VII
A NOTE ON RICHARD WAGNER
I
If it had been hinted a quarter of a century ago that in Richard Wagner’s veins there flowed Semitic blood, roaring laughter would have streaked critical Europe. The race Wagner reviled in speech and pamphlet—although he never disdained its financial generosity—the hated Jew, daring to claim kinship with him, might have set in motion the mighty spleen of the master, and perhaps the world would be the poorer for another Das Judenthum in der Musik. Wagner’s hatred of the chosen race is historical. Benefits ever forgotten, he never lost a chance to gibe at Meyerbeer, to flout some wealthy Hebrew banker. Yet gossips have been at work subjecting the Wagnerian pedigree to keen scrutiny. There is a well-defined legend at Bayreuth, at Leipsic, that Wagner was the natural son and not the stepson of Ludwig Geyer, his mother’s second husband. Of course this is not so, for it would make Wagner a half Jew, the actor Geyer being of Jewish descent. Wagner, they say, resembled him more in features, tastes and temperament than he did his putative father, the worthy police magistrate.
A musical authority, whose name I withhold by request, called my attention to the curious fact that the portrait of Wagner’s father does not hang upon the walls of Wahnfried. Perhaps as Geyer was the father Wagner best remembered he did him the honor of placing his picture in juxtaposition with his mother’s in the Bayreuth home. There is no other sound evidence that may be pressed into service for this fugitive theory. Friedrich Nietzsche, after the rupture with Wagner, openly called him a Jew born in the Judengasse—the ghetto of Leipsic—and this latter assertion happens to be true. Another hot-headed hunter of degeneration, Heinrich Pudor, makes the same statement.
In critical circles there seems to be a disposition to avoid challenging these facts for they asperse the memory of a good mother. Mr. Krehbiel laughs at the story as silly, summoning as witness the fact that Wagner’s elder brother resembled him in a striking manner. I place little credence in the rumor, believing it to have originated with Nietzsche and revived later by Pudor. There is much in Richard Wagner’s polemical writings—his almost insane hatred of the Jews—and in the sensuous glitter and glow of his music that suggests the imagination of the Oriental. Some of it is certainly unlike any music made by a German—indeed, to me, with their vibratile rhythms, their titanic and dramatic characterization, the Wagner plays suggest the Celt, for the Celt, as Matthew Arnold wrote, has natural magic in his poetic speech, and magical in their quality are the utterances of Wagner.
“Was Wagner German at all?” asks Nietzsche, a rabid hater of the Christ idea, who first threw Schopenhauer overboard, only to do the same for his Wagner worship. He continues: “We have some reasons for asking this. It is difficult to discern in him any German trait whatsoever. Being a great learner he has learned to imitate much that is German—that is all. His character itself is in opposition to what has hitherto been regarded as German—not to speak of the German musician! His father was a stage-player named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an Adler—Geyer and Adler are both names of Jewish families. What has hitherto been put into circulation as the ‘Life of Wagner’ is fable convenue, if not worse. I confess my distrust of every point which rests solely on the testimony of Wagner himself. He had not pride enough for any truth whatsoever about himself; nobody was less proud; he remained, just like Victor Hugo, true to himself even in biographical matters—he remained a stage-player.”
Naturally, all that Nietzsche writes about Wagner may be challenged, although he is fairer to the great music-dramatist than Max Nordau. Nordau really borrowed Nietzsche’s denunciatory thunder, and then abused the sadly stricken philosopher for having assailed the musician. Altogether a very Nordau-like proceeding.
