The Wagnerian Romances

by Gertrude Hall Brownell

The Hall of Minstrels gradually fills with these same nobles and their ladies. They salute the Landgrave and the Princess, and take their places to the well-known, long-loved march. The minstrels have seats apart from the rest, facing their audience. The Landgrave addresses them nobly, with gracious compliment for the skill shown theretofore by them in singing as in fighting, for their victorious championship of virtue and the true faith, high tradition and all things lovely. Let them offer the guests to-day a banquet of song, upon the occasion of the return among them of the "daring singer" whose absence they so long had deplored, whom a wonderful mystery has brought back into their neighbourhood. He sets to the song-contestants as their task to define the nature of love. He who shall most worthily besing it shall receive the prize from Elizabeth's hand. Let his demand be bold as he will, the Landgrave's care it shall be to see his wish granted.

Lots are drawn. Fortune appoints Wolfram to open the song-feast. He preludes pensively, and sets forth in an improvisation of slow and stately gait his delicate dreamer's sentiments: Glancing around this noble assemblage, his heart kindles at sight of so many heroes, valiant, German, and wise,—a proud oak-forest, verily, splendid, fresh and green. And among them fair and virtuous ladies, fragrant garland of beauteous flowers. The eye swoons, drunken with gazing, the poet's song grows mute before such splendour of loveliness. He fixes his eyes, then, upon one only of the stars in that dazzling firmament. His spirit is forced to worship and bow in prayer. And, behold, the vision he has of a miraculous fount, from which his spirit may draw sacred joys, his heart receive ineffable refreshment. And never would he wish to trouble that fountain, never with criminal presumption stir those waters,—but offer himself up to it in self-sacrificing adoration, and shed for its sake the last of his blood. From these words the company may apprehend what he conceives to be the nature of love at its purest.

There is warm applause from the noble knights and ladies, whether because they understand the star to be Elizabeth, and the fountain the pure love she inspires, or because it was the ideal of that period of song-contests and Courts of Love and chivalry to love with a reverence that precluded any near approach to the lady elected for adoration. A poet might marry and have seven children, while regarding with exalted passion and celebrating in enraptured song,—making into his star, his sacred fountain, his Muse, some dazzling remote princess, held to be too fair and good by far for human nature's daily food. The audience, when Wolfram resumes his seat, cry: "So it is! So it is!" and loudly praise his song.

Tannhäuser has lent ear somewhat listlessly. This hall has been called his rightful kingdom; he sits among the other minstrels consciously like a young monarch. At the closing figure of Wolfram's rhapsodical rhetoric, the image of the fount, a shadowy smile of superiority has dawned upon his face. As the applause dies, he grasps his harp and rises to take exception to Wolfram's definition. Such a song-feast was in fact a song-debate. His words come warm and ready: "I too, Wolfram, may call myself so fortunate as to behold what you have beheld. Who is there unacquainted with that fountain? Hear me loudly exalt its virtue! But yet can I not approach those waters without sense of warm longing. That burning thirst I must cool. Comforted I set lips to the spring. In full draughts I drink joy, unmixed with doubt or fear, for inexhaustible is the fountain, even as inextinguishable is my desire. That my longing therefore may be prolonged eternally, eternally I drink refreshment at the well. Know Wolfram, thus do I conceive of love's truest essence!"

There is deep silence when he has ended. One person only in the large assemblage has given a sign of approval, made a little gesture of assent, and that is Elizabeth, at bottom a very simple normal woman, who does not recognise herself as a star or a sacred well unapproachable to the one she loves. But as all refrain, she timidly checks herself, and waits to hear the rest.

Walther has taken his harp, has risen; in growing excitement, touched with indignation, he sweeps the strings: "The fountain spoken of by Wolfram, by the light of the soul I too have looked into its depths! But you, who thirst to drink at it, you, Heinrich, know it verily not! Permit me to tell you, accept the lesson: That fountain is true virtue. Devoutly you shall worship it and sacrifice to its limpid purity. Should you lay lip to it, to cool your unhallowed passion, nay, should you but sip at the outermost brim, forever gone were its miraculous power! If you shall gain life from that fountain, through the heart, not the palate, must you seek refreshment!" Again there is lively applause. Tannhäuser springs to his feet, the old contemptuousness toward these companions,—compends of density, conventionality, and hypocrisy!—curving his lip. "Oh, Walther, singing as you have done, how direly have you misrepresented love! Through such languors and timidities as you describe, the world would unmistakably go dry! To the glory of God in his exalted distance, gaze at the heavens, gaze at its stars. Pay tribute of worship to such marvels, because they pass your comprehension. But that which lends itself to human touches, which lies near to your heart and senses, that which, formed of the same clay as yourselves, in a softer shape nestles against your side, the tribute called for by that is hearty pleasure of love. Enjoyment, I say, is the essence of love!"

