Musical Studies

by Ernest Newman

II

Here, then, is a philosophy of life which, in the hands of the artist, aims at creating a new type of "static" drama, in which speech shall give way, as far as possible, to suggestion, incident and action to the immediate revelation of soul-states. Though the drama is to deal with real life in a way that Maeterlinck would regard as most rigorously real, there is to be a progressive withdrawal from most of the points that the average man regards as the essence of reality. In the first place, naked facts and violent actions are to be passed over, as not necessary for the communication to us of the essential thing that the dramatist has to say; in the second place, mere words are no longer to be looked upon as indispensable intermediaries between the thought and the expression. Now all this, in its main features, finds a very close parallel in the work and the arguments of Wagner. Let us look for a moment at his theories as they figure in actual practice, taken out of the wordy metaphysic in which he delighted to obscure them.

The drama and the novel represent an attempt to fire the reader with a certain emotion that has already flamed up in the writer. The tragedy of King Lear, for example, aims at inspiring in us a sentiment of pity for an old man who is shattered by filial ingratitude. Othello aims at enlisting our sympathies for an affectionate man and wife whose happiness is broken to pieces, partly by misunderstanding, partly by diabolical machinations. There are innumerable other points in the plays, but these are the great central forces. These are what moved Shakespeare to the composition of the dramas. These are the ideas from which he started; and these are the ideas that finally remain with us when we have seen or read the plays. But owing to the clumsy, intractable nature of the material in which he works, the dramatist can stimulate this central idea or feeling in us only by a most roundabout process. He cannot plunge at once into his subject. He must commence at a point far distant from that to which he wishes to lead us, and then work up to it gradually. He cannot adequately communicate an emotion without unfolding before our eyes the long and complex scenes or set of circumstances that give rise to this emotion. He cannot confine himself to the characters and the events that make up the real drama; he has to illustrate these—to draw sparks from them, as it were—by the impact of minor incidents and persons. In a word, he has to fill us with a multiplicity of more or less superfluous feelings before he can communicate to us the feeling that is really essential.

In music all this is altered. (The reader will of course remember that I am expounding Wagner.) There being no distinction between the feeling and the expression, no bar between the emotion and the speech, the musician can plunge at once into the very heart of his subject. Further, he need never leave the heart of it; he can devote all his energies to elucidating the really necessary factors; he has no need to waste half his time in showing, from the description of extraneous things, how such and such a situation has come about, or how a man comes to feel in such and such a way. It takes half-an-hour's reading of the Tristan legend, or any poem on the subject, before we feel the atmosphere of tragedy closing round us, or know precisely why it should come. In Wagner's opera, not only is the fact that there is a tragedy suggested in the first bars of the music, but the very tint and spiritual quality of the tragedy are painted for us at once. All through the work, again, we live in the very centre of the metropolis of that territory of emotion—love, grief, and pity—to which the legend and the poets have to guide us by devious and frequently uninteresting paths. We see Tristan and Isolde in the first bar and in the last; we never leave them for a moment. Thus not only does the musician draw us at once to the point he wishes us to reach, but his independence of all the scaffolding necessary to the poet gives him more freedom of development. He can wring from the souls of his characters the last bitter juice of their emotions. Wagner himself was fond of pointing out the gradual growth of his art in these respects. In the Flying Dutchman he tried "to keep the plot to its simplest features; to exclude all useless detail, such as the intrigues one borrows from common life." The plot of Tannhäuser will be found "far more markedly evolving from its inner motives"; while "the whole interest of Lohengrin consists in an inner working within the heart of Elsa, involving every secret of the soul." Wagner's aim was to shake himself clear of the wearisome mass of detail that, in the poetical drama, is necessary to show the "whence and wherefore" of each feeling. "I too, as I have told you," he writes, "felt driven to this 'whence and wherefore'; and for long it banned me from the magic of my art. But my time of penance taught me to overcome the question. All doubt at last was taken from me, when I gave myself up to the Tristan. Here, in perfect trustfulness, I plunged into the inner depth of soul-events, and from out this inmost centre of the world I fearlessly built up its outer form. A glance at the volume of this poem will show you at once that the exhaustive detail-work which an historical poet is obliged to devote to clearing up the outward bearing of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, I now trusted myself to apply to these latter alone. Life and death, the whole import and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul. The whole affecting Action comes about for the reason only that the inmost soul demands it, and steps to light with the very shape foretokened in the inner shrine."

