Between these two obligations, of which the second is no less mechanical than the first, the margin left for the manifestation of life and human truth is likely to be very much reduced.
It is not reduced to nothing. There are in the Tetralogy a few expressions of real humanity, some natural touches drawn from life. Fricka really does resemble a jealous wife, domineering and of narrow outlook, and her domestic scenes with Wotan are sometimes good comedy—not divine, but middle-class. There is a spirit of pleasantry in the dialogues of Mime and Siegfried, which though very Germanic does does not lack wit or relief; they have the moralist's touch. Siegried is agreeable, if one puts aside the anarchic signification of his personality; but the author too has been careful not to let that be explained to him. This young Hercules charms not only by the splendour of his physical youth, but also by a certain child-like quality of heart. Brünnhilde is tiresome, with her final prophesy, to which nothing led up in her career as wild amazon, artless lover of even as betrayed wife, for she was only that in a roundabout way, and the experience cannot have taught her much about humanity. Apart from this point, why should this Sleeping Beauty be any more unwelcome in the Tetralogy than in a fairy story by Perrault? Take them all round, all these figures are pretty elementary. To us these persons give the effect of elements quite as much as persons. There remains, it is true, Wotan, the complexity of whose thoughts and sentiments might make a real moral personality and introduce into the drama a really human interest.
Poor Wotan! His title of monarch of the gods, his lance, the mystery of his single eye, confer on him a seeming majesty. But strip him of these external attributes, and what a fall is there! From beginning to end his role is nothing but one long lament. And what does he lament? Some misfortune that has befallen him? Not at all, but his faults, and especially the fundamental irresolution of his mind, which knows not how to will or to refuse. In a mere mortal this complaining would be wearisome. Is it less so in a god? One may certainly say that it is very incongruous on his lips. Treated in a humorous or satiric vein the character might be excellent. This upholder of order who proclaims himself weary and disgusted with order, and who yet defends it by his acts while undermining it by his words, this monarch who is constantly saying or insinuating to those whom he believes capable of strong action, "Overthrow me! But take care how you go about it, it's not easily done!" who secretly puts the means of doing so in their way, and who when the scheme fails shows himself merciless in repression from fear of his conservative wife—this is a type that might be very successful if done in the style of Aristophanes. It is certainly not from this point of view that Wagner has drawn him; he has made up his mind to attribute greatness to him, a greatness superior to that of gods and kings who believe in the principles of their trade as rulers and who practise it with conscience and conviction. But why should I pretend not to understand? Wotan is indeed great from the point of view of anarchist philosophy. For such a philosophy what is next greatest after the open and declared enemy of Law? The guardian of the laws who applies them while groaning over them.
To grasp, as far as possible, Wagner's intention we must understand Law in the most general sense—political laws, social laws, laws of morality, intelligence and thought, rules, institutions, discipline of every kind; these are what Wotan personifies, these are what must perish with the power and reign of Wotan. All this general body of principles of order Wagner sums up somewhere in one word. He calls it "the Monumental." He desires and foretells the crumbling away of the Monumental, and contrasts its detestable fixity with what, in a jargon which has unfortunately passed from Germany to France, he calls "Life." Like all romantic and revolutionary natures, he is incapable of understanding that the "Order" which offers itself and acts as a destroyer of living forces is not Order, but Routine; that real Order is the support and mainstay of spontaneous energies, and that the latter if not guided and kept in their channel by fixed elements are doomed to sterility and wretched waste. This error shows the violence of impulses where reason is weak. But what am I saying? There is one sphere in which Wagner is as far as possible from committing this error. That sphere is music. There he is not at all inclined to despise the Monumental; on the contrary, he glorifies it, he declares himself a thorough conservative, and never has a professor of harmony, counterpoint or composition preached the respect and sanctity of rules with such decisive energy. The fact is that music corresponded to the strong side of his brain.
If we wished to probe further into the dark places of the Tetralogy, we should have to scrutinise the allusions which occur in it to the previous phase of Wotan's existence. But upon what a confused region we should have to enter! It appears that before Wotan became master of the world, the founder and guardian of the laws, he too had lived the free life of Love—unfortunately he wearied of it, and this fatigue is symbolised in a ridiculous fashion by the quarrels of the elderly divine household. He conceived an ambition for Power, a desire for Gold and for Knowledge. To satisfy the last he sought the help of Erda, who is primitive and eternal Wisdom (Ur-Weisheit). But by doing this he worked for his own ruin. Power, Gold and Knowledge are the joint agents of destruction, the inseparable powers of death. Here let us recognise in a peculiarly muddled and deliquescent form the absurdities of Rousseau's discourse against civilisation. And that we may ourselves limit discreetly our thirst for knowledge, I mean rather our desire to interpret and reconcile all these ideologies, let us reflect that the thread of ideas is not Wagner's only guide in the world of ideas. He is guided quite as much by considerations of the picturesque. If the arrangement of some of his episodes is prompted by reasons of symbolism, others are what they are only for reasons of scenic picturesqueness, but take on a symbolic meaning after completion. This point shows the child-like simplicity and lack of common-sense of those critics who enquire too seriously what were Wagner's thoughts. The fairy story of the Ring is wrapped in clouds, some arising from the author's intentions, others emanating from the story itself.
VI
The care with which I have sought to distinguish the various elements of invention in this huge work will enable me to speak with brevity of Tristan and Parsifal, which were created after the same formula. These two dramas, also, offer us a blend of the abstract with fiction, the union of a system and a fable.
The action of Tristan is wrapped in a poetry whose charm is at once heady and lugubrious. The frame within which it is developed, the circumstances of each scene add to the tragedy of guilty passion a sort of magical effect in which may be recognised the old Celtic imagination that invented this story of love and death. The vessel at sea, the fond tender avowal made over the symbolic abyss of the waters at the very mouth of the harbour where the royal bridegroom, already betrayed, awaits his bride, the meeting by night in the park, where far away are heard the muffled sounds of hunting calls, the torch waved from the top of the tower as a danger signal, Tristan on his bed of pain spending his days looking out to sea for the white sail that will tell him of Yseult's return,—it would be idle to deny the poignancy and strength of the hold on our feelings exercised by all these images, animated as they are by powerful and pulsing music. It is wiser to point out their dangers, and ask whether the extreme attractions of this poetic atmosphere do not serve as a deceptive wrapping for contents that are by no means proportionately valuable.
Let us consider by themselves the themes of the action. There is one of these that is of low quality, one might almost call it brutal; by repercussion it lowers the quality of all the others. This is the philtre, the love potion poured out for Tristan and Yseult by Brangaine. True, it is not this potion which gives birth to their passion. The natural movement of their hearts and their youth was already throwing them into each other's arms. But sooner than yield to it, sooner than commit a triple felony against a husband who is his king, and who has entrusted to his honour the protection of his beloved wife, Tristan, and with him Yseult drawn in to share his sacrifice, would prefer to die. A violent solution, and very short, so to speak.—An infinitely preferable one, I will not say from the moral point of view, but from the point of view of art, which would gain from it far greater richness, real pathos and variety, would be the struggle of will against desire. But it is not even this solution which is adopted. It is a worse one. Inspired by a criminal devotion, the nurse Brangaine substitutes for the poison prepared for the joint suicide the irresistible love philtre. These noble lovers, imagining they are drinking death from the cup, drink delirium. When they put down the empty cup they have lost their moral liberty, that is to say their moral grandeur itself. They step down from the ship drunk and staggering with passion. They are no longer masters of themselves. They become frenzied victims of hallucination. Their souls undergo a terrible simplification.
