Was this a fault in Wagner? Who shall say? If it was, it was a fault which he shared with every earnest reformer who is not content with preaching, but enforces his precepts with action. Reform is no plaything; it cannot be achieved by listening to the well-meant advice of friends who know no higher goal than personal success, who have no glimmering of the motives that impel a great soul, who would fain tell the thunderbolt where it shall strike. Every great man lives alone; he has no friends and no disciples. His equals follow their own ends; his inferiors cannot breathe in the regions where he dwells. He must rely upon himself. Without this full dominion Wagner would not have been himself; he would never have founded Bayreuth, never have had his greater works performed, never even have composed them. And this brings us to the most conspicuous feature of his character, the centre of everything, namely, his uncompromising sincerity and truthfulness, qualities so magnificent in him that I doubt whether they have ever been equalled in any other, qualities which show Wagner no less great "as man" than he is "as artist."
It is certain--and no one knew it better than himself--that Wagner might easily have been successful from the first if he had liked. He might have been wealthy, popular, petted by the great, have lived in the luxury that he loved, at peace with all the world, if he had only consented to traffic with his art and to produce what the public wanted. For assuredly his talent for writing operas on the old lines was not inferior to that of Meyerbeer or Rossini. His Rienzi was the greatest immediate success of his whole life when grand operas, of which it is the type, were fashionable, and a few more works of the kind would have raised him above all anxiety for his livelihood. This can scarcely be questioned now; it has been asserted again and again by those who most hated him, and who were in the habit of denouncing him as "past help" because he refused to listen to them. To do so he would have had to sacrifice all that he held sacred. He had "hitched his waggon to a star," and deliberately chose poverty, exile, public calumny and ridicule, domestic unrest, rather than allow the purity of his art to be sullied by departing for an instant from the ideals after which he strove. Witness the events of the fateful seventies, when his financial straits were perhaps at their worst, when all the powers of Germany, statesmen, theatrical Intendants, press, singers, seemed in league together to thwart the project of Bayreuth upon which his all depended; when even King Louis of Bavaria cooled for a time; when Bülow and Liszt had withdrawn their help, and Nietzsche had seceded in horror and despair; when the first effort of Bayreuth had left a ruinous debt, and the failure of the Patronat-Vereine shut off the last faint ray of hope. Well might the Meister, now advancing in age, have thought of accepting one of the dazzling offers which repeatedly reached him from Russia, from America, from Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, and other places. But he only saw in them lures to tempt him into degrading his art by commercial speculation with all its paraphernalia of advertisement and other sordid abominations. Never once did his courage falter; no thought of any concession, however small, however seemingly reasonable, which he held to be dishonourable to his art ever found a place in his mind. The surrender of Die Walküre alone would probably have turned the tide in his favour, and he was pressed for it by most of the great theatres, but in vain. To mutilate the Ring was in his opinion to dishonour it and prepare the way for its being misunderstood. So far from adopting any one of the many courses which could not fail to lead to success and popularity we find him occupied during this time in coaching singers personally, in building his theatre, and devising schemes for a school of technique where musicians, and especially singers, could learn the true methods of their art, naturally--though perhaps imprudently--believing that before his works could be understood as he meant them they must be rightly represented. Without funds! without patronage! with nothing but his own determined will! Can we wonder that the world's head was turned by such a gigantic personality?
Let those who call Wagner self-willed and perverse because he could not conform to their notions of what is right for an artist, who attempt to measure an infinite mind by the paltry canons of self-interest, reflect upon the harvest that we are now reaping from his unswerving loyalty to his art. To him alone, and to the conductors whom he trained, do we owe the almost perfect performances of our modern orchestras. It has been truly observed that Wagner's own immensely difficult works are better performed at the present day than were the far easier works of his predecessors before he came. The Richters and Mottls and Schuchs of our day are a very different race from the Reissigers and Lachners and Costas of a past generation. It was Richter who taught us in London how a symphony of Beethoven ought to sound; before he came, performances were approved which the present day would not tolerate. He, as well as his great compeers, was brought up in the school of Wagner, the essence of which lies in correctness, in rendering the work as the composer intended it, with conscientious attention to every detail, not only of notes, but of rhythm, tempo, phrasing, dynamics, instead of the slovenly muddling which then passed for breadth of style, and the substitution of the conductor's own subjectivity for that of the composer. It has been well expressed in a few incisive words by one of the greatest of the school: "The privilege of an interesting subjectivity is given to few, its expression will always give evidence of that instinctive logic which is a necessary condition of intelligibility."[[6]] Call Wagner perverse, dislike his art, say that his dramas are chaos and his music discord--all this you have a right to do; but you cannot refuse your homage to his rectitude of purpose, his courageous and resolute struggle for the ideals which were before him.
