Exile has been the lot of many who tried to live for sanity, justice and truth when mad riot raged. Dante, Victor Hugo, Prince Kropotkin and Wagner are types to which we turn. Then there is an attenuated form of persecution known as ostracism, which consists in being exiled at home, but of this it is not worth while to speak.
Wagner was a strong, honest man who simply desired to express his better self. The elements of caution and expediency were singularly lacking in his character. These qualities of independence and self-reliance brought him into speedy collision with those who stood in the front rank of the artistic world of his day, and he became a marked man. His offense was that he expressed his honest self.
In Eighteen Hundred Forty-three, when he appeared upon the scene in Dresden as Hofkapellmeister of the Royal Theater, matters musical were just about where the stage now is in America. In this Year of Grace, Nineteen Hundred One, the great Shakespeare has been elbowed from the stage by the author of "A Texas Steer"; and where once the haughty Richard trod the boards, the skirt-dance assumes the center of the stage and looms lurid like the spirit of the Brocken. Recently a vaudeville "turn" of Hamlet has been presented, where the gravediggers do their gruesome tasks to ragtime; and on every hand we behold the Lyceum giving way to the McClure Continuous, Lim.
Wagner abhorred the mere tune for the sake of tune. "You can not produce art and leave man out," he said. All art must suggest something. Mere verbal description is not literature: it is only words, words, words; a picture must be charged with soul, otherwise a photograph would outrank "The Angelus." Music must be more than jingling tunes and mincing sounds. And thus we find Wagner at thirty years of age boldly putting forth "The Flying Dutchman," with music not written for the text, nor text written for the music, but words and music created at the same time—the melody mirroring forth the soul of the words.
In this play Wagner for the first time sacrificed every precedent of musical construction and all thought of symmetrical form, in order to make the music tell the tale. "The Flying Dutchman" is to opera what Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is to poetry, or Millet's "Sower" is to painting. There is strength, heroic strength, in each of these masterpieces I have named, but the "Dutchman" needs a listener, "Leaves of Grass" requires a reader who has experienced, and the "Sower" demands one who has eyes to see, before its lesson of love and patience and the pathetic truth of endless toil are bodied forth.
Whitman's book was well looked after by the local Antonius Ash-Box inspector of the day, its publication forbidden, and the author incidentally deprived of his clerkship at Washington; Millet did service as the butt for jokes of artistic Paris, and was dubbed "The Wild Man"; Wagner's play was hooted off the stage.
very man is but a type representing his class. Of course the class may be small and one man may even be its sole living representative: but Wagner had his double in William Morris. These men were brothers in temperament, physique, habit of thought and occupation.
Wagner wrote largely on the subjects of Art and Sociology, and made his appeal for the toiler in that the man should be allowed to share the joys of Art by producing it. His argument is identical with that of William Morris; and yet the essays of Wagner were not translated into English until after Morris had written his "Dream of John Ball," and Morris did not read German.