Here the analogy with Maeterlinck's theory becomes evident. Both men despise the cruder, external, historical, active facts on which the drama has felt itself till now compelled to rely; both aim at a subtle form of drama in which the soul-states shall be the first and last thing. There is more in life, they say, than conscious reason; it is the innermost processes of the soul that we desire to have laid bare to us in drama. This reflection led Wagner to the choice of the myth as the best material on which to work. "I therefore believed," he writes, "I must term the 'mythos' the poet's ideal Stuff—that native nameless poem of the Folk, which throughout the ages we ever meet new handled by the great poets of periods of consummate culture; for in it there almost vanishes the conventional form of man's relations, merely explicable to abstract reason, to show instead the eternally intelligible, the purely human." This is not clarity itself, but what Wagner means is that in music as he conceives it you come face to face with the essential truth of things at once, without having to make a wearisome journey through a mass of unimportant detail, as you have to do in the novel and the poetical drama before you can get to the heart of the emotion. And this is quite true, so far as it goes. If you conceive life like the mystic or his soul's brother the musician, if you prefer the general to the particular, the vague to the definite, the suggested to the spoken, you will naturally seek a medium that shall allow free passage to your emotion in its broadest form. Like Wagner, you will not want to stop and explain for half-an-hour who Tristan and Isolde were, who were the people round them, what the causes were that led to their tragic end, and so on. You will want to get to the centre of your subject at once; you abandon all attempts at demonstration and plunge at once into expression. And if, with Maeterlinck, it seems quite unimportant to know the names and histories of two or three given men and women, the scenes in which they live, the commonplace routine of their daily lives—if you only want to know how destiny is dealing with them, what bitter-sweet emotion is being distilled from their souls in some quiet hour that is pregnant with vital meaning—then you will pass over, like the musician, every detail that seems to you unimportant, and concentrate yourself on that supremely fateful hour. You will not depict anything happening, because it is not the event that is the essential thing, but the soul-states that are born of the event. To Maeterlinck, as to Wagner, the "purely human"—the whole man, the essential man—lies deeper than what is "merely explicable to abstract reason." "A new, indescribable power," he says, in speaking of Ibsen's Master Builder, "dominates this somnambulistic drama. All that is said therein at once hides and reveals the source of an unknown life. And if we are bewildered at times, let us not forget that our soul often appears, to our feeble eyes, to be but the maddest of forces, and that there are in man many regions more fertile, more profound, and more interesting than those of his reason or his intelligence."

For these obscure perceptions of the soul, words alone are plainly an inadequate mode of expression. Hence both Wagner and Maeterlinck feel that some more direct kind of utterance is required, some more immediate means of communication between the feeling of the artist and the feeling of the auditor. Wagner finds this in music, which substitutes a direct appeal for the indirect appeal of the ordinary poet. The dramatic poem must be drafted "in such a fashion that it may penetrate the finest fibres of the musical tissue, and the spoken thought entirely dissolves into the feeling." Not that there is to be any surrender of that grip upon the inner life that is the essence of thoughtful drama. On the contrary, Wagner maintains, after the manner of Maeterlinck, that it is only when the soul is set free from the disturbing accidents of the temporary life that it can see clearly into the movements of the universal life. Wagner holds that in the Beethoven symphony, for example, a world-view is presented, quite as philosophical, quite as logically connected, as any that can be put together in words. "In this symphony, instruments speak a language whereof the world at no previous time had any knowledge; for here, with a hitherto unknown persistence, the purely musical expression enchains the hearer in an inconceivably varied mesh of nuances; rouses his inmost being to a degree unreachable by any other art; and in all its changefulness reveals an ordering principle so free and bold that we can deem it more forcible than any logic, yet without the laws of logic entering into it in the slightest; nay, rather, the reasoning march of thought, with its track of causes and effects, here finds no sort of foothold. So that this symphony must positively appear to us a revelation from another world; and in truth it opens out a scheme of the world's phenomena quite different from the ordinary logical scheme, and whereof one foremost thing is undeniable: that it thrusts home with the most overwhelming conviction, and guides our feeling with such a sureness that the logic-mongering reason is completely routed and disarmed thereby."

Now set beside this view of the relations of the musical drama to the poetical drama Maeterlinck's comparison of his own dramatic ideals with those of the "active" poet. The latter passes unthinkingly over many of the feelings that give to a tragic event its real significance. Why should not these feelings, the essential core of the drama, be given fuller play, and the mere incidents be looked upon as either superfluous or purely ancillary? He too, like Wagner, wants to show the heart of a tragic situation without the customary tedious cataloguing of all its limbs. He wants the spiritual essence of drama, and the essence alone, not the crude material facts from which this essence has to be distilled. The whole of Maeterlinck's magnificent passage must here be quoted: "The mysterious chant of the Infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon, the destiny or fatality that we are conscious of within us, though by what tokens none can tell—do not all these underlie King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet? And would it not be possible, by some interchanging of the rôles, to bring them nearer to us, and send the actor farther off? Is it beyond the mark to say that the true tragic element, normal, deep-rooted, and universal—that the true tragic element of life only begins at the moment when so-called adventures, sorrows, and dangers have disappeared?... When we think of it, is it not the tranquillity that is terrible, the tranquillity watched by the stars? And is it in tumult or in silence that the spirit of life quickens within us? Is it not when we are told, at the end of the story, 'They were happy,' that the great disquiet should intrude itself? What is taking place while they are happy? Are there not elements of deeper gravity and stability in happiness, in a single moment of repose, than in the whirlwind of passion? Is it not then that we at last behold the march of time—ay, and of many another on-stealing besides, more secret still—is it not then that the hours rush forward? Are not deeper chords set vibrating by all these things than by the dagger-stroke of conventional drama? Is it not at the very moment when a man believes himself secure from bodily death that the strange and silent tragedy of the being and the immensities does indeed raise its curtain on the stage? Is it while I flee before a naked sword that my existence touches its most interesting point? Is life always at its sublimest in a kiss? Are there not other moments, when one hears purer voices that do not fade away so soon? Does the soul flower only on nights of storm? Hitherto, doubtless, this belief has prevailed. It is only the life of violence, the life of bygone days, that is perceived by nearly all our tragic writers; and truly may one say that anachronism dominates the stage, and that dramatic art dates back as many years as the art of sculpture."

He places the spiritual purposes of painting and music on a higher plane; "for these," he says, "have learned to select and reproduce those obscurer phases of daily life that are not the less deep-rooted and amazing. They know that all that life has lost, as regards mere superficial ornament, has been more than counterbalanced by the depth, the intimate meaning, and the spiritual gravity it has acquired. The true artist no longer chooses Marius triumphing over the Cimbrians, or the assassination of the Duke of Guise, as a fit subject for his art; for he is well aware that the psychology of victory or murder is but elementary and exceptional, and that the solemn voice of men and things, the voice that issues forth so timidly and hesitatingly, cannot be heard amidst the idle uproar of acts of violence. And therefore will he place on his canvas a house lost in the heart of the country, an open door at the end of a passage, a face or hands at rest, and by these simple images will add to our consciousness of life, which is a possession that it is no longer possible to lose."