Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

IX

It was while he was still panting in the mists of idealism that he wrote The Art-Work of the Future, in which the æsthetic ideas that had been maturing in him during the latter part of the Dresden period found their first full expression.

The basis of his theory is again the belief that we shall not have a real art until we have a new and free humanity. "Man will never be what he can and should be, until his life is a true mirror of nature, a conscious following of the only real necessity, the inner natural necessity, and not subjected to an outer, imaginary, and so not a necessary but an arbitrary power." He is still vibrating with anger against the politicians of the day, to whom he attributes all the evils under the sun; and of course he idealises that mysterious abstraction "the Folk," to whom he sings a rapturous pæan.[340] It is the Folk alone that acts as Necessity dictates,—the Folk being defined as "the sum of all those who feel a common need"; while opposed to the Folk are all those "who feel no want," whose motive force is an artificial and egoistic need, satisfaction for which they seek in luxury,—"which can only be generated and maintained in opposition to and at the cost of the sacrifices of the needy." These were not the views he held upon luxury in later years, when he, one of the most luxurious-souled of men, had the opportunity to satisfy his cravings for silk dressing-gowns and lace shirts and other vanities of this world. His fulminations against luxury are simply the eternal cry of the Have-nots against the Haves.

He is, as always, discontented with the life and the art of his day, both of which seem to him fundamentally false and artificial. "The spirit, in its artistic striving for reunion with nature in the art-work, must either look forward with hope to the future, or mournfully practise resignation." He recognises that we can find redemption only in the art-work that is physically present to the senses (nur im sinnlich gegenwärtigen Kunstwerke), "thus only in a truly art-needing, i.e. art-conditioning Present that shall bring forth art from its own natural truth and beauty": that is to say, he has faith in the power of Necessity, for which this work of the Future is reserved.... "The great united art-work, that must embrace all the genres of art and in some degree undo [verbrauchen] each of them in order to use it as a means to an end, to annul it in order to attain the common aim of all, namely, the unconditioned, immediate representation of perfected human nature,—this great united art-work we cannot recognise as the arbitrary need of the individual, but only as the inevitable [nothwendig denkbare] associated work of the humanity of the future."[341]

He proceeds to elaborate his idea of this united art-work, though the full exposition of it is only to be found in Opera and Drama. With his Teutonic passion for categorisation, he divides man up into neat mental parcels. The intellect has for its organ speech; the organ of feeling is tone. Speech gives determination to the otherwise indeterminate vocal tone: it is "the condensed element of the voice, and the word is the consolidated measure of tone." The whole man is the man of intellect (speech), heart (tone) and body (gesture). Thus the three primeval intertwining sisters of art are Dance, Tone, and Poetry: and true art is a union of the three. Such an art expresses all the faculties of man, whereas the separate arts,—the art-varieties, as he calls them,—only issue from and express this or that faculty. Art must appeal to the eye. "Unless it communicates itself to the eye, all art remains unsatisfying, and thus itself unsatisfied, unfree. No matter how fully it may express itself to the ear, or merely to the combining and mediately compensating faculty of thought [das kombinierende, mittelbar ersetzende Denkvermögen], until it communicates itself intelligibly to the eye it remains only a thing that wills, and not yet fully can. Art, however, must can—it is from können that art, in our language, has acquired the appropriate name of Die Kunst."[342]

Each of the dissevered arts longs for reunion with the others, "Dance longs to pass over into Tone, there to find herself again and know herself; Tone in turn receives the marrowy frame of its structure from the rhythm of Dance.... But Tone's most living flesh is the human voice; the Word again is as it were the bony, muscular rhythm of the human voice." Thus the emotion that overflowed from Dance into Tone finds definition and certainty in the Word, and so is able to reveal itself clearly. The union of these three is "the united lyric art-work," of which the perfected form is the drama. Both the music and the poetry of to-day are impotent. He looks forward to "the overwhelming blow of fate that shall make an end of all the unwieldy musical trash, to make room for the art-work of the future." Nor can poetry alone create the genuine art-work, for no genuine art-work is possible without an appeal to the eye. Poetry should be written to be acted, not read. "The whole impenetrable medley of stored-up literature is in truth—in spite of its million phrases—nothing but the toilsome stammering of speech-impotent thought that longs to pass over into natural immediacy,—a stammering that has been going on for centuries, in verse and prose, without achieving the living Word." Shakespeare was to the art-work of the future no more than Thespis was to the perfected Greek drama. "The deed of the unique Shakespeare, which made a universal man, a very god of him, is yet only the deed of the solitary Beethoven, that revealed to him the language of the artistic manhood of the future. Only where these two Prometheus,—Shakespeare and Beethoven—shall reach out hands to one another; where the marble creations of Phidias shall become living, moving flesh and blood; where Nature, instead of being represented on a narrow canvas on the chamber walls of the egoist, shall unfold herself luxuriantly on the ample stage of the future, swept by the warm breath of life,—only then, in the fellowship of his fellow artists, will the poet find redemption."