And the philtre not only delivers them over to this fury of a passion whose sinful character they are no longer capable of realising. It has another effect on them, not less inhuman but far more extraordinary; it gives them over without any intellectual protection to the extreme suggestions of Schopenhauer's philosophy, or at least the philosophy of Schopenhauer as interpreted by Wagner. The reading of this philosopher had marked an epoch in his life; no sooner had he made his acquaintance than he swore by no other guide; from that time he never ceased to mingle his teaching with everything, to resolve all kinds of problems after his principles. But what is most singular, and what gives one of the most characteristic signs of the gulf that exists between German and French natures, is that Schopenhauer's ideas set their stamp upon the late ardent and painful love passion which he experienced in his forty-third year, and which inspired him to write Tristan. There worked in him, in his sentiments and sensations, a combination of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, and amorous delirium which seems to us far from natural, and yet it acquired an explosive force in this Germanic soul. Schopenhauer's morality counsels the annihilation of desire, promising us as the goal of this effort entrance into some undefined state of divine slumber, some kind of pantheistic paradise in which all the movements of life expire and individuality disappears. And it would seem at first sight that nothing could be more opposed to this passion for the void than the exaltation of love.
But neither Wagner nor his heroes feel it thus. For Tristan and his beloved, love's supreme cry is a summons to the void; the expiration of desire in death is the very object of desire carried to its paroxysm. And this is not as one might suppose a sudden flash of imagination quickly dying out, that crosses their brains under the stroke of sensual madness. It is a steadily maintained idea. It is their one idea. It is the theme of their outpourings. They turn it over and over in all its aspects, which are terribly lacking in variety. They shout to "Day," that is to say Life, to be gone, and to "Night," which is the Kingdom of Death, to descend upon them and wrap them round. They dream of the delights of perfect union by the annihilation of individual conscience. They analyse these delights with unrestrained and minute dialectic; they harp on them with a kind of incandescent monotony.
I would not be thought insensible to the charms of the love music in Tristan. I am, I imagine, as much touched by it as anyone. It has enchanting passages, in which the musician's inspiration is softened and humanised, in which the breath of night and the beatings of the heart seem to join in giving out a melody full of tenderness. But ought these celebrated passages to make us forget all those others quivering with a strident and sterile frenzy, that makes up for the eloquence of which it is incapable by the fury of repeated blows? Should they conceal from us the general spirit of the work? Oh, that spirit! let us not hesitate to reject it, to banish it far, very far, from us; for we are the children of humaner races who have ever found in natural healthiness and happy fulness of heart the true sources of beauty.
As regards Parsifal, its Christian aspect has caused the novelty of this drama as a feature in Wagner's work to be much exaggerated. Wagner composed a large part of it out of his oldest ideas. In it we meet again the Knights of the Grail, who had already inspired not only his Lohengrin, but also a certain apocalyptic vision of universal history, a cloudy legend of the Ages (the Wibelungen) outlined immediately after 1848, of which the Holy Grail forms the mystic centre. And what is Parsifal but Siegfried, a Siegfried chaste and ascetic, it is true, but still deriving from his candour as a "primitive," and from his childlike and utter ignorance of laws and men the virtue which makes him a redeemer? The data of Parsifal when considered closely appear the most incoherent that Wagner ever collected, and it is only the theatrical beauty of the decorative images accompanying them that save this incoherence from being unbearable when the work is performed. We are not forgetting that the music of the religious scenes in Parsifal will remain among the finest creations of universal art. But that is no sort of reason for respecting what calls for derision, or if you prefer it a yawn. I mean the ideology, the spurious hermetism of this work. This hermetism is nothing but an impressionism, often puerile, putting on airs of deep thought. It is concentrated in the figure of the enigmatic Kundry, over whom the simplicity of some commentators has exhausted its efforts, without their perceiving that the ease with which a hundred meanings each more elusive than the last can be found in Kundry must have some explanation, and an unfortunate one. Kundry is the amorphous conglomeration under one proper name of a thousand confused scraps of sensations, abstractions and dreams. It must be noted that already in some parts of Tristan, Wagner had adopted a form of utterance that does not seek to have any particular sense, but aims only at the voluptuously vague impression engendered by a certain mellowness of sound in the words and syllables. Kundry is created by the same process. And it was this aspect of Wagner that exercised some attraction over our symbolist school of 1890.
VII
There is one idea that one finds again and again in all Wagner's works; it occupies a dominant place in them and forms, one might say, the leit-motif of his dramatic poetry. That idea is "redemption." In all his operas someone or something is redeemed, and the principal character is the redeemer, male or female. The fidelity of Senta redeems the Flying Dutchman from the curse which constrained him to wander eternally upon the seas unable to die. The pious death of Elizabeth redeems Tannhäuser from the servitude of debauchery. Siegfried redeems the old world from the reign of the Laws and from the tyranny of Gold. Lohengrin, Elsa, Parsifal are redeemers.
The persistence of this theme has struck several critics, who with infectious gravity have drawn the attention of their contemporaries to "the problem of redemption in the work of Richard Wagner." Thereupon they have embroidered all kinds of comments. But these comments seem to me quite wide of the mark, and I am not convinced of the need of this gravity. Why? Because I do not see the problem. There are in fact two alternatives. Either Wagner has only applied (as in Tannhäuser and up to a certain point in Parsifal) the Christian idea of the Redemption, and in that case the question is no more bound up with his work than with all other literary works written in the last nineteen hundred years in which this dogma is postulated: or on the other hand we have to deal, as in the Nibelungen Ring, with some romantic, socialistic, humanitarian, and necessarily confused transposition of the Christian idea; in that case there is no problem, only a tangle. Wagner as artist, as a being of exceptional sensibility, feels with peculiar keenness the social evils that belong to modern humanity. But the notion which he forms of them is a hundred times more clouded and more puerile than what may be observed in the most unbridled French visionaries. It fittingly corresponds with the dream of a mystic revelation rising from the depths of nature to bring to these evils their remedy.
Visions like these have lost their power to attract. But there exists to-day a widespread tendency which is only too closely related to the most general tendency of Wagner's ideas, though it presents itself under more insidious, learned and subtle forms. I refer to a certain contempt for reason, thought, and experience, a certain pretension to eliminate from the formation of human opinions and beliefs, from the creation of works of the mind, the share taken by operations of reason and the guidance of criticism. All Wagner's written work breathes this feeling. What is it that gives all these redeemers of either sex their virtue? What is it that makes them agents of regeneration and salvation, revealers of truth? It is their ignorance, the fact that they are all instinct and sensibility, that they are "life" and pure spontaneity, with no element of knowledge. We have heard enough harping on this strain underlying more involved expressions. I am still waiting for those who take pleasure in it to show us or produce, in any art form they please, anything successful, consistent, and not stillborn, that is not based on the calculations of strong and close reasoning.
This is the most irritating aspect of the Wagnerian ideology.
I have called Wagner's works dramas, but the term applies to their external appearance rather than to their nature and true quality. There is no drama where there is not living and active humanity, and I think I have shown that there is little humanity in Wagner's dramatic inventions. Take away from them all the rubbish of symbolic significations, foggy abstractions obscuring ideas that are more childishly simple than is usually supposed, and what remains of these strange compositions ought to be called by its true name, poetic fantasies. They remind one of frescoes or rather of moving tapestries that unroll before our view natural and fantastic scenes of a heavy and expensive colouring, figures of strong and outstanding picturesqueness, but almost without life. This essentially German art form has its charm; it is free from vulgarity. There is no error of taste in taking pleasure in it, so long as it is only a petty pleasure, such as we might feel in some wonderful Nuremberg doll, which no Frenchman could possibly confuse with a statue by Houdon. I am considering these picturesque and poetic elements apart from the music which lends them lustre and wraps them in its brilliant charm. We shall now have to bring them again in contact with the music, as one brings together the terms of a problem after analysing them separately. It is for musical criticism to say to what extent and in what sense Wagner's music transfigures the themes of his poems. But if his music is of the same nature as his poetry, it may be presumed that in the marvels it has succeeded in rendering real, the enthusiasm of a very powerful German imagination for rich theatrical effects has generally speaking had more share than the pure inspirations of the heart and the subtleties of the mind.