All the overtures, then, that epitomise the opera with which they are connected are in the same category as the symphonic poem; for an understanding of the literary basis of them we have to go to a source outside themselves. The theory that a piece of music is bad music unless it is "self-sufficing" and "self-explanatory" is a mere nightmare of the arm-chair æsthetician. There are thousands of pages in Bach that only yield up their full secret to us when we get some outside light upon the sequence of poetic ideas in his mind at the time of writing. This is the case with many of the chorale preludes, for example. But Bach's music is often rich in a kind of allusive symbolism greatly resembling Wagner's use of the leading motive, though it is bolder than that, inasmuch as the musical symbol has not been made familiar to us by a previous definite use of it in the same work of art. In the Christmas Oratorio Bach sets the words of a chorale addressed to the infant Jesus to the music of another chorale that was already associated in the minds of the congregation with the Passion—thus in a flash bringing the death of the Saviour into the same mental picture as the birth.[416] The chorale fantasia which the blind old man dictated to his pupil Altnikol a few days before his death united the music of the hymn "In our hour of direst need," with the words of "I come before thy throne." And who can forget the effect, comparable to some of the most thrilling of those that Wagner makes with his leading motives, of the trumpet pealing out with the melody of "Great God, what do I see and hear! The end of things created" in the midst of the bass recitative describing the terrors of the Day of Judgment (in the cantata Wachet, betet). Bach anticipated, as he did most things in modern music, the Wagnerian use of the leading motive, the function of which is to suggest to the hearer's imagination another idea simultaneously with the one the music is explicitly expressing. I think Bach would have smiled at anyone who chose to object that his chorale in the Christmas Oratorio was not self-sufficing, inasmuch as it depended for its affecting double meaning upon knowledge that the hearer had gathered elsewhere. He would probably have been satisfied with the unshakable fact that the hearer had this knowledge, and that it was therefore quite safe to rely on his making use of it. Surely the composer of the symphonic poem and allied forms is also justified in trusting occasionally to his auditors' outside knowledge of the subject of his work. Is there anything less legitimate in Strauss's trusting to our imagination to summon up at performance the scenes and the figures of Don Quixote, than there is in Wagner's trusting to it, during the Tannhäuser or Meistersinger Overture, to summon up the scenes and figures of the opera? I have already pointed out that in his music-dramas Wagner is continually asking us, by means of recurrent leading motives, to visualise more than is actually set before us on the stage—thus flying in the face of his own theoretical arguments. It only needs to be added that he also relied, at times, as much as the writer of symphonic poems does, upon the hearer's or spectator's knowing more about the course of the drama than has been revealed to him in the drama itself. How do we know, for example, that the "Sword" motive in the final scene of the Rhinegold is a "Sword" motive at all? How do we know the train of thought running through Wotan's mind at this point as he looks into the future? Simply by antedating the information we have gained from the later dramas of the Ring. At the time the "Sword" motive is first heard there has never been the slightest suggestion of the sword that is to help to lift the curse from the gods; not only Siegfried but Siegfried's parents are as yet unborn. Again, the phrase that Tannhäuser sings to the words "Ha, jetzt erkenne ich sie wieder, die schöne Welt der ich entrückt" in the first Act of the opera is explained only by the association of it with Elisabeth and the Hall of Song in the second Act. Anyone with a knowledge of the Wagnerian operas can multiply these instances for himself.
Does not everything, in fact, point to the impossibility of our listening to any performance of a drama or opera, except the first one, with a mind that is absolutely a clean slate? Are we not always drawing consciously or unconsciously upon our store of acquired knowledge of the work, and blending this with the visual or auditory impressions of the moment? Do we not all know, long before it happens, that the screen will fall down at a certain climactic point in the School for Scandal and show us Lady Teazle hiding behind it? Is not our appreciation of all the dialogue of this scene whetted by our knowledge—gained from "outside" sources—of what is going to happen at the end of it? The instructed spectator or reader invariably keeps looking ahead, his interest or delight in what is occurring at the moment being intensified by what may be called anticipatory memory. It is only at the first time of reading Tom Jones that we can be in the slightest doubt as to who is the hero's mother. The ever-present clue to the solution of the mystery does not spoil our pleasure, however, in the second and subsequent readings; nay, it rather adds to it, for it makes us conscious of a number of cunning strokes of construction that we had not noticed at the first reading. At the second and every subsequent performance of Mr. John Galsworthy's The Pigeon a thrill of horror goes through us at the exit of Mrs. Megan in the second Act, for we know—what we did not know at the first performance—that she means to throw herself into the river; and for this reason the second performance necessarily makes a profounder effect on us than the first. I take it, then, that an exaggerated importance can be attached to the principle of art being "self-sufficing" and "self-explanatory" at the first time of hearing or seeing; the subject is a far more complex one than the amateur æstheticians have imagined. They had only to turn to the Greek drama to see a form of art in which deliberate advantage was taken by every author of the fact that the audience had an "outside" knowledge of the characters and events of the play. The Greek drama, broadly speaking, did not rely, as ours does, on the effect of a slow unfolding of a complicated plot—the main art of which consists in first of all giving the audience something to hunt for and then finding it for them. The Greek drama was based on a myth or a legend every detail of which was known to every member of the audience. At a first performance, therefore, the audience would be in precisely the same position as a modern audience is when it reads in its programme-book the analysis of a new symphonic poem that is about to be performed. And this knowledge, so far from diminishing the audience's enjoyment of the drama, actually intensified it, and permitted to the author an amount of subtle psychological allusion that can only be compared with the effects of the leading motive in modern opera. When Clytemnestra, for instance, in Æschylus's drama, greets Agamemnon with falsely-fawning words, the thrill that ran through the Athenian audience came not from any feeling of foreboding inspired by the visible situation or the actual words, but from its outside knowledge that all this was feigning, and that the hounds of death were already hot on the track of the unsuspecting king. Wagner would have flashed the same light upon Clytemnestra's words by means of an orchestral motive. An Athenian, again, at the first performance of the Œdipus Rex, must have known the whole of the story from the beginning. There could be for him none of the cumulative surprise at the slow unravelling of the web that we feel at a first reading of the tragedy; rather did he accompany the first blind steps of Œdipus with a pity born of the knowledge—the outside knowledge—of the doom the gods had woven for him.
VIII
If, then, there is no æsthetic falsity involved in assuming some previous knowledge of the action or the motive on the part of the spectator, or in communicating this knowledge by other means than a stage presentation, why should we not boldly recognise that the time is ripe for a new form of art that shall carry the potency of music a step further than it was carried by Wagner? After all, it is the music that counts for ninety-five per cent, of our enjoyment of a Wagner opera. The "philosophy" of the Ring may be something to write or read about in the study, but in the theatre it really goes for very little. It is interesting to talk about the Schopenhauerian or Hindoo significance of the discourse of the lovers, in the second Act of Tristan, upon Love and Death, and Night and Day; but again—for how much does this count in the theatre? Has there ever been a single spectator, since Tristan was first given, who could make out from the performance alone what philosophy it was the lovers were talking, or whether they were talking philosophy at all? And how many people who do know the text at this point—because they have read it—feel in the theatre that very much of the essential emotion of the work would be lost if the characters sang Chinese words, or Choctaw words, or no words at all, so long as the music was left to tell its own tale? I must guard against possible misunderstanding here. I am not for a moment urging that speech should henceforth be banished from opera as a mere superfluity.[417] There are many subjects in which it will always be a necessity; the world of the Meistersinger, for instance, could have been made real to us in no other medium than that of music with words. But I do contend that there are many poetic subjects in which virtually the whole of the expression could be entrusted with perfect safety to music alone,—not necessarily in the form of a symphonic poem, but in a sort of drama without actors—if the paradox may be permitted—or with speechless actors. And could we not in this way approach a step nearer to the ideal musical art-work, in which all the needful suggestiveness of poetry was retained without any admixture of the cruder non-musical elements that at present merely go to make plot and persons intelligible to the auditor?
