And yet he would insist on the truth of his own assertion in the pamphlet. “If in the plastic art a Jew has to be represented,” he said, “the artist models after an ideal, or, if working from life, omits or softens those very details in the features which are the characteristic of the countrymen of Isaiah.”
As regards the histrionic art, he laid it down that it is impossible to picture a Jew impersonating a hero or lover without forcing a sense of the ridiculous upon us. And this feeling he felt of an actor, irrespective of sex. It would not be difficult to destroy this argument now: the names of Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt, Patti at once cross the mind. He asserted that their strength in art lay in imitation and not in creation.
MAKING STRANGE STATEMENTS.
In speech, too, the Jew was offensive to him. The accent was always that of a foreigner, and not of a native. The language was spoken as if it had been acquired, as something alien, and had not the ring of naturalness in it; for language, he argued, was the historic growth of a nation, and the Jew’s mother tongue, Hebrew, was a dead language. To the Jew, our entire civilization and art had remained a foreign language. He could only imitate it; the product, therefore, was artificial; and as in speech, so in song. “Notwithstanding two thousand years of contact with European peoples, as soon as a Jew spoke our ear was offended by a peculiar hissing and shrill manner of intonation.” Moreover, he contended, in their speech and writing there was a wilful transposition of words and construction of phrases, characteristics of an alien people, also discernible in their music. These racial characteristics which Wagner asserted were repugnant, were intensified in their offensiveness in his eyes by an absence of genuine passion, i.e. strong emotion coming deep from the heart. In the family circle he allowed the probability of the Jews being earnest and impassioned, yet in their works it was absent. On the stage he would have it that the passion of a child of Israel was always ridiculous. He was incapable of artistic expression in speech, and therefore less capable of its expression in song; for true song is speech raised to the highest intensity of emotion.
It will not be difficult to call to the mind the names of celebrated Hebrews, great as histrionic artists, who at once appear to confute this statement; and for my part, one name is sufficient, viz. Pauline Viardot Garcia, though it will be admitted, on closely examining Wagner’s feeling, there is a vein of truth in it, which grows upon one on reflection.
And then Wagner turns towards the plastic art, and examines the position of the Jew under that art aspect. He states as his opinion that the Hebrew people lack the sense of balance and proportion, and in this he sees the explanation of the non-existence of Jewish sculptors and architects. Now it is regrettable that Wagner should have committed himself to so faulty a statement. The sculptor’s art was not practised by the Jews, because it was prohibited by the Mosaic law, and to this day strict Hebrews would not fashion “any graven image, nor the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.” But Wagner was of opinion that the Jew was too practical to employ himself with beauty, and yet he was unable to explain the Jew’s acknowledged supremacy as a connoisseur in works of art.
In such a general indictment, it is hardly to be expected that Wagner would have omitted the vulgar charge of usury, nay, he even went so far as to assert that it was their chief craft. This, I told Wagner, was hardly generous or fair on his part. By persecution and restriction of the Jew to certain trades we had driven him to the tables of the money-changers, and then charged, as crime, the very vice persecution had engendered.
Nor was he less severe towards the cultivated Jew, charging him with a desire to disown his descent, and wipe out his nationality, by embracing Christianity, but whatever his efforts, he remained isolated in a society he did not understand, with whose strivings and likings he had no sympathy, and whose history and development had remained indifferent to him.
MUSIC OF THE SYNAGOGUE.
With such convictions, strong and deep, it follows that Wagner would not allow that Hebraic tonal art could be acceptable to European peoples. The Jew, he said, was unable to fathom the heart of our civilized life; he could not feel for or with the masses. He was an alien, and at the utmost, the cultured Jew could only create that which was trivial and indifferent to us. Not having assimilated our civilization, he could not sing in our heart’s tones. He could compose something pleasant, slight, and even harmonious, since the possibility of babbling agreeably, without singing anything in particular, is easier in music than in any other art. When the Jew musician tried to be serious, the creative faculty was entirely absent; all he could do was to imitate the earnest, impressive speech of others, and then the imitation was of the parrot kind, tones, without the purport being understood, and occasionally exhibiting an unconscious gibberishness of utterance. Now this seemed to me the denial of pure feeling to the Jew, and so I sought to get from Wagner precisely what he did mean by his charges on this point in the “Judaism” pamphlet. Music, I urged, was the art of expressing feelings by sounds; did he deny feelings to the Semitic people? “No.” Then it is only the mode of utterance, I urged, to which you so strongly object. But he would not wholly subscribe to this view, though he confessed it was an important element in the question. His view was, that the true tone poet, the genius, was he who transfixed in immortal tones the joys and sorrows of the people. “Now,” said he, “where is the Jew’s people to be found, where would you go to see the Hebrew people, in the practice, as it were, of unrestrained Judaism, which Christianity and civilization have left untouched, and where the traditions of the people are preserved in their purity? Why, to the synagogue.” Now if this be admitted, Wagner has certainly made out a strong case. Truly, the folk melody proper of the Hebrews is to be found in the song service of the synagogue, and a dreadful tortuous exhibition it is. As Wagner said, “it is a sort of ‘gargling or jodelling,’ which no caricature could make more nauseous than it is in its naïve seriousness.” There was the proper sphere for the Hebrew musician, wherein to exercise his art, and when he attempted to work outside his own people’s world he was engaged in an alien occupation. The melodies and rythmical cadences of the synagogue are already discernible in the music of Jewish composers, as our folk melodies and rhythm are in ours. If the Jew listened to our music and sought so dissect its heart and nerves, he would find it so opposed to his own cult, that it were impossible for him to create its like from his own heart; he could only imitate it. Following up this reasoning, Wagner argued that the Hebrew composer only imitated the external of our great composers, and that his reproductions were cold and false, just as if a poem by Goethe were delivered in Jewish jargon. The Hebrew musician threw the most opposed styles and forms about, regardless of period, making what Wagner called, with his usual jocularity, a Mosaic of his composition. A real impulse will be sure to find its natural expression, but a Jew could not have that, since his impulse would not be rooted in the sympathies of the Christian people. Then he enters into a description of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, or of the men and their music. Of Mendelssohn he says:—