ON CERTAIN OBJECTIONS TO THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA
In this chapter I propose to consider certain criticisms which are often made on Wagner's treatment of the drama, which differ from some of those mentioned before, in being intelligible and worthy of respect, since they have not been made maliciously or through ignorance. In so far as they are invalid they rest upon misunderstandings which can easily be accounted for by Wagner's unparalleled originality, by the novelty of his art, necessarily involving a wide departure from the classic standards by which alone the critic can form his judgment. To comprehend his work we must give up many of those cherished canons which hitherto have passed unquestioned.
Wagner's Tristan has often--even by Lichtenberger--been described as a philosophic work; and as abstract thought or philosophy, it is said, is foreign to art, a work which admits it must be condemned. Let us first understand what is meant by philosophy. It is surely a train of thought in the mind of the spectator, not in the object which he contemplates. Anything in the world may be the subject of philosophic thought, or may suggest it; there is plenty of philosophy to be drawn from a daisy, but we do not therefore call a daisy a philosophic flower. So, too, we may philosophize about Wagner's Tristan, but the philosophy is our own; it is not in the work. What is meant no doubt is that the work itself is not a concrete reality, but an exposition of an abstract conception. Philosophy has only herself to blame if abstractions are in the naïf, ordinary mind opposed to realities, for it is unhappily true that nearly the whole of our current philosophy does consist of abstractions which are mere "Hirngespinnste," rooted in words and not in nature; philosophy itself has in art become a term of reproach from being associated with unreality. We must, however, distinguish between notions which are real but difficult to grasp and those which cannot be grasped, because there is nothing in them, and this distinction cannot be made without thought and labour from which the ordinary mind shrinks, being too indolent or indifferent. Poetry is not opposed to philosophy, and is not the less poetry when it concerns itself with those higher notions which are outside the range of our more ordinary comprehension, [Greek: ho¯s philosophias ousaes megistaes monsikaes]. Both poetry and philosophy deal in abstractions, only in both the abstractions must be true, i.e. must be true general statements of ideas found in nature; when this is the case poetry and philosophy are indistinguishable, except by mere external and conventional features. Under which heading are we to class, for example, Plato's Republic? Or the Upanishads? or the book of Job? They are generally thought of as philosophy, but all who have even partially understood them will feel their poetic spell. Or if we take our greatest poems, to mention only some of those most familiar to us: Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust or Marlowe's, Tennyson's In Memoriam, Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát--all of these might be just as well classed under philosophy as under poetry. Only untrue philosophy is unpoetical, that which has grown out of the reason of man. Abstractions manufactured by human reason are no more philosophy than an account of centaurs and gryphons is natural history. They are not to be found in Wagner's Tristan.
The particular philosophy which Wagner's Tristan is supposed to set forth is that of Schopenhauer. But Schopenhauer's doctrine of Negation of Will or Nirvâna--for it is identical with that of Buddhism--is a negation of existence itself absolutely. The man who puts an end to his own life does not attain Nirvâna; he is not dissatisfied with life in itself, but only with its conditions, and he passes through the endless cycle of Samsâra until the moment arrives when, sickened with the wearisome struggle, he longs for complete annihilation. The lovers in Tristan look forward to a renewed existence beyond the grave, in the "realm of night," where, freed from the trammels of the senses their love will endure, purified from the pollution of human lust in glory undimmed by the sordid conditions of human life.
Sehnen hin zur heil'gen Nacht
Wo ur-ewig einzig wahr
Liebes-Wonne ihm lacht.
Such a future life would with Schopenhauer only be a renewal of the misery of existence in another form. It is the Christian, not the Buddhist, way of feeling that inspires the lovers. Christianity starts from the insufficiency and misery of human life, but contemplates redemption therefrom by love, whereas Buddhism conceives of no possibility of redemption. Its release is annihilation, and it is a religion of despair, not of hope.
It would be interesting, if it did not take us too far from our present subject, to compare this conception of love with that of Sokrates as set forth in the Symposium of Plato. Sokrates believed fully in immortality, but wisely refrained from speculating on the conditions of existence after death. His Eros is confined to this life, but none the less he treats it as a divine gift. Love is the mediator and interpreter between gods and men; and love of the beautiful, which manifests itself in the procreation and love of offspring, is the desire for immortality, the children being the continuation of the immortal part of their parents.[[29]] This is the lower mystery. The higher, which is not revealed to all, is the gradual expansion of love until it comprehends the eternal Idea. The beauty which we love in the individual becomes a stepping-stone from which we may rise to the love of all beautiful things, passing from one to many, from beautiful forms to beautiful deeds, from them to beautiful thoughts, laws, institutions, sciences, until we contemplate the vast sea of beauty in the boundless love of wisdom, a beauty which does not grow and perish, but is eternal. There could be no finer commentary on Wagner's Tristan than this wondrous speech of Sokrates in the Symposium.
[29.] It is worth noting in passing how this beautiful conception of Plato coincides with views expressed in our own day by a scientific man of the highest distinction, the foremost living representative of Darwinian evolution, Professor Weismann. See his Essays on Heredity.
It is true, however paradoxical it may seem, that Wagner's very stupendous power is itself a source of weakness; it is too great for more limited minds to grasp. If love is really the one divine fact of human existence, to which all else is as nothing; and if at the same time a pure and burning love resolutely followed of necessity leads to destruction, then how are we to live at all? Is this life to count for nothing? I shall not attempt to answer this question. I cannot bring the truth that all noble and generous actions are bound to end in failure, to bring death upon their doers, within the scheme of a divinely ordered universe. I will only observe that it is a truth tacitly acknowledged by all who compose tragedies or take pleasure in witnessing them. How else could we endure to contemplate the failure and destruction of a Lear, a Wallenstein, a Deianira, an Antigone?
Here our attempts to extract philosophy out of the Tristan drama must cease. My only purpose has been to show that its abstractions are warm with the living breath of reality, and whatever is beyond this must be left for the student to carry out for himself, from the point of view of his own mind. Such exercises are interesting and salutary to the philosophic mind, but for minds trained in the modern formulas of "self-interest" and "liberty" they are only possible after a complete reconstruction of the foundations of knowledge, a "revaluation of all values."
The decisive part played by the magic love-potion has given rise to much comment. Hostile critics ridicule it, and condemn the whole work as turning on an absurdity, while those who are favourable try to explain it away, but their explanations have always seemed to me more unnatural than the thing explained. Why may we not accept it as it is evidently intended? In art at least, rationalism has not yet--thanks perhaps to Shakespearian traditions--prevailed so far that we must exclude supernatural motives altogether. Wagner could scarcely have used the myth and the names of Tristan and Isolde without introducing the philtre with which they have always been associated. It would be just as reasonable to explain away the ghost in Hamlet as the love-potion of Isolde; if we accept one we can accept the other, for in both the prime mover of the tragedy is supernatural. Lessing, in comparing the ghost of Hamlet's father with the ghost of Ninus in Voltaire's Semiramis, has some remarks which are equally valid for all supernatural motives in the drama. The principle which he evolves is that a supernatural being to be admissible must interest us for its own sake as a living and acting personage; in other words, it must be an organic portion of the play, not a mere machine brought in for stage effect. "Voltaire treats the apparition of a dead person as a miracle, Shakespeare as a perfectly natural occurrence." I do not think that the difference between what is allowable and what is not could be more clearly put than in this last sentence. We are not obliged to believe that the potion is the sole cause of their love; that they hated each other as deadly enemies at one moment and became lovers at the next. Such a notion would be altogether too crude. We are justified in supposing that behind Isolde's rage and Tristan's disdain there lies a deeper feeling, as yet unconfessed but sufficiently deep-rooted to endure when the anger of the moment has passed away, and that this is what is effected by the draught.
A very marked characteristic or mannerism of Wagner's dramas is the tedious length of explanation in some scenes or soliloquies, and they have often been severely criticized. There is one in Tristan, King Marke's speech at the end of Act II., and I may say at once that after all that has been said the objections cannot be entirely set aside. It numbers nearly two hundred bars in slow tempo, and takes about ten minutes. The argument generally used in defending it is that the action is laid within, and the interest is in the music. But the objection--to me at least--is not that the action is at a standstill, but that the scene is undramatic, and much of it unmitigated prose. The action has stood still nearly all through the act, but no one would wish to miss a bar of any other portion. The king's reproaches of his friend and vassal for his treachery, and the music with its gloomy orchestration, mostly of horns, bassoons, viola, and lower strings, with occasional English horn, and the deepest notes of the clarinet interspersed with wails of the bass-clarinet, are profoundly touching and proceed naturally out of the situation. Had there been nothing more than these it might have been much shorter, but Wagner has taken the occasion to try to throw some light upon the circumstances that preceded the events of the play. If they were to be told they should have been told earlier. Here we have forgotten our perplexity at the beginning and are now thrilled with the situation, not at all in the mood for hearing explanations. Nor does it really explain; if the hearer does not already know why Isolde was brought to be the bride of King Marke, he will scarcely learn it from Marke's speech.
When I spoke just now of Wagner's predilection for long soliloquies and prosy explanations as a mannerism, I do not think that I was expressing myself too strongly. Thus in Die Walküre, in Wotan's long speech to Brünnhilde in Act II., he sketches the main events of Das Rheingold. In Siegfried the amusing riddle scene, a reminiscence of the Eddic Alvísmál, seems intended to relate events which have gone before. In Götterdämmerung it is Siegfried who just before his death tells the story of the preceding evening.[[30]] In Parsifal Gurnemanz explains all the circumstances to the Knappen. How undramatic are these explanations we shall realize when we compare them with such soliloquies as Tannhäuser's account of his pilgrimage or Siegmund's story of his life, which, though equally lengthy, keep us spellbound from the first bar to the last, because they directly lead up to and form part of the scene which is actually before us. Tannhäuser's wild aspect and manner, Siegmund's desolation and longing for community with other human beings, are in direct connection with the story told.
[30.] From which we may conclude that Wagner when composing the tetralogy contemplated the separate numbers being sometimes performed singly. For this the explanations are again inadequate. Much better it would have been to provide at the performance a short printed or spoken introduction, a plan which in my humble opinion might well be adopted in most plays.
I am, of course, only expressing an individual opinion, because I feel bound in giving a full account of the work to say how it appears to me; others may very probably feel it differently. It matters little. Even if I am right in thinking that Wagner has miscalculated the effect on the stage, Tristan will still remain a work immeasurably superior to a thousand that are faultless.