Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde": An Essay on the Wagnerian Drama

by George Ainslie Hight

[4.] Not his Richard Wagner, which is a more popular work.

Such has been the response of the public through its literature to the man who expressly did not wish to be worshipped, but only to be understood. Assuredly there is yet plenty of room for good work to be done! The purpose of the following pages is criticism, not as judging, but as selecting. In choosing certain characteristics to show them in a different perspective from an altered point of view the critic may hope to help others to a better understanding of the art. I have endeavoured to do this for English readers in respect of Wagner's dramatic works through one of the most characteristic and representative of them. The problem resolves itself into two. First there is the general technical one, so fully treated by Wagner himself in his theoretical writings, whether music is capable of being used as a means of dramatic expression; and secondly, how far the endeavour has been successful in the particular work selected for illustration. To treat these problems satisfactorily it will be necessary for me to go far beyond the limits of music and dramatic art, and to enter rather fully into questions of psychology and metaphysics, which I fear may discourage some readers, but which cannot be shirked by those who wish to form a judgment based upon a more solid foundation than their own personal taste. The mistake made by nearly all writers on Wagner hitherto has been to suppose that the mere assertion of an individual opinion has any value at all, however illustrious the person who holds it, however able his exposition. Of what use can be the assertion that a certain progression of chords is acceptable and pleasing to the healthy ear (even with the usual addition that all who do not think so are blockheads), when some other person equally competent asserts the contrary? Or how am I to persuade my readers that Tristan und Isolde is what I hold it to be, the loftiest paean of pure and holy love ever conceived by a poet, when others see in it only a "story of vulgar adultery," steeped in sensuality? The moral law is the same to all men, and differences of judgment upon moral acts are due to imperfect understanding. But I cannot hope to make my own position clear without descending to the foundations of all art, of all life, without asking: what is drama? what are its aims, and how does it express them? what is human life which it reflects? Wagner felt this very strongly, and soon realized that an ontological basis was required for his own theories; that to reform art he must reform human life. "Oh ye men," he exclaims passionately in a letter: "feel rightly, act as you feel! be free!--then we will have art."

We may learn the true principles of criticism from Wagner himself. Truthfulness in literature is what correctness is in Vortrag. They are objectivity, the art of seeing things as they really are, clearness of vision, right understanding. The truthful representation of an artist as he really is does not preclude, but rather stimulates, enthusiasm, for we may believe that the true artist and the true work of art as he intended it are superior to the flattering creations of our own fancy.

Lessing observes that of ten objections raised by the critic, nine will probably have occurred to the author; that he himself will read a passage twenty times rather than believe that the writer contradicted himself. Some of our critics seem to proceed upon an opposite principle and to reject a thought at once if it does not seem to agree with what they themselves have thought, and they observe little restraint in expressing their authoritative judgment. One critic speaks of Wagner meditating on problems "which any clear-headed schoolboy could quickly have settled for him"; we are not surprised to find the same critic sneering at Kant and Plato! Such writers there will always be, but a nation which tolerates them cannot expect to maintain an honourable place in the intellectual commonwealth.

[CHAPTER II]

WAGNER AS MAN

The distinction so often made with a genius between the "man" and the "artist" has been justly ridiculed by Wagner himself. For the truest individuality of an artist is in his art, not when he leaves his own proper sphere and enters one that is foreign to him. Beethoven is the writer of symphonies and sonatas, not the suspicious friend and unmannerly plebeian. The man is the same in both relations, i.e. his character remains the same, only it manifests itself differently under changed conditions, and the difference lies not in him, but in the point of view from which we regard him. Let us bear this in mind in considering Wagner as he appeared away from his art.

A genius has been aptly likened to an astronomical telescope, which is able to scan the heavens, but is useless for things close at hand. To some extent this is true of Wagner, but less so than with most, and not in the sense in which it has been often asserted. The attacks which have been made upon Wagner's private character show little discrimination, for it is a simple truth that the particular vices of which he has been accused are just those from which he was singularly free. No charge has been more audaciously or persistently brought by ignorant writers or believed by an ill-informed public in England and America than that of morbid sensuality. Just as Wagner's dramas have been called licentious, so his character has been described as sensual, in defiance of easily ascertainable facts. Not long ago the discovery was made that his health had been undermined by loose living when he was young. It is easy to invent such charges, for which there is not a particle of evidence, and unfortunately the reader is not always in a position to verify the authorities, and naturally thinks that the writer must have some ground for what he says. As a rule these statements have originated with Ferdinand Praeger's book Wagner as I knew him, a book which I am astonished to see still quoted in England, as if it were an authority. I have not seen it, and do not know what it contains. Its character was exposed by two Englishmen, Mr. H. S. Chamberlain and Mr. Ashton Ellis, soon after its publication in 1892, and it was consequently withdrawn from circulation in Germany by its publishers, Messrs. Breitkopf und Härtel. In England and America it still seems to be widely read, and is, more than any other single work, responsible for the false notions that are abroad about Wagner. Sensuality, that is in the morbidly sexual sense of the term, was no part of Wagner's character, nor could it be of the man who justly claimed that no poet had ever glorified women as he had done. His Sentas, Elsas, Brünnhildes, and I must add his Isoldes, rightly understood, afford the best answer to such accusations.

"But," it is said, "his music is unmistakably sensual." I must defer it to a future chapter to consider how far pure music, that is, music apart from words, is capable of expressing a specific human quality, but may here anticipate by saying that the nature of music is to assimilate the elements with which it is joined; the hearer may, within certain broad restrictions, put into it whatever he likes, and will therefore hear in it the reflection of himself. This is why different people hear such different things in the same music. If a man hears sensuality in the music of, let us say, the second act of Tristan und Isolde, it is his own interpretation. Another hears something very different, an anticipation of eternity, of that world beyond which the lovers are about to enter to be united with each other and with all nature in a higher love of which all earthly love, with its degrading garment of sensuality, is but the debased image. The music by itself will bear either interpretation; each hearer will find in it just that which he looks for and can understand. But when the words are added the meaning is clear. People are not "sensual" when death is right before them, as it is here. I do not wish to be understood as meaning that Wagner excluded sensuality from his works, or that he did not treat the most universal and most ungovernable of human impulses in accordance with its character. The drama must include everything human, and when passionate sexuality is a necessary part of the dramatic development, Wagner no more shirks it than did Shakespeare or any other great dramatist. But Wagner always treats it with such consummate grace and refinement that it ceases to be repulsive and appears in its own uncorrupted beauty, as in the Venus music and in the flower-maiden scene in Parsifal. Only to the impure are the senses impure.

An unbiassed consideration of all that is known about Wagner's life will acquit him of all the graver vices, unless a propensity for living beyond his income be reckoned as such. Whatever his faults there was nothing dishonourable or mean about them, and he is entitled to the treatment that is always accorded by one gentleman to another, whether friend or enemy, so long as he does not disgrace himself. Surely it ought not to be necessary to insist upon this before an English public, but it has not always been observed.