IX
Maeterlinck and others have of late familiarised us with the idea of a "static" as distinguished from the older "dynamic" drama. It is highly probable that in the future men will go to the theatre craving the satisfaction of rather different desires from those they seek to satisfy there now. That "drama" is capable of more than one meaning is proved by the existence of dramatic forms so varied as those of the Greek drama, the Shakespearean drama, the Maeterlinckian drama, the Atalanta in Calydon of Swinburne, The Dynasts of Mr. Thomas Hardy, and the Getting Married of Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is quite reasonable to suppose, therefore, that a new generation may read another new meaning into the word. Among the finer minds of the present day there is a decided movement away from what seems to them the crudity of the old-style "well-constructed" drama of action. Maeterlinck, in one or two of his essays, has given eloquent expression to the feelings that inspire this movement of revolt. Many of the time-honoured dramatic "motives" are already sadly discredited. The dagger and the poison-bowl no longer play the part in tragedy that they used to play. Humanity has come to see that things of this kind are the mere excrescences of a dramatic action,—the mere crude outward and visible signs of desires and passions working in secret in the souls of men,—and their gaze is being turned more and more on the psychological springs of action rather than on the visible actions themselves. Drama, in the hands of thoughtful poetical writers, is becoming more and more an affair of the inner rather than the outer man; and it is probable that, as time goes on, still less reliance will be placed on the crude stage effect of violent action. It need hardly be said that as drama dispenses with piece after piece of action and explanation, and comes deeper down to the essence of tragedy as a war of impulses in a man's soul or of the fates about his path, it approaches more nearly to the mood of music. We may look in the future to a yet further purging of poetic drama of many of the tedious conventional devices on which it is still dependent so long as it has to play off a number of characters against each other like chessmen on a few square yards of board in a theatre. I think I can foresee the time when most of what now passes for "plot interest"—the pretence on the author's part of hiding something merely in order that it may in due time be triumphantly found again—will be regarded as something almost childish in the naïve quality of its appeal, and will be relegated to forms of art as much below the general intellectual level of the literature of the day as the detective story is below the intellectual level of our own better novels and dramas. The more artistic the race becomes, the less will it crave for mere facts and events in drama, and the more for an imaginative reading of the soul on which the facts and events have written their record. Again let me interpolate a word of warning against a misunderstanding of my thesis. I am not supposing that a time will ever come when the drama as we have it now will have disappeared from the stage. I fully recognise that there are certain dramatic concepts that can never be adequately expressed except by means of clashing and marching and counter-marching characters, and action more or less violent or clockworklike. But I fancy that in the not distant future the more poetic side of man will demand a form of art in which very little happens or is told, but in which the soul of the spectator is flooded by emotions of pity and sorrow and love that are all the more penetrating because they do not come to us through the relatively cold medium of words and the childish, creaking clockwork of exits and entrances and surprises and intrigue.
X
It is this attitude of the artistic mind of the future towards drama that will, I think, find utterance in a form of quasi-dramatic music in which we shall be rid of all or most of the mere scaffolding of narration or action that serves at present simply to give intellectual support to the music of opera. Even in Wagner are we not painfully conscious at times of the fact that the music, which matters a great deal, is being diluted and made turbid by a quantity of baser matter the only function of which is to make it clear to us why these particular people are there at that particular moment, and what it is that they are doing? It cannot be reiterated too often that it is only the music that can keep alive any form of art into which music enters. The mere facts in an art-work lose their force with repetition; it is only artistic emotion that can be born anew again and again and yet again. Who feels anything but a glow of rapturous anticipation when the first notes of the Liebestod or of Wotan's Abschied are sounded? He may have heard it all a hundred times before, and know every note of it by heart; but it will all be as new and wonderful and inevitable to him at the hundredth hearing as at the first. But who does not involuntarily emit a groan from the very depths of his being when Wagner's first care at the moment is not to kindle us with great music but to tell us through Wotan's lips at great length, and for the hundredth time, certain mere facts that have long lost their absorbing interest for us. And even in his most compact work, Tristan, is there not a great deal that is, from the highest point of view, superfluous? We can bear to hear the same glorious music time without number; but we will not bear being told time without number who Tristan and Isolde and Marke and Morold are, and how Tristan slew Morold, and how Isolde nursed Tristan back to health, and all the rest of it. I can imagine a Tristan in which things of this kind would be assumed to be matters of common knowledge on the part of the audience, as the characters and motives of Tchaikovski's Romeo and Juliet or Francesca da Rimini are assumed to be common knowledge, or those of Strauss's Macbeth or Till Eulenspiegel, or those of Beethoven's Coriolan and Egmont Overtures or the Leonora No. 3, or those of Dukas's L'Apprenti Sorcier. Then the whole of the composer's time and the audience's attention could be devoted to that full musical exposition of nothing else but the protagonists' "soul-states" and "soul-events" which Wagner avowed as the ideal of music-drama, but which is virtually an impossible ideal so long as opera is compelled to utilise so many actors on so much and no more of a stage, and to occupy precisely so many hours of an evening.
As it happens, we already have in the Greek drama,—especially that of the older type,—a form of poetic art strongly resembling that which I am here suggesting might be now produced in music. Not only did the old Greek dramatist, as we have seen, largely rely on the audience's knowledge of the characters and events of his play, and so save himself the necessity of much action or much scene-shifting, but he cast the drama into a concentrated form that enabled him to appeal rather to the spectator's sense of poetry than to the mere delight in external catastrophe and the unravelling of plot; while in the chorus he had under his hand an instrument capable of extraordinary emotional expression. The Greek drama, in fact, was singularly akin to the music-drama of Wagner. As Wagner saw, the true modern equivalent of the Greek chorus is the orchestra; it is at once part of the action and aloof from it, an ideal spectator, sympathising, commenting, correcting. The Greek drama resembles ideal opera, again, in that the ultimate sentiment disengaged from it is one not of facts shown, or of interest held by the mere interplay of intrigue, but of a high poetic spirit, purifying and transfiguring the common life of things.
Is not this form capable of further development? Is it not possible to construct an art-form in which the mere facts that it is necessary for us to know are either assumed as known or set before us in the briefest possible way, so that music can take upon itself the whole burden of expression, and the whole work of art be nothing but an outpouring of lofty, quintessential emotion? Can we not imagine something like the second Act of Tristan with silent and only dimly visible actors, the music, helped by their gestures, telling us all that is in their souls, while they are too remote from us for the crude personality of the actors and the theatrical artificiality of the stage-setting to jar upon us as they do at present? Cannot some story be taken as so well known to everyone that only the shadowiest hints of the course of it need be given to the spectator, the real drama being in the music? Or, to go a step further, cannot we dispense altogether with the stage and the visible actor, such external coherence as the music needs being afforded by impersonal voices floating through a darkened auditorium? [418] The effect of disembodied voices can be made extraordinarily moving; in all my experience of concert-going I can remember no sensations comparable to those I felt during the Grail scene from Parsifal at one of the Three Choirs Festivals; the exquisite beauty of the boys' voices floating down from one knew not where was something almost too much for mortal senses to endure. Here, in the concealed, impersonal choir, is an instrument, I think, the full emotional power of which is not yet suspected by composers. It lends itself admirably to just that desire for the exploration of the mysteries around us that music is always endeavouring to satisfy. As the cruder kind of action goes out of drama, the hovering Fates will come in. Mr. Hardy, in The Dynasts, has given us a hint of what may be done by a partial reversion to the Greek type of drama, the purblind, struggling human protagonists being surrounded by an invisible chorus of Fates that see to the hidden roots of things. A poetic scheme of this kind could be made extremely impressive by music,—say a series of orchestral pictures of human desires and passions, having a simple intellectual co-ordination of their own, with an invisible chorus commenting upon it all now and then in the style of the Fates of Mr. Hardy or the chorus of Æschylus. There are, I think, several possible new art-forms open to us when we shall have learned to dispense, for certain purposes, with the actor and his speech, to rely upon the audience's previous knowledge of some story of universal interest and significance, and to leave it to music alone to express the whole of the dramatic or poetic implications of the story. But it is perhaps vain to try to forecast these future developments by means of reason. They will certainly come, but not by theorists taking thought of them; they will have to be born, as the Wagnerian drama was, out of the burning need of some great soul.