Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

In Art and Revolution we get the first hint of that "united art-work" that was to occupy his mind so much during the succeeding years.[336] He holds that "with the Greeks the perfect work of art, the drama, was the sum and substance of all that could be expressed in the Greek nature; it was—in intimate connection with its history—the nation itself that stood facing itself in the art-work, that became conscious of itself, and, during a few hours, rapturously devoured, as it were, its own essence." With the later downfall of tragedy, "art became less and less the expression of the public conscience: the drama split up into its component parts,—rhetoric, sculpture, painting, opera, &c., forsook the ranks in which they had formerly moved together, and now went each its own way and pursued its own development, self-sufficing, indeed, but lonely and egoistic." The great "unified art-work" has been lost for us; only the dissevered arts exist now. In each of them wonders have been wrought; "but the one true art has never been born again, either in the Renaissance or since." And only "the great revolution of mankind" can restore to us this art-work. "If the Greek art-work comprehended the spirit of a beautiful nation, the art-work of the future must comprehend the spirit of a free humanity soaring above all barriers of race." The new art demands a new mankind, and, as a preliminary, a return to nature. Man has been destroyed by culture. The goal both of art and of the social impulse must be "the strong and beautiful man, to whom revolution shall give his strength, and art his beauty."

He looks forward to the time when man shall be free from care for the material things of life, with which the collective wisdom of the community will supply him; and "then will man's enfranchised energy manifest itself only in artistic impulse." Every man will become an artist, and the expression of the artistic emotion of the whole community will be the drama. But art will not be practised for gain. The theatre too must be freed from the greed of industrial speculation. The care of the theatre will be the first concern of an emancipated and enlightened community; it must be managed by "the whole body of the artists themselves, who unite in the art-work and ensure the success of their common efforts by proper co-operation." Admission to the theatre must be free, the community recompensing the dramatists and the performers.

The essay is written at a white heat throughout. His dreams are unrealisable in any world that we can think of at present: but he evidently believed in not only the possible but the speedy realisation of them. In Dresden, in the days before the rising, he expounded them enthusiastically to everyone he met. And he clung to them long after his flight from Dresden. Though he thought nothing was now to be achieved by working for reform, and that only by revolution could a new heaven and a new earth be brought into being,[337] in the possibility of this new heaven and earth he continued to believe. To Sulzer, in Zürich, he "insisted in attaching to the artistic destiny of mankind an importance far above that of any concern of the State."[338] Even in 1851 he had not given up hope that the social revolution that would bring with it the artistic revolution was near at hand. "I assumed that there would soon come a huge revulsion with regard to the public and indeed our whole social life; for the new resulting state of affairs and its real needs I believed that the right material for a quite new and instantaneous relationship of art to the public lay in the work I had sketched so boldly." He saw that the political movement had been crippled, but hoped all the more from the social movement, especially in France. He counted on a great blow for freedom being struck in the French presidential election of 1852. "The condition of the other European States, in which every aspiration was suppressed with stupid brutality, justified one in thinking that this state of affairs also could not last very long anywhere, and everything seemed to be looking towards the great decision that was to be taken in the following year." Uhlig, as he says, argued against him: but nothing could shake Wagner's faith. "Whenever we had to complain of any baseness, I always pointed him to this hopeful and fateful year, my opinion being that we should calmly wait for the expected upheaval, so that when no one else should know what to do, we could make a start. I cannot measure how deeply this hope had taken root in me; I soon, however, was forced to recognise that the confident pride of my assumptions and affirmations was largely due to the greatly increased excitement of my nerves. The news of the coup d'état of the 2nd December in Paris seemed to me absolutely incredible: I was certain the world was coming to an end. When the news was confirmed, and it became clear that events no one had thought possible had happened and seemed likely to endure, I turned away from the investigation of this enigmatic world, as one turns from a mystery the fathoming of which no longer seems to be worth while." So deep was his disappointment at the triumph of reaction that for a little while his health was affected.[339]

IX

It was while he was still panting in the mists of idealism that he wrote The Art-Work of the Future, in which the æsthetic ideas that had been maturing in him during the latter part of the Dresden period found their first full expression.

The basis of his theory is again the belief that we shall not have a real art until we have a new and free humanity. "Man will never be what he can and should be, until his life is a true mirror of nature, a conscious following of the only real necessity, the inner natural necessity, and not subjected to an outer, imaginary, and so not a necessary but an arbitrary power." He is still vibrating with anger against the politicians of the day, to whom he attributes all the evils under the sun; and of course he idealises that mysterious abstraction "the Folk," to whom he sings a rapturous pæan.[340] It is the Folk alone that acts as Necessity dictates,—the Folk being defined as "the sum of all those who feel a common need"; while opposed to the Folk are all those "who feel no want," whose motive force is an artificial and egoistic need, satisfaction for which they seek in luxury,—"which can only be generated and maintained in opposition to and at the cost of the sacrifices of the needy." These were not the views he held upon luxury in later years, when he, one of the most luxurious-souled of men, had the opportunity to satisfy his cravings for silk dressing-gowns and lace shirts and other vanities of this world. His fulminations against luxury are simply the eternal cry of the Have-nots against the Haves.

He is, as always, discontented with the life and the art of his day, both of which seem to him fundamentally false and artificial. "The spirit, in its artistic striving for reunion with nature in the art-work, must either look forward with hope to the future, or mournfully practise resignation." He recognises that we can find redemption only in the art-work that is physically present to the senses (nur im sinnlich gegenwärtigen Kunstwerke), "thus only in a truly art-needing, i.e. art-conditioning Present that shall bring forth art from its own natural truth and beauty": that is to say, he has faith in the power of Necessity, for which this work of the Future is reserved.... "The great united art-work, that must embrace all the genres of art and in some degree undo [verbrauchen] each of them in order to use it as a means to an end, to annul it in order to attain the common aim of all, namely, the unconditioned, immediate representation of perfected human nature,—this great united art-work we cannot recognise as the arbitrary need of the individual, but only as the inevitable [nothwendig denkbare] associated work of the humanity of the future."[341]

He proceeds to elaborate his idea of this united art-work, though the full exposition of it is only to be found in Opera and Drama. With his Teutonic passion for categorisation, he divides man up into neat mental parcels. The intellect has for its organ speech; the organ of feeling is tone. Speech gives determination to the otherwise indeterminate vocal tone: it is "the condensed element of the voice, and the word is the consolidated measure of tone." The whole man is the man of intellect (speech), heart (tone) and body (gesture). Thus the three primeval intertwining sisters of art are Dance, Tone, and Poetry: and true art is a union of the three. Such an art expresses all the faculties of man, whereas the separate arts,—the art-varieties, as he calls them,—only issue from and express this or that faculty. Art must appeal to the eye. "Unless it communicates itself to the eye, all art remains unsatisfying, and thus itself unsatisfied, unfree. No matter how fully it may express itself to the ear, or merely to the combining and mediately compensating faculty of thought [das kombinierende, mittelbar ersetzende Denkvermögen], until it communicates itself intelligibly to the eye it remains only a thing that wills, and not yet fully can. Art, however, must can—it is from können that art, in our language, has acquired the appropriate name of Die Kunst."[342]

Each of the dissevered arts longs for reunion with the others, "Dance longs to pass over into Tone, there to find herself again and know herself; Tone in turn receives the marrowy frame of its structure from the rhythm of Dance.... But Tone's most living flesh is the human voice; the Word again is as it were the bony, muscular rhythm of the human voice." Thus the emotion that overflowed from Dance into Tone finds definition and certainty in the Word, and so is able to reveal itself clearly. The union of these three is "the united lyric art-work," of which the perfected form is the drama. Both the music and the poetry of to-day are impotent. He looks forward to "the overwhelming blow of fate that shall make an end of all the unwieldy musical trash, to make room for the art-work of the future." Nor can poetry alone create the genuine art-work, for no genuine art-work is possible without an appeal to the eye. Poetry should be written to be acted, not read. "The whole impenetrable medley of stored-up literature is in truth—in spite of its million phrases—nothing but the toilsome stammering of speech-impotent thought that longs to pass over into natural immediacy,—a stammering that has been going on for centuries, in verse and prose, without achieving the living Word." Shakespeare was to the art-work of the future no more than Thespis was to the perfected Greek drama. "The deed of the unique Shakespeare, which made a universal man, a very god of him, is yet only the deed of the solitary Beethoven, that revealed to him the language of the artistic manhood of the future. Only where these two Prometheus,—Shakespeare and Beethoven—shall reach out hands to one another; where the marble creations of Phidias shall become living, moving flesh and blood; where Nature, instead of being represented on a narrow canvas on the chamber walls of the egoist, shall unfold herself luxuriantly on the ample stage of the future, swept by the warm breath of life,—only then, in the fellowship of his fellow artists, will the poet find redemption."