I should like to believe, but cannot, that Schopenhauer ruined Wagner. This is one of Nietzsche’s favorite contentions. The fact is, the artist was stronger than the philosopher in Wagner. The reflective man in him was generally overcome by the man poetic. Witness Tristan and Isolde, which was composed, as Wagner confessed, in direct defiance of his pet theories. Even the pessimism of the Ring never crowds out the dramatic power of the work. Who would wish to cut from Die Meistersinger Hans Sachs’ beautiful monologue? It is the passing of a cloud over the shining sun. All thoughtful humans are pessimistic at times, but the strong man and woman soon tire of the cui bono and find work near at hand. Wagner was caught in the currents of his time, though he really escaped many metaphysical vortices. That he was any more a Christian than a Schopenhauerian at the end of his life I doubt. Wagner was primarily an artist and, as an artist, could not help seeing the artistic possibilities in the superb ceremonial of the Roman Catholic Church; could not help feeling the magnificent story of the Christ; could not escape being touched by the beauties of pity, of redemption, and by the Quietist doctrines of Buddhism filtered through the hard brain of Arthur Schopenhauer. All these elements he blended dexterously in Parsifal, and we know with what result.
Keep in your mind that Wagner the artist was a greater man than Wagner the vegetarian, Wagner the anti-vivisectionist, Wagner the revolutionist, the Jew hater, the foe of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, and greater than Wagner the philosopher. It is a mistaken partisanship that attaches to his every word deep significance. He dearly loved paradox, and his versatility was such that he wore many masks. Not that I doubt his sincerity, but the enormously emotional nature of the man, his craving for artistic excitement, his agitated life often led him to write and speak in misleading terms. Wagner was not a Christian; he was not a passive Buddhist—far from it; he was no lover of the Jewry, and his pessimism, like Schopenhauer’s, was thin skinned. Both men were desperately in earnest and both enjoyed life—one in execrating it, the other in works of beauty.
II
I have often wondered where Wagner’s religion, his art, his metaphysics, in a word his working theory of life, would have led him, had he lived longer. That he had, dimly floating in his extraordinary brain, the outlines of a greater work than Parsifal we learn in his correspondence with Liszt. He died with the Trilogy incomplete, for Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal, and The Penitents, (Die Büsser) were to have been this Trilogy of the Will to Live, Compassion and Renunciation.
Wagner was going to the East with many other Old World thinkers. That negation of the will to live, so despised by his former admirer Nietzsche, had gripped him after he forsook the philosophy of Feuerbach for Schopenhauer in 1854. He eagerly absorbed this Neo-Buddhism and at the time of his death was fully prepared to accept its final word, its bonze-like impassivity of the will, and sought to translate into tone its hopelessly fatalistic spirit, its implacable hatred of life in the flesh.
That the world has lost a gigantic experiment may not be doubted, but that it has lost the best of Wagner I greatly question. In Parsifal his thematic invention is not at its high-water mark, despite his wonderful mastery of technical material, the marvellous moulding of spiritual stuff. Even if Parsifal is almost an abstraction, is not that “howling hermaphrodite,” as Hanslick called Kundry, a real flesh and blood creation? It is with no fears of Wagner’s power of characterization failing that we should concern ourselves, for the gravity of the possible situation lies in the fact that Wagner had drifted into the philosophical nihilism, the intellectual quietism which is the sweet, consoling pitfall of the thinker who wanders across the borderline of Asiatic religious ideals. The glimmer of Christianity in Parsifal seems like the last expiring atom of Wagner’s faith in the value of Christ. That he used the church in the dramatic sense cannot be doubted, and that in the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church he found grateful material, which he employed so deftly yet so reverently in Parsifal, is also incontrovertible; but in Wagner’s Christianity I place no faith.
He went to the roots of Christianity, its Buddhistic roots, and there sought philosophical consolation. Nietzsche’s attack on Wagner’s supposed religious predilections is wide of the mark; no one was less likely to indulge in sacerdotal sentimentalism than Richard of the giant brain.
The speculation is a fascinating one, especially when you remember that he changed the title of his projected work from The Victors (Die Sieger) to The Penitents. First spoken of in 1856, the name was altered a quarter of a century later. Wagner had encountered Oriental philosophy in the interval, and its mysticism had become a vital, integral part of his strenuous intellectual and emotional life.
It is not safe yet to pass judgment on this emotional product of the age; Wagner carried within his breast the precious eucharist of genius. In music he is the true Zeit Geist.
