And if there has never been a brain in music that saw so deeply into the springs of character, there has never been a musical brain with such a grasp of a drama as a whole. It was the mighty, tireless synthetic engine that we meet with only some score of times, perhaps, in the whole history of human thought,—in two or three great military commanders, a few great architects, and half-a-dozen philosophers. It is becoming more and more evident each year that since his death there has been no single composer of anything like his bigness, no single composer capable of work at once so new and so coherently wrought. His was the last truly great mind to find expression in music. That statement is not at all inconsistent with the admission that modern composers have said many hundreds of things that Wagner could never have thought of: I simply mean that the brains of Strauss and Debussy or any two others put together would not equal Wagner's in range, in depth, in staying power. There has not been a musician since his time who can "think in continents" as he did. The more we study him, indeed, the more wonderful do this sweep of vision and tenacity of hold become to us. There is nothing in all other men's music comparable to Wagner's feat of keeping the vast scheme of the Ring in his head for more than a quarter of a century, and actually laying it aside completely for eleven years during that time, without relaxing his grip for a moment upon the smallest limb of the great drama. It is in virtue of this fiery and unceasing play of the imagination and this stupendous synthetic power that he takes his place among the half-dozen most comprehensive minds that have ever worked in art.
In music there are only two brains—those of Bach and Beethoven—to compare with his in breadth of span. Say what we will about the repetitions and the longueurs of the Ring, there is nothing in all music, and very little else in any other art, to compare with that wonderful work for combined scope and concentration of design. Wagner had in abundance the rarest of all artistic gifts,—the faculty, as a great critic has put it, of seeing the last line in the first, of never losing sight of the whole through all the tangle of detail. One might almost say that no other modern brain except Napoleon's and Herbert Spencer's has been able to keep all the minutiæ of a gigantic problem so unfailingly within the one sphere of vision. Wagner forgot nothing in his work: at any stage of it he could summon up at a moment's notice not only any figure he wanted, in all its natural warmth of life, but the very atmosphere that surrounded it, the very mood it induced in others. To me one of the most marvellous instances of this has always been the passage in Waltraute's recital in the third scene of the Götterdämmerung, in which, in the midst of that extraordinary picture of the frustrated Wotan brooding among the joyless gods in Valhalla, she speaks of the god remembering his favourite and banished child:
Then soft grew his look:
He remembered, Brynhilde, thee!
It is a far cry at this stage from the parting of the god and his daughter in the Valkyrie; but at the mere mention of it there wells up in Wagner, after twelve years or more, all the emotion of the wonderful union between them, and the gloomy, careworn music melts for a bar or two into a tear-compelling tenderness. Another magnificent illustration of this gift of his of looking before and after may be had in the third Act of the Meistersinger, just after the greeting of Sachs by the populace of Nuremberg. That reception is surely the most overwhelming thing of its kind the earth has ever seen or heard; it has always been a mystery to me how any merely human singer can find a voice in which to respond to it. But it is precisely here that we realise the subtlety of Wagner's conception of Sachs, the profoundly imaginative way in which he saw him, and his ever-present sense of the fundamentals of the character through apparently the most distracting vicissitudes. Any other operatic librettist and composer, after that million-throated outburst, would have set a strutting Sachs on his feet, smilingly and condescendingly accepting the homage of the multitude. Wagner makes his Sachs realise nothing but his own unworthiness and the sense of something hollow and fleeting in all this vociferation; and there is hardly an effect in all music to compare for subtlety, for poetry, for the profundity of its humanity, with the instantaneous melting of the crimson and purple strains of the folk into the quiet grey theme of Sachs' sorrow in the strings. It was the only possible outlet from what any other sincere composer would have instinctively felt to be an emotional impasse; and it was only Wagner who could have found the outlet. He is great in many ways, but in no way greater than in this faculty of keeping the burning vision of the moment always in touch with those that have passed and those that are to come; in all contemporary music there is not to be found a brain with a third of his power in this respect. In the latest operas of Strauss, strewn with fine things as they are, there is no such unity of style, no such ardour of conception, no such unrelaxing hold upon every character in every phase of it; and of course no purely orchestral work can compare with even a single opera of Wagner's for combined sweep of design and closeness of texture.
11
The clarity and unity of Wagner's vision are evident again in the pictorial element that plays so large a part in his works. He was often pictorial without intending it, and was himself probably unconscious of many of the effects of light, colour, and atmosphere that delight us in his music. Mr. Runciman has done well to insist upon the gift, exhibited as early as Die Feen, for not only visualising a scene or a character for us but giving it us in its natural tints. We have happily got past the day when old-fashioned theorists used to lay it down that "pure" music was "concerned with nothing but itself," and that whoever made it concern itself with appearances of the visible world was at the best no more than half a musician. As I have argued in an earlier chapter of this book, we cannot parcel off the human consciousness into psychology-tight bulkheads in this way. The various faculties are always crossing over into each other's territories for a moment, and coming back with spoils that they refuse to surrender for the rest of their days. The theorists have always been telling us that music cannot "paint." The composers, knowing much more about the matter than the theorists, have always gone on painting to their heart's content,—Bach, for example, being incorrigibly realistic. The three minds with the most pronounced bias towards tone-painting were probably those of Bach, Schubert (in his songs), and Wagner. But between the musician-painters there are as many differences of vision and of manner as there are between "pure" musicians or "pure" painters; and Wagner, in this regard as in every other, brought certain new elements into music, and still stands in a class by himself.
The curious thing about him is that while no other man's music gives us such an impression of being bound up at almost every point with the visible world in which we live and move, actual realism of the ordinary kind is comparatively rare with him, and it is certainly the least important factor in this impression. Now and again, of course, he does "paint" the concrete in the realistic way made familiar to us by the modern symphonic poem-writers. But this way is not at all a new way. The music of Schubert and that of Bach, as has been said, is full of realism of this order,—Schubert's spinning-wheel and Bach's serpents, to give merely two well-known instances. To this category belong Wagner's Rhine, and his fire music, and the whinnying of the Valkyries' horses. But there is really not much realism of that sort in Wagner's music. He objected to it in Berlioz and others unless there was a very good reason for it, and never employed it himself except where it complied with the dual condition of being thoroughly justified by the scene and unquestionably within the scope of musical expression. Wagner does comparatively little tone-painting of the purely realistic kind, but of course he does it always with superb certainty, profiting by a hundred years of evolution of technique since Bach, and by the gorgeous instrument that the modern orchestra places at his disposal.
A subtler sort of pictorialism,—subtler because it is unpremeditated and unconscious,—is that to which Mr. Runciman has drawn attention. No one except Hugo Wolf has ever approached Wagner in the capacity for bathing each scene, each character, in a light and an atmosphere of its own. (Wolf's achievements in this line were of course on a much smaller scale than Wagner's, but some of them are hardly less wonderful if we take into consideration the limitations of the black-and-white medium in which he worked.) This is surely one of the most baffling mysteries in music,—how the same few dozen tones and colours can be made to suggest such differently coloured aspects of the visible world, a world, we must remember, from which music is utterly cut off by the very nature of its medium. But whatever the explanation, the fact is indubitable; though it is a comparatively new thing in music, and indeed would not be possible without our modern developments of harmony, colour and technique. It is virtually unknown in pre-Wagnerian music. I do not mean that no previous composer ever gave a specially appropriate tint to a particular scene. That was frequently done; but it was done more or less by a convention, by the use of instruments having a particular association in the minds of the audience, as when the oboe or the cor anglais would be used for suggesting a pastoral scene, or the horns,—as in the beautiful passage at the commencement of the Freischütz overture—for suggesting a wood. The Wagnerian and Wolfian method to which I am now referring is something quite different from this. The term "method," indeed, is inappropriate, for it is impossible to reduce it to any rules or to trace the secret of its effect, as we can in the two other general instances I have cited. It is possible to say that the cold, bare effect of Wolf's Das verlassene Mägdlein comes from the peculiar harmonies he uses, and the pitch at which they are used,—just as the pastoral effect of the "Scène aux champs" in Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique comes from the use of the cor anglais. But the difference is this,—that you can standardise, as it were, the pastoral effects of the oboe or the cor anglais, whereas you cannot standardise the effects of Das verlassene Mägdlein. Even in the hands of a fifth-rate composer the oboe may be made to suggest a shepherd: but give Wolf's harmonies to a second-rate musician and tell him to "paint" with them as Wolf has done, and he will soon realise that the "painting" is really not separable from the music as a whole, even though we may be able to say analytically that it is due to one factor more than another. The truth is that the scene has been perceived with such intensity of vision by the composer that, unknown to him, and without any volition on his part, the vision has made its own idiom for itself, incarnated itself in lines and colours that are expressive of it and it alone.
It is this subtle faculty that is always unconsciously operative in Wagner. It first comes to light in Die Feen. It gave parts of the Flying Dutchman their strange salt tang. It makes the peculiar white light of Lohengrin. And after that opera, when Wagner had attained full command of his powers, it did astounding things for him. There is a different light, a different air, in each of the four dramas of the Ring; and this broad difference between any two of the four is maintained in spite of there being minor differences of colour between the various scenes of each of them. How mysterious and infallible this faculty is in its workings is best seen from the fact that when Wagner took up the second half of Siegfried, in 1869, after having suspended work upon it in 1857, he did what no other musician before him or since could have done—spontaneously, unconsciously reverted to the idiom of twelve years before. Between those two dates he had travelled an incredibly long path as a musician; he had written Tristan and the Meistersinger, two works with as many differences of idiom between themselves as there are between either of them and the Ring. Yet the wonderful brain could sweep itself clear of all the new impressions that had fed it during those twelve years, and, though the new acquisitions of technique of course remained, he thinks himself back in a flash to the very centre of the souls of the Ring characters and the very colour and temperature of the scenes he had parted from so long ago.