So much, then, is clear; according to the Wagnerian theory, mere poetry needs music to help it to make its direct appeal to Feeling; mere music needs the concrete suggestions of poetry to give it order and direction. Even in the later works of Beethoven the pendulum shifts from absolute, abstract musical tone-weaving to the effort to say more definite things; there awoke in him, says Wagner, "a longing for distinct expression of specific, characteristically individual emotions," and he "began to care less and less about merely making music." The climax of this impulse to blend musical feeling and poetic purpose in the one art-work was, of course, to be the Wagnerian opera or music-drama.

This line of argumentation leads to two other propositions:—

(1) In the first place, given that music and poetry are to co-operate to make one product, and given that the most perfect art-form is that which makes a single, undivided, undistracting appeal to us, it follows that the more intimately the two factors are blended the better the result will be. There must be no little bit of music that hangs out, as it were, and declines to meet the poetry on equal terms; there must be no little bit of poetry that refuses to be amenable to musical expression. The compromise must be perfect; there must be just so much poetic purpose as is necessary to keep the musical utterance definite and unmistakable, and just so much musical outpouring as is necessary to lift all the poetry into the ideal realm of Feeling; just so much in each case and no more. There must be a complete "emotionalisation of the intellect"; or, to use yet another of Wagner's phrases, we must have "a truly unitarian" form. And in answer to the question, "Has the poet to restrict himself in presence of the musician, and the musician in presence of the poet?" he says that they must not restrict each other, "but rouse each other's powers into highest might, by love...." "... If the poet's aim—as such—is still at hand and visible, then it has not as yet gone under into the Musical Expression; but if the Musician's Expression—as such—is still apparent, then it, in turn, has not yet been inspired by the Poetic Aim." In the Zukunftsmusik he puts the same idea in other words: the ideal text can be achieved only by "that poet who is fully alive to Music's tendency and exhaustless faculty of expression, and therefore drafts his poem in such a fashion that it may penetrate the finest fibres of the musical tissue, and the spoken thought entirely dissolve into the Feeling."

(2) In the second place, the new circumstances must sanction a new form. What was quite right in the symphony, having regard to its peculiar purpose, will be quite wrong in the music-drama, where the purpose is altogether different. Nowhere, perhaps, is Wagner on safer ground, or more illuminative in his reasoning, than he is here. He shows how the symphony—like all purely abstract musical utterances—must adopt certain definite formal methods of procedure if it is to hang together at all. The growth of sonata-form in the eighteenth century was determined not by the arbitrary desires of individuals here and there, but by a deep underlying logic—a logic of the emotions—that ran unconsciously through them and through their hearers. It was this obscure, intuitive logic that made the need felt for a second subject in contrast with the first, for an exposition of these two subjects, for their working out, and for their final recapitulation; it was this logic that determined the contrast of character between the different movements. The kaleidoscope had to be perpetually bringing the picture before us in new aspects; the essence of dramatic working is development; the essence of "all forms arisen from the March or Dance" is change. Thus the new form for dramatic music must be sought in the nature of that genre, not in the nature of a quite alien genre. In the essay On Franz Liszt's Symphonic Poems, Wagner points out, as we have seen, how the laws of drama and the laws of symphony are at variance. Let me quote the gist of his remarks again. "It will be obvious that, in the conflict of a dramatic idea with this (symphonic) form, the necessity must at once arise to either sacrifice the development (the idea) to the alternation (the form), or the latter to the former"; whereupon follows the criticism of the Leonora overture which I have already quoted. When he reaches the point that a new form would have been necessary to allow free and consistent play to Beethoven's ideas in the Leonora, he asks, "What, now, would that form be?" and replies, "Of necessity a form dictated by the subject of portrayal and its logical development."

Having briefly sketched out the two leading principles of Wagner's theory, let us now leave the second, which is perfectly clear in itself and in all its implications, and return to the first, the implications of which are perhaps not quite so clear. Wagner himself held that as he grew in artistic wisdom, his opera-poems came closer and closer to the ideal form, in which there should be just as much music as the poetry required, and just as much poetry as the music required. He admitted that the poems of Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin were not quite all they should be; they were simply stages in his evolution. But he was willing to submit the poem of Tristan to the severest possible test of conformity with his ideal. "Upon that work," he says, "I consent to your making the severest claims deducible from my theoretic premisses: not because I formed it on any system, for every theory was clean forgotten by me; but since here I moved with fullest freedom and the most utter disregard of every theoretic scruple...."

