or Arnold's
"Hear it from thy broad lucent Arno-vale
(For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep
The morningless and unawakening sleep
Under the flowery oleanders pale)."
Wagner was blind to this super-intellectual quality in words because for him that quality was most naturally added to them by music. Speech was with him always "the organ of the intellect"; our modern speech was "utterly feelingless": the poet cannot communicate feeling because "articulate language" is capable only of "description and indication."[360] He himself was strictly speaking hardly a poet at all: he was simply a writer of words for music,—words to which the music had to add the emotional beauty that the genuine poet would have conveyed by speech alone. We are therefore not in the least surprised to learn that Wagner first of all wrote his "poems" in prose, which he then turned into rhyme or rhythm at his leisure. We possess, in Wieland the Smith,[361] an intended operatic libretto of his that never got past the prose stage. Having decided not to set it to music himself, he offered it to Liszt. "The poem," he writes to the Princess Wittgenstein, "is fully worked out; nothing remains to be done [sic] but the simple versification, which any tolerably skilful verse-maker could do. Liszt will easily find one. In the most important places I have written the verses myself."[362]
Hence all this elaborate analysis of vowels and consonant sounds is quite beside the mark. He imagines "the feeling" of a word to reside in the "root-syllable" of it,—"which was invented or discovered by the primitive emotional need of humanity" (die aus der Nothwendigkeit des ursprünglichsten Empfindungszwanges des Menschen erfunden oder gefunden ward). And the fountain of that emotional force in the root is the vowel sound, which is "the inner feeling incarnate" (das verkörperte innere Gefühl).[363] Portentous attributes are also given to the consonants, and the initial consonant is pronounced to be of more significance than the terminal. Most of this is merely fantastic. Words, especially in the hands of a poet, are not simply clothed vowel sounds; they are entities with a marvellous life of their own. The appeal of Keats's
"The same that ofttimes hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,"