THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA AND ITS ANTECEDENTS
We have already seen that the drama is distinguished from all other forms of art by its essential quality of directly enacting the things to be communicated instead of merely describing them. Since only human things can fitly be so enacted by human beings, dramatic art is generally identical with human art; it is the art of representing the actions of men and women--or of deities conceived as idealized human beings--in such a way as to reveal the motives by which they are impelled, their characters. The adjective "dramatic" may, however, be understood in two ways, according as our interest is centred in the actions themselves, their contrasts and conflicts, or in the motives or characters of the persons engaged. In the former case the drama will endeavour to represent decisive and exciting actions passing in rapid succession before the eyes. This may be called the spectacular drama, and its greatest master is Schiller. When Goethe is described as "the least dramatic of all great poets" it is in this sense that the word is used. Goethe often hankered after spectacular effects, but was never very successful in producing them.
But if we consider the essence of a dramatic conception to lie in the conflict of opposing motives, not necessarily discharging themselves as action, but subdued, and the more impressive because kept under restraint within the soul of the actor, we shall rank Goethe amongst the very foremost of dramatic poets. Examples of what I will call the moral drama are all Goethe's maturer plays, such as Tasso and Iphigenie. To this class also belong Lessing's Nathan der Weise and the representative French plays of the classic epoch. They are, generally speaking, bad stage plays, but are extremely interesting to read, and gain in interest the more they are studied. In the works of the greatest of all dramatists, such as Sophokles and Shakespeare, the spectacular and moral elements are so closely united as to be inseparable. In the Attic drama the more striking spectacular events had, for technical reasons, to be kept out of sight. Ajax piercing himself with his sword, Oedipus tearing out his own eyes, are, like the thunderstorm in Lear, the outcome of terrific internal motives bursting all confines with the force of an irresistible torrent. Our interest is centred, not in the actions themselves, but in the motives which produced them, in the characters.
Wagner, with his conscientious habit of accounting to himself for everything that he did, found his artistic level more slowly than do most poets. When the stylistic crudities of his earlier productions had been overcome, he began the work of his maturer life with Rheingold, the most spectacular drama ever written. Walküre and Siegfried were continued in the same vein, and it is very significant that he broke off the composition and laid the work aside just at the monstrous dragon-fight. It is no strained conjecture that as the difficulties of his gigantic subject accumulated he at last realized the practical impossibility of what he had undertaken. To bring the whole story of the fall of the ancient Germanic gods into a spectacular drama on the scale of the Ring was beyond even his mighty powers, and in Die Walküre he is like a man trying to break away from the path which he has laid down for himself, to get rid of the cumbersome spectacular element and let the action develop itself naturally from within. With all its unrivalled beauties the Ring as a drama is a monstrosity. It turns upon motives which are not apparent from the actions and have to be explained in dreary and most undramatic length. Its very foundation is wrong; its central figure, the prime author of the new and more blessed world which is to follow, is the offspring of an incestuous union for which there is no occasion whatever. The myth itself has sometimes been held responsible, and it has been asserted that Wagner had to reproduce the tradition as he received it. Nothing of the kind is true; Wagner has altered the entire story, taking, leaving, or altering just as he pleased. In the Völsunga paraphrase of Eddic lays, upon which the story of the Ring is founded, the child of the unnatural union is not Sigurd, not the golden hero "whom every child loved," but the savage outlaw Sinfjötli, half wolf, half robber, one of the most terrible creations of mythology. To conceive such a union as bringing forth a hero whom we are expected to regard as the very type of human nobility and guilelessness is an artistic blunder which we can only explain by supposing that Wagner found his material unmanageable. He was struggling with impossibilities and gave up the attempt.
From this he turned to Tristan, rushing at once to the opposite extreme. The absence of clear and decisive action in Tristan is as remarkable as the excess of action in the Ring. Persuaded that the motives and characters of men must be known before their actions can be understood, and that these can only be revealed in music, he has given us in Tristan music such as no mortal ear ever heard before or since; but action there is little or none. He scarcely deigns to tell even the most vital incidents of the story. Can any one say that he has understood the events connected with Morold and Tristan's first visit to Ireland and the splinter of the sword from the play itself without an independent explanation? Or that Tristan's reasons for carrying off Isolde are clear to him from Marke's account? Without these incidents the whole story is unintelligible, but with Wagner in his then mood they counted for nothing in the flood of emotional material. It was in Die Meistersinger that Wagner found the final equation between impulse and action, and the public has again judged rightly in placing that work first among all his dramatic compositions. But the musician and the philosopher will always turn to Tristan.