What now is the great advantage, according to Wagner's theory, that the musical dramatist has over the poet or the novelist? Simply this, that he can discard all the more or less uninspired matter that they require in order to make their purpose clear, and plunge at once into the heart of his subject. Take, as an example, this very poem of Tristan and Isolde. The poet or the novelist, before he can begin to move you, must descend to a relatively unemotional plane in order to acquaint your understanding with certain positive facts it is essential it should know. He must tell you who Tristan and Isolde were, when and where they lived, what was their relation to the other people of the drama, and a score of other things that can hardly be made emotional in themselves. A long poem or drama is bound, by the nature of the case, to have a certain amount of dross scattered about among its gold; the beautiful appeals to Feeling are only made into a coherent story or picture by the use of this less emotional tissue. From this difficulty the musical dramatist escapes; in music he has a powerful engine that enables him to dispense with all these mere wrappings of his Feeling, and reach directly and immediately to the Feeling itself. He avoids the arbitrary, and takes up his stand at once in the centre of the "purely human." Thus Wagner needs no preliminary fumbling about for his tragedy; the first bar of the overture transports you at once into the world and the mood to which the poet must drag you through twenty explanatory pages. "All that detailed description and exhibition of the historico-conventional which is requisite for making us clearly understand the events of a given, remote historical epoch, and which the historical novelist or dramatist of our times has therefore to set forth at such exhaustive length—all this I could pass over." He concerns himself not with historical subjects but with the simple myth or legend, for "the legend, in whatever age or nation it occurs, has the merit of seeing nothing but the purely human content of that age and nation, and of giving forth that Content in a form peculiar to itself, of sharpest outline, and therefore swiftly understandable." The musician, in fact, must discard everything but the purely human; he must take a poetical subject of which this is the core, and then kindle it into incandescence by means of music. In Tristan, says Wagner, "I plunged into the inner depth of soul-events, and from out this inmost centre of the world I fearlessly built up its outward form. A glance at the volume of this poem will show you at once that the exhaustive detail-work which an historical poet is obliged to devote to clearing up the outward bearings of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, I now trusted myself to apply to these latter alone. Life and death, the whole import and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul." The object, of course, was—to recur to a previous order of imagery—to reduce the amount of dross in the work and to increase the amount of pure gold; all the available space ought to be devoted not to demonstrations or recitals of fact but to the evocation of feelings, to "exhibiting the inner springs of action, those inner soul-motives which are finally and alone to stamp the Action as a necessary one."

So much, then, is clear. Without questioning one of Wagner's contentions—accepting his theory as true, without disagreeing with his data or his reasoning—we come to these positions:—

  1. Poetry without music is lacking in expression, in appeal to Feeling: music without poetry is lacking in the power to give a definite direction to Feeling.
  2. An art-form therefore must be sought that will be an amalgam of the two, with the advantages of each and the defects of neither.
  3. In proportion as the advantages are retained and the defects eliminated will the new art-form approach ideal perfection.
  4. The musical defect to be guarded against is the attempt to subject dramatic music to the laws of symphonic music: this is easily overcome, and there only remains the poetic defect to be avoided, i.e.
  5. All poetic or verbal material that cannot be "musicalised," or caught up into the spirit of music, is superfluous and harmful; therefore in proportion as the music-drama is perfected will this kind of material tend to disappear.

So far, so good. The point remaining to be considered is this: can we ever totally eliminate this non-musical material from opera? Let us say, for example, in terms of the Wagnerian æsthetic, that a good opera on the subject of Romeo and Juliet will be nearer artistic perfection than Shakespeare's play, because it will dispense with all the poet's clumsy methods of reaching the Feeling through the viscous waters of the Understanding—that it will concern itself only with the "purely human," with the "inner springs of action" of the souls of the characters, and that it will raise these—to use a term borrowed from electrical science—to the highest potential, the highest incandescence. Granting all this, let us then press our question a point further still. There will, let us admit, be less non-emotional matter in the opera than in the drama, less hard, incalcitrant material that cannot be emotionalised, but that has to be there because without it the structure cannot hang together. Admitting that there will be less of it, will any one venture to say that there will be none of it in the opera? I think not. Â priori considerations apart, an appeal to practical experience will soon disillusionise us. Of all the thousands of operas that have been written since opera began, not one, outside the works of Wagner, will pass successfully through the ordeal. Of Wagner's operas, Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin are, by his own admission, as I have already shown, put out of court. The Ring will certainly not stand the test; Parsifal certainly will not; The Mastersingers certainly will not. There only remains Tristan, of the form and substance of which he himself was justly proud. It will pass the judges with a lighter sentence than any of the others; but will it be dismissed without a stain on its character? By no means. Even in the pure, dazzling, magnificent metal of Tristan itself we find embedded, here and there, a refractory piece of alien ore, of raw material not yet put through the subtle alchemy that must divinise it. If then this last straw fails us, where shall we look for salvation? The only answer can be that salvation on these lines is impossible. Reduce the coarser, explanatory, unemotional matter of opera—the merely utilitarian stuff, the paste that binds the more precious things together—reduce this as you will, some of it you are still bound to retain in opera, for without it opera cannot have enough intellectual, dramatic consistency to ensure our getting hold of it. And if (1) granting the premisses, the reasoning by which the Wagnerian theorem is supported has been flawless, and (2) the brain that strove to embody that theorem in practical art was an organ mightier than anything the sons of men are likely to see for a very long time to come—then, I take it, there is only one conclusion possible, that the failure occurs through attempting to realise the theory in the wrong medium. To phrase it differently, the logic of the case is not rigorously enough applied at the last stage, when it comes to be pushed to its ultimate conclusion. Always bearing in mind that, according to Wagner, the strong point of the musical drama, as compared with any other poetic art-form, is that the non-emotional matter in it can be reduced to a minimum, let us ask ourselves whether a form cannot be found in which even this minimum can be dispensed with. The answer will be that the necessary conditions are united in the symphonic poem, which is therefore the true heir of Wagner's theory, and has been too long kept out of its lawful inheritance.

Two points now fall to be considered: (1) Can the affiliation of the symphonic poem to the Wagnerian theory be properly established, and the superiority of its rights of succession over those of its half-brother opera be fully demonstrated; and (2) are there no defects, suggested by Wagner himself, that unfit the symphonic poem to hold sway over opera?