Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

XI

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

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

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

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

"We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep"?

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

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

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

or Arnold's

"Hear it from thy broad lucent Arno-vale

(For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep

The morningless and unawakening sleep

Under the flowery oleanders pale)."

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

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

"The same that ofttimes hath

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,"

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