[6.] I have translated rather freely so as to give the general sense, as von Bülow's German is not always very easy to follow. It will be found in his comments upon Beethoven's Fantasie, Op. 77.]
This is the secret of what is known as the modern German spirit--close attention to every detail, faithfulness to the work in hand, with the conviction that no part of the organism is so trifling as not to be vital. This it was, and not bookish education, that inspired the German army in its victories of 1870-71; this spirit it was that enabled the Meiningers in 1882 to fill our Drury Lane Theatre to overflowing with performances of our own Shakespeare in a foreign language. At the present day it still continues to actuate German trade and German handicrafts, while we English in our blindness think to dispose of it by cant phrases and sneers.
To the nearer friends of his home-circle Wagner's personality must have been singularly attractive, from the intelligent sympathy which he showed with everything human, and from the irrepressible gaiety which never forsook him for long. In times of stress it helped those around him to tide through the most crushing disasters.
Genius is not a thing apart by itself, severed from the rest of the world. Its one distinguishing mark is its intense humanity. If I may speak in paradox, the true poet is more truly ourselves than we are. The astronomical telescope is constructed upon the same principles as the terrestrial one, only it is more powerful and more perfectly made. Not only the lenses, but all the details of the mechanism are more highly finished; more thought and more labour are bestowed upon them; the parts are more skilfully co-ordinated together; it is a better instrument. We do wrong to genius in connecting it with mental aberration; it is more normal, more perfectly human, than we are; more human in its virtues, in its faults, in its follies, above all, in its consummate beauty; only with its greater perfection the organism becomes more delicate, and is more easily injured. For genius is exposed to heavier strains than we are, because it is in uncongenial surroundings. If one part happen to be imperfect, if, as we say, "a screw be loose," the injury is more serious than in ordinary natures, and the exquisite adjustments may suffer in the rude handling of a stupid and clumsy environment, wrecking the whole system. This, and not natural proclivity, is the reason why genius so often shows a tendency to eccentric and abnormal conduct. The fault is with society, which feels instinctively that those who rise too high in excellence must be crushed. And this is the theme of every real tragedy. Othello, Lear, Njál, Grettir, Clarissa Harlowe, the Maid of Orleans, Antigone, Prometheus, and, as I hope to show, Tristan and Isolde, these are but a few among those who must perish from no fault in themselves, but because they are too noble for their surroundings.
"The greater the man, the greater his love." We should not set the genius on a pedestal to be first gaped at and then ridiculed. He needs before all else our love and our sympathy; for his nature is essentially that of a child, and, childlike, he craves for human love as the first necessity of his life. To those who set up an idol of their own fancy and worship that as his image, he will be cold and repellent, but to those who know him as he really is he will return their love with all the warmth and purity of his childlike nature. Two things are intolerable to a healthy-minded child--rough brutality and mawkish caressing; Wagner was fated to endure a full share of both. It is touching to read of Wagner's simple affection for those who were around him in humble capacities. Every one who has read his life knows of his kindliness to his domestic servants. Now it is the village barber who is "gar zu theuer," now his gondola-man in Venice. His love for animals has been perhaps too much dwelt upon by his biographers, but it is very characteristic.
Mankind is not divided into Wagnerites and anti-Wagnerites; nor is it divided into Romanists and Protestants, nor into theologians and rationalists, nor into Tories and Radicals, nor into any other of our familiar party divisions. The true division is into great men and small, lovers of truth and sophists, honest men and thieves. Thieves and sophists wrangle, but the great and true "join hands through the centuries," and between them is eternal peace.