II
It is, of course, a truism to say that the corner-stone of Wagner's doctrinal arch was that music in the opera had usurped a position of pre-eminence to which it was not entitled, and which was not to be tolerated in what he conceived to be the ideal music-drama. He conceived the true function of music in its alliance with drama to be strictly auxiliary—an aid, and nothing more than an aid, to the enforcement, the driving home, of the play. As Mr. Apthorp has excellently stated it, his basic principle was that "the text (what in old-fashioned dialect was called the libretto) once written by the poet, all other persons who have to do with the work—composer, stage-architect, scene-painter, costumer, stage-manager, conductor and singing actors—should aim at one thing only: the most exact, perfect, and lifelike embodiment of the poet's thought." Wagner's chief quarrel with the opera as he found it was with the preponderance of the musical element in its constitution. If there is one principle that is definite, positive, and unmistakable in his theoretical position it is that, in the evolution of a true music-drama, the dramatist should be the controlling, the composer an accessory, factor—like the scene-painter and the costumer, ancillary and contributive. If it can be shown that in the actual result of his practice this relationship between the drama and the music is inverted—that in his music-dramas the music is supreme, both in its artistic quality and in its effect, while the drama is a mere framework for its splendours—it becomes obvious that he failed (gloriously, no doubt, but still definitively) in what he set out to achieve. It was his dearest principle that, in Mr. Apthorp's words, "in any sort of drama, musical or otherwise, the play's the thing." Yet what becomes of "Tristan und Isolde," of "Meistersinger," of "Götterdämmerung," when this principle is tested by their quality and effect? Would even the most incorruptible among the Wagnerites of a quarter of a century ago, in the most exalted hour of martyrdom, have ventured to say that in "Tristan," for example, the play's the thing? Imagine what the second act, say, divorced from the music, would be like; and then remember that the music of this act, with the voice-parts given to various instruments, might, with a little adjustment and condensation, be performed as a somewhat raggedly constructed symphonic poem. The test is a rough and partial one, no doubt, and it is subject to many modifications and reservations. It is not to be disputed, of course, that here is music which is always and everywhere transfused with dramatic emotion, and that its form is dramatic form and not musical form; but is there to-day a doubt in the mind of any candid student of Wagner as to the element in this musico-dramatic compound which is paramount and controlling?
It should be remembered that what Wagner thought he was accomplishing, or imagined he had accomplished, is not in question. He conceived himself to be primarily a dramatist, a dramatist using music solely and frankly as an auxiliary, as a means of intensifying the action and the moods of the play; and this end he pathetically imagined that he had achieved. Yet it is becoming more and more generally recognised and admitted, by the sincerest appreciators of his art, that as a dramatist he was insignificant and inferior. Had any temerarious soul assured him that his dramas would survive and endure by virtue of their music alone, it is easy to fancy his mingled incredulity and anger. He was not, judged by an ideal even less uncompromising than his own, a musical dramatist at all. It is merely asserting a truth which has already found recognition to insist that he was essentially a dramatic symphonist, a writer of programme-music who used the drama and its appurtenances, for the most part, as a mere stalking-horse for his huge orchestral tone-poems. He was seduced and overwhelmed by his own marvellous art, his irrepressible eloquence: his drama is distorted, exaggerated, or spread to an arid thinness, to accommodate his imperious musical imagination; he ruthlessly interrupts or suspends the action of his plays or the dialogue of his personages in order that he may meditate or philosophise orchestrally. He called his operas by the proud title of "music-dramas"; yet often it is impossible to find the drama because of the music.
It was not, as has been said before, that he fell short, but that he went too far; he should have stopped at eloquent and pointed intensification. Instead, he smothered his none too lucid dramas in a welter of magnificent and inspired music—obscured them, stretched them to intolerable lengths, filled up every possible space in them with his wonderful tonal commentary, by which they are not, as he thought, upborne, but grievously overweighted. Mr. James Huneker has remarked that Wagner was the first and only Wagnerite. As a matter of sober fact, he was one of the most formidable antagonists that Wagnerism ever had.
It appears likely that his lyric-dramas will endure on the stage both in spite of and because of their music. The validity and persuasiveness of "Tristan" and the "Ring" as music-dramas, as consistent and symmetrical embodiments of Wagner's ideals, seems less certain than of old. But the music, qua music, is of undiminished potency—it is still, regarded as an independent entity, of almost unlimited scope in its voicing of the moods and emotions of men and the varied pageant of the visible world; and it will always float and sustain his dramas and make them viable. Gorgeous and exquisite, epical and tender, sublimely noble, and earthly as passion and despair, it is still, at its best, unparalleled and unapproached; and, as Pater prophesied of the poetry of Rossetti, more torches will be lit from its flame than even enthusiasts imagine. Nothing can ever dim the glory of Wagner the conjurer of tones. His place is securely among the Olympians, where he sits, one likes to fancy, apart—a little lonely and disdainful. In his music he is almost always, as Arnold said of the greatest of the Elizabethans, "divinely strong, rich, and attractive"; and at his finest he is incomparable. No one but a master of transcendent genius, and the most amazingly varied powers of expression, could have conceived and shaped such perfect yet diverse things as those three matchless passages in which he is revealed to us as the riant and tender humanist, the impassioned lyrist, and the apocalyptic seer: the exquisite close of the second act of "Die Meistersinger," where is achieved a blend of magically poetic tenderness and comedy for which there are analogies only in certain supreme moments in Shakespeare; the tonal celebration of the ecstatic swoon of Tristan and Isolde in the midst of which the warning voice of the watcher on the tower is borne across an orchestral flood of ineffable and miraculous beauty; and that last passage to which this wonderful man set his hand, the culminating moment in the adoration of the Grail by the transfigured Parsifal—music that is as the chanting of seraphs: in which censers are swung before celestial altars. Of the genius who could contrive such things as these, one can say no less than that, regarded from any æsthetic standpoint at all, he is, as the subtle appreciator whom I have quoted said of a great though wayward poet, "a superb god of art, so proudly heedless or reckless that he never notices the loss of his winged sandals, and that he is stumbling clumsily when he might well lightly be lifting his steps against the sun-way where his eyes are set."