There are four principal epochs in which the drama has been a flourishing reality in Europe. They are: 1. In Athens in the fifth century B.C. 2. In Elizabethan England. 3. In Spain in the seventeenth century. 4. In France under Louis XIV.
Of the influence of the Elizabethan drama upon the Wagnerian drama it is difficult to speak to any good purpose. Shakespeare is the common heritage of all German dramatists, Wagner as well as others, and it is not too much to say that the enthusiasm for Shakespeare which began towards the end of the eighteenth century was the stimulus which roused the German nation to create a drama of its own. It is enough for the present if we note that the Elizabethan drama is characteristically human and popular. True, the Elizabethans revel in courts and high society, as do the populace; they represent kings and rulers as they are beheld from outside, and there is always a "Sampson" or "Gregory," or "Citizen" or "Merchant" ready as a chorus to express with great shrewdness his opinion of the doings of his betters.
For an opposite reason we may pass over very shortly the French classical drama, namely, because it does not seem to have weighed with Wagner at all. Corneille, Racine, and their contemporaries are little mentioned in his writings; certainly he shows no enthusiasm for their art. Yet the influence of the French stage was by no means a negligible quantity in the development of the German drama.
It was Lessing who in the trenchant prose of his Hamburger Dramaturgie first revolted against the French domination, the strength of which may be judged from the list there given of works performed in the Hamburg theatre from April to July 1767. Of the fifty-two plays there enumerated, fifteen were German, thirty-five French, and two from other languages--only one being English. In itself the French influence was not altogether for evil; what was bad was the unlimited sway of a foreign art. The French sense for elegance of form is far more acute than that of either Germans or Englishmen, but with the Louis Quatorze dramatists it had degenerated into pedantry. The "Unities," rightly understood, are a very important feature of every drama. Aristotle has treated this much vexed question with his customary Hellenic moderation. Inner unity is an indispensable qualification of every work of art; dramatic unity is technically called Unity of Action, that is, the mind must be able to receive the work as a whole, and it must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Only nature is at once varied and eternal. Out of this may proceed the Unities of Time and Place, but so far from being obligatory they were not even always observed in the Greek tragic drama itself, where they seem specially called for by the presence of the chorus and where the fact that a dramatic performance was always a competition made some restrictions binding upon all competitors necessary. Aristotle's only rule about time is that the length must be such that it can be easily comprehended (Poet., vii. 1450b), and he adds in a general way that in his day tragedy generally tried as far as possible to keep within one revolution of the sun, or thereabouts (Ib., v. 1449b). Of the third Unity, that of Place, he says nothing at all.
Aristotle's eminently practical generalizations of the features of the drama as it existed in Athens in his day were exalted by the French dramatists of the seventeenth century into rigid inviolable laws, and a dramatist would in a doubtful case think it necessary to demonstrate to his public in a special discourse that he had not been guilty of any breach of the law in this respect! The authority of the supreme law-giver was incontestable; the only question was how to interpret his enactments. Does, for example, "one revolution of the sun" mean twelve hours or twenty-four? This and other such weighty matters were subjects of warm controversy. Lessing's mind was critical rather than creative; he, too, was an enthusiastic student of Aristotle, and read with far truer artistic intelligence than Corneille. The criticism of his Hamburgische Dramaturgie cleared the way for the great creative poets of the end of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. It was a period of experiment, both in subject-matter and in form. The latter hovers between that of classic tradition and the licence of Shakespeare, while the subjects are generally taken from foreign history or from Greek mythology; only occasionally, as in Götz von Berlichingen and Wallenstein, from German history. The entire dramatic movement of this period is an endeavour to find a workable compromise between the classic and the Elizabethan drama, an endeavour which attained a fair measure of success a little later in the superb classic tragedies of Grillparzer. Still, noble as were its achievements in this direction, the German nation had higher aims. As it gained in self-consciousness and conceived its own artistic ideals it could not but feel itself worthy to bring forth an art characteristically its own. Till now the only indigenous German art had been instrumental music, and the stupendous achievements of a Bach, a Haydn, a Beethoven must have helped to bring home to the Germans the artistic capabilities latent within them.
The decisive step in German art was taken by Richard Wagner, whose appearance is like a world-catastrophe. In one vast flood, comparable only to the tide of his overwhelming music, all that was trivial and experimental was swept away. What was strong enough to swim in the tide was invigorated and strengthened; Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Grillparzer, Weber, Mozart, Beethoven, and their compeers are both better performed and better understood now than they were before Wagner's appearance, but all the second-rate has perished. The days of experimenting have passed; the danger now threatening German art is not from abroad, but is within itself, from those of its own body who, just when the only hope lies in sobriety and self-restraint, are goading it on the career of intoxication.
There remain the Hellenic and the Spanish dramas. Wagner's true spiritual progenitors were Sophokles and Calderon. Different as are the creations of two such widely separated epochs in their external physiognomy, they possess one vital characteristic in common. In both man is the instrument of higher powers; whether they be, as in the one case, Zeus or Ate, or, as in the other, Honour or Christian faith, matters little. These are the real actors, impersonated in flesh and blood in the heroes.
An Englishman who, like myself, is ignorant of the Spanish language and people can never hope to understand, still less to expound, their literature. The Spanish drama is largely dependent upon subtleties of metre and diction which cannot be reproduced in translations, and it is inspired by motives very different from our own. Our watchwords are "self-interest," "freedom," "progress"; those natural to the Spaniard are "honour" and "Catholic Christianity." No great people has been so uniformly true to the traditions of its nationality as the Spanish. Alone among the nations Spain has refused to assimilate the rationalist formulas fashionable in other countries; she has preferred to relinquish her foremost place in the European commonwealth rather than her ideals. To us the policy of Philip II appears as perverse as the notions of honour and Christianity appear extravagant in Spanish dramas; the reason is that we are not Spaniards, and we read their history through the spectacles of rationalist historians. But if we once concede their fundamental notions as they understand them, we must acknowledge that Spanish history and Spanish art proceed directly out of them more logically, more naturally, than in those nations which are continually being drawn aside, now this way, now the other, by the political notions and passing philosophies of the day.
Wagner made his first acquaintance with the Spanish drama in the winter of 1857-58, when engaged on the composition of Tristan, and at once seized its character with the sympathetic insight of genius. His remarks in a letter to Liszt written at this time[[25]] are so noteworthy, and bear so directly upon the work with which we are concerned, that I will add a translation of a portion of the letter:
I am almost inclined to place Calderon by himself
and above all others. Through him, too, I have learned
to understand the Spanish character. Unprecedented,
unrivalled in its blossom, it developed so rapidly that
its material body soon perished, and it ended in
negation of the world. The refined, deeply passionate
consciousness of the nation finds expression in the
notion of honour, wherein its noblest and at the same
time its most terrible elements unite to a second
religion. Extremes of selfish desire and of sacrifice
both seek to be satisfied. The nature of the "world"
could not possibly find sharper, more dazzling, more
dominating, and at the same time more destructive,
more terrible expression. The poet in his most
vigorous presentations has taken for his subject the
conflict of this honour with the deep human feeling of
sympathy (Mitgefühl). The actions are dictated by
"honour," and are therefore acknowledged and
approved by the world, while the outraged sympathy
takes refuge in a profound melancholy, the more telling
and sublime for being scarcely expressed, and revealing
the world in all its terrible nullity. Such is the wondrous
and imposing experience which Calderon presents
to us in magic creative charm. No poet of the world
is his equal in this respect. The Catholic religion
intervenes as a mediator, and nowhere has it attained
greater significance than here, where the opposition
between the world and sympathy is pregnant, sharp,
and plastic, as in no other nation. How significant
too is the fact that nearly all the great Spanish poets
in the latter half of their lives retired into the Church,
and that then, after complete ideal subjugation of
life they could depict that very life with certainty,
purity, warmth, and clearness, as they never could
before when actively engaged in it. Their most
graceful, most whimsical creations are from the time
of their clerical retirement. Beside this paramount
phenomenon all other national literature seems
insignificant.
[25.] No. 255 of the Collected Letters.
Wagner knew Greek, but seems to have read his Aeschylos and Sophokles in the excellent translation of Donner. From his seventeenth year onwards, his exclusive occupation with music and the drama left him little time for the study of classics. Yet he was a born classic. In the earlier period of his school life, when at the Kreuz-Schule in Dresden he showed remarkable aptitude for Greek, and translated half the Odyssey into German as a voluntary task when he was about thirteen. Unfortunately in the next year his family moved to Leipzig, where his zeal was checked by the pedantry of schoolmasters, and his studies soon began to take another direction, but throughout his life he remained ardently in sympathy with Hellenic culture. His remarks on the Oedipus tragedies of Sophokles are well worthy the attention of those who value the poetry above the letter of a work. He was attracted to the Spanish and to the Hellenic drama because they were akin to himself. He was himself cast in a tragic mould, in that of the heroes of Aeschylos, Sophokles, and Calderon. Prometheus suffering torments rather than submit to the will of an iniquitous ruler is Wagner voluntarily sacrificing all that made life dear to him rather than adopt the conventional falsehoods of society. He is Prince Fernando suffering disgrace and imprisonment rather than betray his country. He is Tristan and Isolde going willingly to death rather than sully their honour.