If the history of music be looked at with a view to discovering the spirit which animates its products rather than observing their integument, it will be found that from the beginning two forces have been in operation, and by their antagonism have done the work of progressive creation. In the religious chant, with its restrictive clog (the fruit of superstitious veneration and fear) we find that manifestation of the spirit of antique music which was chiefly instrumental in its establishment and regulation. To that spirit tribute above its meed is paid in the hand-books which begin the history of modern music with the chants of the Christian Church. The other spirit, having been cultivated outside the church, has had fewer historians to do it reverence. It is the free, untrammelled impulse which rests on the law of nature and refuses the domination of formal rule and restrictive principle. On the love-song, war-song, and hunting-song of early man, on the cradle-song crooned by early woman, there rested not the weight of superstitious fear and hope which fettered the religious chant. They were individual manifestations of feeling, and in them the fancy was free to discover and use all the tonal and rhythmical combinations which might be helpful in giving voice to emotion. The mission of this spirit (which I will call Romanticism to distinguish it from the conservative, and regulative spirit which I will call Classicism) was fulfilled, during the artificiality and all-pervading scholasticism of the Middle Ages, by the Minnesinger and trouvère; and though the death of chivalry ended that peculiar ministry, the spirit continued to live as it had lived from the beginning, as it still lives and will live in sæcula sæculorum, in the people's songs and dances. When the composers of two hundred and fifty years ago began to develop instrumental music they found the germ of the sonata form—the form that made Beethoven's symphonies possible—in the homely dance tunes of the people which till then had been looked upon as vulgar things, wholly outside the domain of polite art. The genius of the masters of the last century moulded this form of plebeian ancestry into a vessel of wonderful beauty; but by the time this had been done the capacity of music as an emotional language had been greatly increased, and the same Romantic spirit which had originally created the dance forms that they might embody the artistic impulses of that early time, suggested the filling of the vessel with the new contents. When the vessel would not hold these new contents it had to be widened. New bottles for new wine. That is the whole mystery of what conservative critics decry as the destruction of form in music. It is not destruction, but change. When you destroy form you destroy music, for the musical essence can manifest itself only through form.
As a perfectly natural result of the development of this beautiful and efficient vessel called the Sonata form, a love of symmetry and order, of correct logic and beautiful sequence, came to dominate composers, and it is a relic of this love, a love which we must not despise in such masters as Haydn and Mozart, which led them to fill so many of their compositions with repetitions of parts and conventional passages that appear meaningless and wearisome to us. They were written in compliance with the demands of form.
III.
For the purposes of our exposition of the symbolism of Wagner's comedy, of the meaning of its satire, we shall have to look upon classical composers as those who developed music chiefly on its formal side and conserved the laws which enabled them to reach one ideal of beauty. The Romantic composers will then be those who sought their ideals in other regions than the formal, and strove to give them expression irrespective—or, if necessary, in defiance—of the conventions of law. Romanticism will appear to us as the creative principle, and hence we shall find it in Wagner's comedy associated with Youth, its passions and enthusiasms; with Love, and heedless, reckless daring; with Spring and blooming time; with the singing of birds and the perfume of flowers; with assertion of the right of unfettered utterance and denial of the wisdom or justice of reflection and moderation.
Do not visions corresponding with these attributes rise up out of the incidents of the play? The lovers, with their impetuous love-making and reckless resolve which sapient Sachs frustrates; Walther's songs in the first act, telling of Spring releasing Nature from her icy shackles and winning her smiles, while sunlight and birds and meadow flowers, and the old poet who sang the praises of them and was named after the mead he loved, united in teaching him the art of song; the bold defiance of the master-singers and their code; the rejection of the medal when it had been won. Classicism, in turn, will appear as the regulative and conservative principle, and its association in the play will be with maturity of age and moderation in thought and action; with personages in whom the creative impulse is not an elemental force, but a pleasure or a duty which waits upon the judgment; also, for satirical purposes, with a guild of handicraftsmen and tradespeople who enforce an apprenticeship in art as they do in trade; who think that by adherence to rule artworks may be created as shoes are made over a last; who are pompous in their pedantry and amiable only in the holy simplicity of their earnestness, their vanity, and their complacency. Such are the associations which arise when the pictures of the comedy are passed in hasty review; and they have been grievously incomplete. They have omitted the real hero of the play, the poet who belongs to the guild and upholds its laws while battling for the spirit represented by him who falls under the condemnation of those very laws. Where is Hans Sachs? Search him out. You will find him in the midst of the combatants fighting valiantly on both sides; representing a principle at once creative and conservative, standing, in the history of artistic development, for those true geniuses who breathe the breath of life into the body, not for the purpose of destruction, but that the spirit may become manifest in the flesh.
It is contest which brings life. All the great classical composers from Brahms back to Bach have had their moments of Romantic feeling; it is never absent from the truly creative artist; but its most eloquent expression was reserved for our century. You recognize it in the whole body of instrumental music, beginning with Beethoven; you yield to its influence when you hear the operas of Gluck, Mozart, and Weber. The musicians whose influence was strongest when Wagner began his reforms were frank in their protestations of allegiance to this conception of Romanticism: "The Spirit builds the forms, or finds them ready-built, and refashions them according to its needs and desires," said Marx. "If you wish to adopt art as a profession you cannot accustom yourself early enough to consider the contents of an art-work as more important and serious a matter than its structure," said Mendelssohn, the greatest master of form that the century has known. "That would be a trivial art which would have only sounds but no language or signs for the conditions of the soul," said Schumann.
Wagner was too thorough an artist, too profound a musician, not to recognize the value of constructive law. He would have been false to his principles and false to his practice had he written a comedy for the purpose of glorifying mere lawlessness. Had this been his purpose he would not have told us as he has that it was Sachs whom he intended to oppose to the spirit of pedantry and formalism personified in Beckmesser. Sachs has no condemnation to pronounce on the laws of the guild of which he was the brightest ornament. On the contrary, he upholds them even against Walther, and persuades him to adopt them in the composition of his prize song, just as after the victory is won he admonishes him to give the reverence due to the masters. What he learns from Walther, and impresses on his colleagues, is the need of adapting form to spirit, and the mental conflict which brings him to this conviction is a reflection of that creative activity which looks to the short-sighted like destructive war, but is exemplified in the works of the great masters as the highest peace. We can gain an insight into the musical structure of the comedy, and find proofs for our contention at the same time, if we observe Sachs under the influence of this seeming contradiction.
It is evening, and the poet has returned to his cobbler's bench. The scent of the elder-tree, the charm of the summer night, will not permit him to work; they turn his thoughts to poetry; but memories of Walther's song come over him, and under their influence he can neither work nor compose. There was an inexplicable charm in the song. No rule would fit it, yet it was faultless. It was new and strange, yet sounded old and familiar, like the carolling of birds in May-time. To try to imitate it would result in shame and contumely. That he knew. Where lay the mystery? At last he discovers it. The song was the voice of Spring, of the heyday of the singer's life and passion. The need of utterance brought with it the capacity and the privilege. All this we may learn from the words of Sachs, while the music tells us of what is passing through his mind in the intervals of his soliloquizing. This music is built up out of a very short phrase, but it is the phrase which may be set down as the chief musical symbol of the spirit which I have called Romanticism:
