[301]before found expression. I have found in a motet of Vittoria one of the motives of "Parsifal," almost note for note, and there is no doubt that Wagner owed much to Palestrina and his school. But even the sombre music of Vittoria does not plead and implore like Wagner's. The outcry comes and goes, not only with the suffering of Amfortas, the despair of Kundry. This abstract music has human blood in it.
What Wagner has tried to do is to unite mysticism and the senses, to render mysticism through the senses. Mr. Watts-Dunton has pointed out that that is what Rossetti tried to do in painting. That mysterious intensity of expression which we see in the faces of Rossetti's latest pictures has something of the same appeal as the insatiable crying-out of a carnal voice, somewhere in the depths of Wagner's latest music.
In "Parsifal," more perhaps than anywhere else in his work, Wagner realised the supreme importance of monotony, the effect that could be gained by the incessant
[302]repetition of a few ideas. All that music of the closing scene of the first act is made out of two or three phrases, and it is by the finest kind of invention that those two or three phrases are developed, and repeated, and woven together into so splendid a tissue. And, in the phrases themselves, what severity, what bareness almost! It is in their return upon themselves, their weighty reiterance, that their force and significance become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche says, they end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic process, a cunning absorption of the will of another.
"Parsifal" presents itself as before all things a picture. The music, soaring up from hidden depths, and seeming to drop from the heights, and be reflected back from shining distances, though it is, more than anything I have ever heard, like one of the great forces of nature, the sea or the wind, itself makes pictures, abstract pictures; but even the music, as one watches the stage, seems to subordinate itself to the visible picture there. And, so perfectly do all the
[303]arts flow into one, the picture impresses one chiefly by its rhythm, the harmonies of its convention. The lesson of "Parsifal" is the lesson that, in art, rhythm is everything. Every moment in the acting of this drama makes a picture, and every movement is slow, deliberate, as if automatic. No actor makes a gesture, which has not been regulated for him; there is none of that unintelligent haphazard known as being "natural"; these people move like music, or with that sense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest. Gesture being a part of a picture, how should it but be settled as definitely, for that pictorial effect which all action on the stage is (more or less unconsciously) striving after, as if it were the time of a song, or the stage direction: "Cross stage to right"? Also, every gesture is slow; even despair having its artistic limits, its reticence. It is difficult to express the delight with which one sees, for the first time, people really motionless on the stage. After all, action, as it has been said, is only a way of spoiling something. The aim of
[304]the modern stage, of all drama, since the drama of the Greeks, is to give a vast impression of bustle, of people who, like most people in real life, are in a hurry about things; and our actors, when they are not making irrelevant speeches, are engaged in frantically trying to make us see that they are feeling acute emotion, by I know not what restlessness, contortion, and ineffectual excitement. If it were once realised how infinitely more important are the lines in the picture than these staccato extravagances which do but aim at tearing it out of its frame, breaking violently through it, we should have learnt a little, at least, of what the art of the stage should be, of what Wagner has shown us that it can be.
Distance from the accidents of real life, atmosphere, the space for a new, fairer world to form itself, being of the essence of Wagner's representation, it is worth noticing how adroitly he throws back this world of his, farther and farther into the background, by a thousand tricks of lighting, the actual distance of the stage from the
[305]proscenium, and by such calculated effects, as that long scene of the Graal, with its prolonged movement and ritual, through the whole of which Parsifal stands motionless, watching it all. How that solitary figure at the side, merely looking on, though, unknown to himself, he is the centre of the action, also gives one the sense of remoteness, which it was Wagner's desire to produce, throwing back the action into a reflected distance, as we watch someone on the stage who is watching it!
The beauty of this particular kind of acting and staging is of course the beauty of convention. The scenery, for instance, with what an enchanting leisure it merely walks along before one's eyes, when a change is wanted! Convention, here as in all plastic art, is founded on natural truth very closely studied. The rose is first learned, in every wrinkle of its petals, petal by petal, before that reality is elaborately departed from, in order that a new, abstract beauty may be formed out of those outlines, all but those outlines being left out.