It is evident throughout that his theory is the product of his own æsthetic bias. He can express himself only in terms of poetry and music on the stage; it is therefore illegitimate for any other artist to adopt any other medium of expression. Poetry without music, music without poetry, cannot satisfy him; therefore no one else has any right to be satisfied with either of these arts separately. The truth is that he was utterly insensitive to the peculiar qualities in each of the separate arts that constitute its special charm for those who practise it exclusively. When he was in Milan in 1859 he suddenly realised, he tells us, that he was "no good as a judge of pictures, because the subject, when once it had made a clear and sympathetic appeal to me, at once and completely decided me."[343] The confession is quite superfluous. It is writ large over all his prose works that he had nothing of the painter's delight in painting, or any real understanding of its æsthetic effect. He seems to have been equally blind or deaf to the peculiar appeal of the other arts. If it were not so, he would hardly have laid it down, in all seriousness, that "literature poetry," as the "mere organ of the intellect," should be dissolved, self-abrogated, into the "unified art-work of the future," or that architecture decays when it passes from the service of the State and religion into the service of the "egoistic individual," or that sculpture too has become a merely "egoistic" art, only to be "redeemed" by being taken up into the "united art-work,"[344] or that painting too must seek a similar "redemption." His notions that the landscape painter will find his impulses satisfied in the painting of scenery or a background for the living man of drama, and that the gestures of the mime will amply compensate us for the cessation of sculpture, are indeed not to be taken seriously; they are possible only to a man without the least understanding of the plastic arts. It is of course quite untrue that in such a union of the arts as he suggests "the highest faculty of each is unfolded to the fullest." Even in the Wagnerian opera none of the contributing arts receives anything like its full unfolding except music. The truth is that Wagner had still not rid his artistic ideas of their political encumbrances. He was poor, and unable to realise himself in the world as it was then. He naturally supposed there must be something fundamentally wrong with a world of that kind, and he looked forward to a speedy dissolution of it, and the rising of a new civilisation from its ashes. He saw the rich buying pictures and sculptures and building houses for themselves, and the ordinary people reading poetry or prose, instead of them all flocking to the opera. People had a reprehensible passion for being what he called "units," each of them enjoying his own art in his own way. "True" art, therefore, would be possible only in a society in which the unit had lost consciousness of himself in the community. The communal art, the art enjoyed by great masses of people in the same place and at the same time, is the drama. The "units" who could not quite stifle their liking for painting and sculpture must therefore be satisfied with so much of these as could be given them in the theatre. It was a very logical and symmetrical piece of pleading: the only defect in it was that it left just one thing out of account—human nature.

His political speculations have the triple disadvantage that they are rarely true in themselves, they are too obviously the product merely of the circumstances of Wagner's own time and place, and they have no practical bearing upon art. The angry idealist overshoots his mark when he tells us that our modern States are the most unnatural associations of men, inasmuch as they arose solely out of a "mere external caprice, i.e. dynastic family interests," and that "they yoke together once for all a certain number of men for an aim that either never corresponded to a need they had in common, or, owing to the changes wrought by time, is certainly no longer common to them now." Even if it were true it would be without any practical significance either for politics or art,—for politics, because there is no one art that can be said to possess the imagination of a complex modern State, no one "need" for the satisfaction of which it is possible to induce all the citizens to labour: and for art, because art's business is to display to us the endless beauty and interest of things, not to argue us into the adoption of this or that view of this infinite, incomprehensible world. Too much of Wagner's political theorising is the mere outcome of affairs as they happened to be in Germany at the latter end of the first half of the nineteenth century. He idealised the "Folk" because that unfixable abstraction was the natural antithesis of the rich governing class whom he held in abhorrence. It is right that the artist should have his dreams of life as well as of art, and if he chooses to find his ideal in an abstraction no one can say him nay. But when he proceeds to endow that abstraction with all the impossible virtues under the sun, when he tells us that "the artist of the future" will be, not the poet, the actor, the musician or the plastician, but the "Folk,"—"to whom alone we owe all Art itself,"—we can only decline to keep company with him until he shall be able to use words with some meaning in them. There is, in fact, a sort of nonsense prose as there is a nonsense verse. Wagner's dithyrambs upon the Folk—and upon many another topic—are simply the prose counterpart of Lear and Carroll.