III
It was a German critic of acuity who said of the music of Tristan and Isolde, “The thrills relieve each other in squads.” Wagner certainly touched the top-notch of his almost boundless imaginings in this supreme apotheosis of lyric ecstasy. A scorching sirocco for the soul are the tremendous blasts of this work. Nothing has ever been written that is comparable with it in intensity, and it is safe to predict that future generations will not hear its double. Wagner declared that when he wrote it he could not have composed it otherwise; it is full blown with his imperfections, his glaring excellences, his noble turgidity, his lack of frugality, his economy of resource, his dazzling prodigality, his riotous tonal debaucheries, his soggy prolixity and his superhuman fascinations.
All that may be urged against Wagner’s ways I am, perforce, compelled to acknowledge. He is all that his musical enemies say, and much more; but how wilted are theories when in the full current of this tropical simoon! I have steeled myself repeatedly when about to listen to “Tristan and Isolde” and summoned up all my prejudices, bade my feeble faculties perform their task of analysis, but am breathless and vanquished before the curtain rises.
What boots it, then, to gird critically at an art, a devilish, demoniac art that enchants, thrills and makes mock of all spiritual theories about the divine in music? Here it is no longer on the heights as in Beethoven’s realm. The philosophy of Schopenhauer hurled at your head in the pessimistic dualism of the famous love scene availeth not to stem the turbulent, sensuous torrent. Tristan and Isolde is the last word, the very deification of carnalism. Call it what pretty titles you may, wreathe the theme with the garlands of poetic fancy, the stark naked fact stares at you—a strong, brutal, fact. It is the man and the woman, nothing more, nothing less. The love potion does but unloosen their tongues, for both were mute lovers before Brangäne juggled with the fatal brew. Not in the sacred writings of the Jews, not in Shakespeare, are expressed such frenetic passions. The songs of Solomon are mildly Virgilian in comparison. This distinction must be conferred upon Wagner; he is the greatest poet of passion the world has yet encountered. As fiercely erotic as Swinburne, with Swinburne’s matchless art, he has a more eloquent, a more potent instrument than words; he has the orchestra that thunders, surges and searches out the very heart of love. A mighty master, but a dangerous guide.
I am not an ardent admirer of all the Wagnerian play-books. There is much that is puerile, much that is formless, and many scenes are too long. It was Louis Ehlert who said that nothing but the sword would suffice, and an heroic sword, to lop off superfluities. To the argument that much lovely music is bound to be sacrificed by such a summary proceeding, let the answer be—sacrifice it. “The play’s the thing;” dramatic form must come first, else the whole Wagnerian framework topples groundward.
If you consider, you will discover that Tristan is not the protagonist of this fiery soul drama. He accepts the potion in the first act, gets stabbed in the second, and tears the bandage from his wound in the third. Isolde is the more absorbing figure. It is her enormous passion that breaks the barricades of knightly honor and reserve. She it is who extinguishes the torch that signals Tristan. She summons him with her scarf; she meets him more than half-way; she dares all, loses and gains all.
She is not timid, nor does she believe in prudent measures. Shakespeare in Juliet, Ibsen in Hedda Gabler, never went such lengths. I think that to Wagner must be awarded the honor of discovering the new woman. Isolde’s key is high-pitched from the outset. And with what superb wrath she cries:
“Destroy this proud ship, swallow its shattered fragments and all that dwells upon it; the floating breath I will give you, O winds, as a reward”! And Wagner has wedded this dramatic invocation to magnificent music.
The composer often, in the intense absorption of creation, forgot the existence of the Kantean categories of space and time. It requires strong nerves to sit out Tristan and Isolde with unflagging interest; not because it bores, but because it literally drains you of your physical and psychical powers. The world seems drab after this huge draught that Wagner proffers us in an exquisitely carved and chased chalice, but one far too large for average human capacity. He has raised many degrees the pitch of passion, and this work, which I think is his most perfect flowering, sets the key for all future composers.
Let Nordau call us degenerates and our geniuses mattoids, we can endure it. We are the slaves of our age, and we adore Wagner because he moves us, thrills and thralls us. His may not be the most spiritual art, but it is the most completely fascinating.