III
The excellence and the wisdom of these thoughts need no pointing out. What is the defect in them—or, rather, wherein are they incomplete?
This may be seen, in the first place, by playing off Maeterlinck's theory against that of Wagner. It is quite true, as Wagner says, that his kind of music-drama has one great advantage over the poetical drama: that by surrendering certain outlying interests it can concentrate all its power on the central interest—giving full play, as Wagner would express it, to the inner motives of the dramatic action. But, on the other hand, music must, from its very nature, fail to touch a score of ideas and passions that are within us, and for whose expression we are compelled to go to poetry that is unhampered by music. Thus there are certain mental states with which music can have practically no communion. The girl can sing, as Ruskin has told us, of her lost love, but the miser cannot sing of his lost money-bags. For a study of the miser, then, and of all the shades of character that resemble his, we must look, not to music, but to poetry or prose. Again, any one who has seen Verdi's Otello on the stage must have been struck with the relative feebleness of the character-drawing of Iago. A monster of this kind, made up entirely of cunning and deception, is a concept almost entirely foreign to the art of music, which does indeed give a heightened value to the primary emotions, but, on the other hand, has difficulty in reaching beyond these. One frequently finds it hard to believe that Wagner's Mime, who sings such pleasant music, is really a hateful character, owing to the difficulty music has in expressing the mean and despicable. It can render, mainly by physical means, the horrible and the terrible, but the contemptible, the abortive, are practically beyond its sphere.
Nor, again, even in the field where music and poetry meet, does music so far cover the ground, as Wagner would contend, as to make non-musical poetry a superfluity, a mere echo of what can be heard in fuller tones in the drama that is a blend of poetry and music. For the sheer emotional beauty of pity, for exquisite tenderness and complete consolation, nothing, in any art, could surpass certain portions of Parsifal. But it is essentially emotion here, not thought; it is wholly esoteric; it achieves its miracle by withdrawing into its own lovely atmosphere the crude, hard facts of the world, and there transforming them. If we want an expression of pity that shall bear more closely on our real life, give us the emotional balm at the same time that it allows free play to our philosophic thought, we must go to poetry. Look at the colloquy of the pots in the Rubaiyat, in which the humanist Omar empties the vials of his compassion upon the marred and broken beings of this world:—
"Said one among them—'Surely not in vain
My substance of the common Earth was ta'en
And to this Figure moulded, to be broke,
Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again.'
Then said a Second—'Ne'er a peevish Boy
Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy: