I have often wondered where Wagner’s religion, his art, his metaphysics, in a word his working theory of life, would have led him, had he lived longer. That he had, dimly floating in his extraordinary brain, the outlines of a greater work than Parsifal we learn in his correspondence with Liszt. He died with the Trilogy incomplete, for Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal, and The Penitents, (Die Büsser) were to have been this Trilogy of the Will to Live, Compassion and Renunciation.
Wagner was going to the East with many other Old World thinkers. That negation of the will to live, so despised by his former admirer Nietzsche, had gripped him after he forsook the philosophy of Feuerbach for Schopenhauer in 1854. He eagerly absorbed this Neo-Buddhism and at the time of his death was fully prepared to accept its final word, its bonze-like impassivity of the will, and sought to translate into tone its hopelessly fatalistic spirit, its implacable hatred of life in the flesh.
That the world has lost a gigantic experiment may not be doubted, but that it has lost the best of Wagner I greatly question. In Parsifal his thematic invention is not at its high-water mark, despite his wonderful mastery of technical material, the marvellous moulding of spiritual stuff. Even if Parsifal is almost an abstraction, is not that “howling hermaphrodite,” as Hanslick called Kundry, a real flesh and blood creation? It is with no fears of Wagner’s power of characterization failing that we should concern ourselves, for the gravity of the possible situation lies in the fact that Wagner had drifted into the philosophical nihilism, the intellectual quietism which is the sweet, consoling pitfall of the thinker who wanders across the borderline of Asiatic religious ideals. The glimmer of Christianity in Parsifal seems like the last expiring atom of Wagner’s faith in the value of Christ. That he used the church in the dramatic sense cannot be doubted, and that in the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church he found grateful material, which he employed so deftly yet so reverently in Parsifal, is also incontrovertible; but in Wagner’s Christianity I place no faith.
He went to the roots of Christianity, its Buddhistic roots, and there sought philosophical consolation. Nietzsche’s attack on Wagner’s supposed religious predilections is wide of the mark; no one was less likely to indulge in sacerdotal sentimentalism than Richard of the giant brain.
The speculation is a fascinating one, especially when you remember that he changed the title of his projected work from The Victors (Die Sieger) to The Penitents. First spoken of in 1856, the name was altered a quarter of a century later. Wagner had encountered Oriental philosophy in the interval, and its mysticism had become a vital, integral part of his strenuous intellectual and emotional life.
It is not safe yet to pass judgment on this emotional product of the age; Wagner carried within his breast the precious eucharist of genius. In music he is the true Zeit Geist.
III
It was a German critic of acuity who said of the music of Tristan and Isolde, “The thrills relieve each other in squads.” Wagner certainly touched the top-notch of his almost boundless imaginings in this supreme apotheosis of lyric ecstasy. A scorching sirocco for the soul are the tremendous blasts of this work. Nothing has ever been written that is comparable with it in intensity, and it is safe to predict that future generations will not hear its double. Wagner declared that when he wrote it he could not have composed it otherwise; it is full blown with his imperfections, his glaring excellences, his noble turgidity, his lack of frugality, his economy of resource, his dazzling prodigality, his riotous tonal debaucheries, his soggy prolixity and his superhuman fascinations.
All that may be urged against Wagner’s ways I am, perforce, compelled to acknowledge. He is all that his musical enemies say, and much more; but how wilted are theories when in the full current of this tropical simoon! I have steeled myself repeatedly when about to listen to “Tristan and Isolde” and summoned up all my prejudices, bade my feeble faculties perform their task of analysis, but am breathless and vanquished before the curtain rises.
What boots it, then, to gird critically at an art, a devilish, demoniac art that enchants, thrills and makes mock of all spiritual theories about the divine in music? Here it is no longer on the heights as in Beethoven’s realm. The philosophy of Schopenhauer hurled at your head in the pessimistic dualism of the famous love scene availeth not to stem the turbulent, sensuous torrent. Tristan and Isolde is the last word, the very deification of carnalism. Call it what pretty titles you may, wreathe the theme with the garlands of poetic fancy, the stark naked fact stares at you—a strong, brutal, fact. It is the man and the woman, nothing more, nothing less. The love potion does but unloosen their tongues, for both were mute lovers before Brangäne juggled with the fatal brew. Not in the sacred writings of the Jews, not in Shakespeare, are expressed such frenetic passions. The songs of Solomon are mildly Virgilian in comparison. This distinction must be conferred upon Wagner; he is the greatest poet of passion the world has yet encountered. As fiercely erotic as Swinburne, with Swinburne’s matchless art, he has a more eloquent, a more potent instrument than words; he has the orchestra that thunders, surges and searches out the very heart of love. A mighty master, but a dangerous guide.