At this, which falls upon all ears present with the effect of rank blasphemy, Biterolf rises in wrath. "Out, out, to fight against us all. Who could be silent hearing you? If your arrogance will vouchsafe to listen, hear, slanderer, me too! When high love inspires me, it steels my weapons with courage; to save it from indignity proudly would I pour forth my last blood. For the honour of women and of lofty virtue I unsheathe my knightly sword,—but that which your youth is pleased to call pleasure is cheap enough and worth no single blow!" The audience cheer him enthusiastically: "Hail, Biterolf, our good blade!" Tannhäuser can no longer contain himself. It is now again quite as it used to be, when never could he live at peace with these purblind tortoises, dull of wit to the point of amazement, and yet pretending to pronounce upon things, pass judgment upon others. What can there be but warfare forever between him and them? But that Biterolf, this war-worn, middle-aged, rugged minstrel should take it upon himself to instruct Heinrich Tannhäuser, pupil of Venus, in matters of love! His retort comes quick, from the shoulder, so to speak, though the form is not dropped of fitting his words to chords of the peaceful harp: "Ha, fond braggart, Biterolf! Is it you, singing about love, grim wolf? But you can hardly have meant that which I hold worthy to be enjoyed. What, you poverty-stricken wight—what pleasure of love may have fallen to your share? Not rich in love your life has been! And such joys as may have sprouted along your path, indeed, were hardly worthy of a blow!"—"Let him not be allowed to finish! Forbid his insolence!" cry the incensed nobles, who had suffered Biterolf's personal attack, but find insufferable this of the over-splendid, over-bearing, over-confident youth. Biterolf's sword has leaped from its scabbard. The Landgrave orders it back. "Preserve peace, you singers!"

A hush falls as Wolfram takes the floor again. He had sacrificed every selfish hope to serve both Elizabeth and Tannhäuser, had employed himself to further their union. What now is happening is plainly terrible to him. His opinion of the friend has undergone in the last moments a grievous subversion. He has been wounded to the soul by the bold and profane tone of Tannhäuser's argument. His sensibility detects an atmosphere of sin about this novel love's advocate, and as a good and pious knight he is forced to array himself against the friend, to uphold Ideal Love in antagonism to the Carnal Love he has just heard exalted. "Oh, Heaven, hear my prayer and consecrate my song!" he sings, a pale flame informing his song, as, imaginably, his cheek and eye; "Let me see evil banished from this pure and noble circle! To you, Highest Love, let my song resound, inspired, to you that in angelic beauty have penetrated deep into my soul. As a messenger from Heaven do you appear to us; I follow from afar. You guide us toward the regions where immortally shines your star!"

Tannhäuser, exasperated, reckless, frenzied with that temperamental need of his to dominate, that impatience of being lessoned, losing sight of all but one thing, that it shall be proved to them they can teach nothing about love to him, the lover of the very Goddess of Love, seizes his harp, his sword in this duel, and breaks forth in his impassioned Praise of Venus,—the song we heard in the heart of her Hill, when he celebrated her at her own bidding, in conclusion begging so lamely for his dismissal. "To you, Goddess of Love, shall my song resound! Loud shall your praises now be sung by me! Your sweet beauty is the source of all that is beautiful, and every lovely miracle has its origin in you! He who aglow has enfolded you in his arms, he knows, and he alone, what love is! Oh, you poor-spirited, who have never tasted love, go,—to the Hill of Venus repair!"

The last words have the effect of a thunder-clap, in the consternation they produce. Tannhäuser in the drunkenness of his pride had forgotten what this revelation would mean in the ears he trumpeted it to; in his long sojourn in the pagan underworld, where his moral judgment had become dulled and perverted, had forgotten, apparently, how the Christian world regarded such commerce with it as his words betrayed. That mysterious Hörselberg looming in the distance was in popular thinking the very ante-chamber of Hell; its pleasures, paid in the world to come with eternal damnation, were rewarded in this world with excommunication and death. One who had frequented it was sin-polluted, sin-drenched, he poisoned the air with sin. All shrink back at his announcement as from a leper. The women flee precipitately from the contamination of his neighbourhood. It is like a flight of gorgeous birds. The men's instant and only thought is to immolate him, cleanse the earth of the inexpressible blot upon it that he is. "He has luxuriated in the pleasures of Hell! He has dwelled in the Hill of Venus! Abominable! Accursed! Bathe your swords in his blood! Hurl him back into the fiery lake!"