This is not a pleasing paragraph, but it shows the writer’s style of argument. She girds with something approaching violence at the milk-and-water men of the day, declaring that Woman’s Emancipation is the result of some deficiency in modern manhood. However, read Marholm and draw your own pictures of what women should or should not be. A charming woman told me that she had asked Jean de Reszké if he cared to sing Romeo or Tristan with any particular singer.

“I always sing to my ideal woman,” replied the artist. And I fancy that we all pursue that illuding composite. It is Woman who composes all the great music, paints all the great pictures, writes all the great poems—Woman the inspirer of all art! Is She, after all, our coast of Bohemia? Then mankind, from the torrid time of undifferentiated protozoa, has been frantically striving to acquire a footing upon that fascinating territory.

IX
AFTER WAGNER—WHAT?

I
THE CAPRICE OF THE MUSICAL CAT

Few critics are prophets honored in their own musical country, and but one or two in a generation possess prévoyance enough to predict the way the musical cat will jump. The antics of that exotic feline since the day Richard Wagner pinched its tail and bade it leap through the large and rather gaudy hoop of the music-drama, have been mystifying and extraordinary. It coquetted with Brahms, it visited Italy, and for a time took up its abode in the house of Grieg.

In a word, caprice of a deep-seated order has marked the progress of music during the past half-century. I am not speaking now of America, but of the world at large. Chopin died in 1849, Schumann in 1856; with them were buried the ideals that lit the lantern of the romantic school. It has flickered on, this sweet, phosphorescent signal of revolt, but chiefly in the music of imitators. The strong light of the torch first firmly held by Bach and passed on by men like Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms was not the sort desired of the dreamers. For them the twilight and the strange-winged creatures bred in the twilight; the classical composers—who were romantics in their time—loved too much the luminary of day, and had few favors for melancholy and moonshine.

Then came Richard Wagner, revolutionist, genius by the grace of God, and a marvellous moulder of other men’s ideas. We are no longer alarmed by the senile warnings of the extreme right camp; as for the crazy boasts and affirmations of the musical romantics, we who know our Wagner smile at the godlike things claimed for him. He had genius and his music is genuine; but it is music for the theatre, for the glow of the footlights; rhetorical music is it, and it ever strives for effect. That this cannot be music to touch the tall stars of Bach and Beethoven we know; yet why compare the two methods when they strive for such other and various things? Wagner arrogated everything to his music-dramas; this he had to do or else be left lonely, bawling his wares to unsympathetic listeners in the market-place of art. But he did not hesitate to invade its most sacrosanct precincts to vend his musical merchandise. And we must not criticise him for this—such auctioneering in his case was absolutely necessary.

Wagner caught up into a mighty synthesis all the loose threads of romanticism, all the widely-severed strands of opera. He studied Bach and Beethoven, and utilized the polyphony of the one, the symphonic orchestra of the other; then, knowing that opera as opera on Rossinian lines had reached its apogee, and that Mozart and Gluck contained in solution the very combinations he needed, he, like the audacious alchemist, the cunning Cagliostro that he was, made a composite that at first smacked of German and then of Italian. He ran through his Rienzi, Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser days, strenuously testing his originality the meanwhile; and when the time had arrived—in his case late in life—he calmly threw overboard old formulas and served us the Ring and the rest of his masterpieces. It was the most deliberate chase after and assumption of genius the world had ever witnessed; and, strange as it seems, the wings that carried Wagner, Icarus-wise, to the vistas of the sun showed no weaknesses, no threatened and precipitous meltings. To change the figure: We know that this conscious composer perfected his style with other men’s ideas; he beat, bruised, battered into shape a method of his own, strong, individual, and all-sufficing for his purpose. He knew that certain subjects could stand operatic treatment, and that your opera orchestra must not be a big guitar, nor yet as symphonic as Beethoven’s. With the prescience of genius he helped himself to precisely the material he wanted. How well he knew his needs we all realize when we listen to Die Meistersinger and Tristan and Isolde.

George Bernard Shaw, in a long since vanished and brilliant essay, held that “Wagner, like most artists who have great intellectual power, was dominated in the technical work of his gigantic scores by so strong a regard for system, order, logic, symmetry, and syntax that, when in the course of time his melody and harmony become perfectly familiar to us, he will be ranked with Handel as a composer whose extreme regularity of procedure must make his work appear dry to those who cannot catch his dramatic inspiration. If Nordau, having no sense of that inspiration, had said: ‘This fellow, whom you all imagine to be the creator of a new heaven and a new earth in music out of a chaos of poetic emotion, is really an arrant pedant and formalist,’ I should have pricked up my ears and listened to him with some curiosity, knowing how good a case a really keen technical critic could make out for that view.”

Wagner was the last of the great romantics; he closed a period, did not begin one. It is the behavior of the musical cat—to resume our illustration—since Wagner’s death that is so puzzling to the prophets. The sword and the cloak, the midnight alarums and excursions sentimental, occupied for long the foreground; but music discarded adventure when adventure was reëntering the land of letters in the person of Robert Louis Stevenson,—Stevenson who wore his panache so bravely in the very presence of Émile Zola and other evangelists of the drab in fiction. A curious return to soberer ideals of form was led by Johannes Brahms. I may add that this leadership was unsought, indeed was hardly apprehended, by the composer. A more unpromising figure for a musical Messiah would have been difficult to find. Wagner, a brilliant, disputatious, magnetic man, waged a personal propaganda; Brahms, far from being the sympathetic, cultured man of the world that Wagner was, lived quietly and thought highly. His were Wordsworthian ideals; he abhorred the world, the flesh, and the devil,—this last person being incarnate for him in the marriage of music with the drama. Yet his music is alive to-day; alive with a promise and a potency that well-nigh urge me to fatidical utterance, so sane is it, so noble in contrast, so richly fruitful in treatment. A sympathetic writer he is, and also a man who deals largely in the humanities of his art. Learned beyond the dreams of Wagner, Brahms buried his counterpoint in roses, set it to blooming in the Old-World gardens of Germany; decked his science with the sweet, mad tunes of Hungary, withal remaining a Teuton, and one in the direct line of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert.