XIII
The musician, then, being at the basis of all his æsthetics, all his theories of opera and drama, the question arises, what sort of a musician was he? He was the spiritual son of Beethoven; a remoter ancestor was Bach. This is the cardinal fact in the psychology of Wagner; and it will need to be examined in all its bearings.
Wagner was one of those dynamically charged personalities after whose passing the world can never be the same as it was before he came—one of the tiny group of men to whom it is given to bestride an old world and a new, but to sunder them by a gulf that becomes ever more and more impassable; one of the very few who are able so to fill the veins of a whole civilisation with a new principle of vitality that the tingle of it is felt not only by the rarer but by the commonest spirits—some new principle from which, whether a man likes it or not, he will find it impossible to escape. Wagner is probably the only figure in the whole history of music of whom this can be said. Bach created no such upheaval. He counts for next to nothing in the music of his own day and that of the two generations that followed him. He did not make a new world in music: rather had a new world to be made before men's eyes were competent to take the measure of that towering stature, or men's hearts quick enough with life to respond to the profound humanism of that great soul. We were not fit for Bach until Beethoven and Wagner—and Wagner, perhaps, even more than Beethoven—made us so. Beethoven, again, had it not been for Wagner, would probably not have meant as much to us as he does now, or become the fertilising force he is in modern music; and even that fertilisation is effected through Wagner's work rather than along lines in continuation of Beethoven's own. If anyone doubts this, let him ask himself what new spirit of enduring vitality and power of propagation has come out of the classical symphony pure and simple. Not Brahms, assuredly, great as he is: "arrested development" is written large upon the forms and the ideas of all the music that has come out of Brahms's symphonies as clearly as upon those symphonies themselves. So far as modern instrumental music has developed in humanity of utterance or in breadth of structure, it is from assimilating from Beethoven, through Wagner, just the urgent poetic spirit that Brahms passed by in Beethoven,—the spirit of which Beethoven was himself only dimly conscious, but which Wagner from the beginning saw to be inherent in him, and which he distilled from the general tissue of Beethoven's work and used in a new form for magical results of his own. The only explosive force in music at all comparable in general to Wagner was Monteverdi. But Monteverdi came a couple of hundred years too soon. The world was not ready for him—it is hardly a paradox to say that he was not ready for himself—and his explosion mostly spent itself in a desert. Wagner had first-rate luck in this as in everything else in his life that really mattered to him as an artist; not only had he the right dynamic spark within him, but he was born into an atmosphere made electrically ready by the passionate soul's cry of Beethoven. The explosion came—a cataclysmic upheaval, leading to a new geological formation, as it were, in music, new geographical delimitations, a new fauna and flora.
He had access to Beethoven's heart: and from the blood in Beethoven's veins he won the strength both for his own new expression and his new freedom of form. It is one of the things we should be constantly thanking Providence for that the natural man in him insisted on making its own world in its own way. Busoni, in his suggestive Entwurf einer neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst, has remarked upon the curious formalism of most music, even the greatest. Here is an art fortunate enough to be free from all material factors: it is, as Busoni says, simply "sounding air," and is therefore presumably capable of a freedom of handling that should be the despair of workers in the other arts. Perfect freedom has yet to come; looked at from the heights, even giants like Bach and Beethoven and Mozart are seen to be loaded with chains of their own and their fellows' forging, and to be performing the same timid evolutions again and again in one small corner of a field, while glorious leagues of unexplored country unroll themselves all around them. Bach and Beethoven enriched music by a sort of intensive culture of an inherited estate. Wagner was really the first to leap the fences and break down the gates and send his ploughshare deep into the bowels of a new earth. Almost from his earliest years he had an instinctive sense of the great force of emotional liberation that was struggling for an outlet in Beethoven's music. He was probably the only man in Europe to be aware of it and its tremendous significance for the future. There were plenty of men who felt the greatness of Beethoven; but not one of them, apparently, saw him as Wagner did. It is evident that people like Mendelssohn and Robert and Clara Schumann, for example, with whom he talked much in the 'forties, had no inkling that out of the spume of this eager, restless mind the future of music was to be born. To them his far-darting talk about Beethoven was apparently no more than the interesting speculations of a clever but slightly eccentric visionary. From the first he fastened upon the seminal essence of Beethoven's later work—the attempt of a great soul, hampered somewhat by a transmitted form, to pour out an endless fund of quasi-dramatic emotion in music. The problem that lay before Wagner was how to release this fund of emotion, to give it wings that would carry it over the whole field of human life, to give it a new and more wonderful articulation. After years of struggling he found his way to the light. It was one of the extremely lucky "throws" of nature—a throw she will probably not achieve again for generations—that within the musician who had this unique vision of a music infinitely human and perfectly free there was a dramatist capable of providing the definite framework upon which the indefinite musical emotion could be woven into firm, coherent shapes. His theory that purely instrumental music had shot its last bolt with Beethoven, and that the choral ending to the Ninth Symphony is the unconscious, instinctive cry of the musician for the redemption of music by poetry, is the soundest of æsthetics if we do not take it too literally. Music did need this fertilisation by poetry if it was to win a new procreative power. Agreeable music has been made, and will continue to be made, by the passionless, disinterested weaving for its own sake of beautiful strands of tone. But great music must go deeper than this, and the deeper it goes the closer it comes to the heart; and our name for the necessities of the heart is poetry.