Frédéric Chopin, despite the limited field of a piano keyboard, was the unconscious centre of all the hazy, purple dreams, drifting ideals, and perfumed sprays of thought that to-day we call romanticism. As the hub of that vast wheel of poesy and gorgeous imaginings, he absorbed the spirit of the time and shot out radiant spokes, which lived after the whole romantic school became a faded flower, a pallid ghost of the yesteryear. Hugo flamed across the historical canvas like a painted scarlet meteor; Berlioz’s mad talent, expressed by his symbolical coloring in orchestration—color carried to insanity pitch—was a lesser musical Hugo. Delacroix, with his brush dipped in the burning sun, painted vertigoes of color and audacities of conception. All was turbulent exaggeration, all was keyed above the normal pitch of life, and in the midst the still, small voice of Chopin could be heard.
The end had come to all monstrous growths of the romantic epoch in French art—be it remembered that earlier the movement was equally as strong in Germany, beginning with Novalis, Schlegel, Tieck, Schubert, Schumann, and Jean Paul Richter; the revolution of 1848 shattered the dream of the mad republicans of art. That sphinx-like nonentity, the third Napoleon, mounted the imperial tribune, and the Cerberus of Realism barked its first hoarse bark. For a time this phantasmagoria dominated Parisian art and letters.
All this was typical of cynicism, unbelief; technical perfection was carried to heights undreamed of, and the outcome of it all was Émile Zola. French painting was realized in the miniature manner of Meissonier, or later in the marvellous brutalities of Degas. Two geniuses who attempted to stem the tide that ran so swiftly died untimely deaths: Georges Bizet, the creator of Carmen, and Henri Regnault, who painted the Moorish Execution in the Luxembourg. The last-named perished before Bougival in 1871, done to death by a spent Prussian bullet. These two remarkable men, with possibly the addition of Fortuny, the Spanish virtuoso of arabesques in color, might have changed history if they had lived. But the fates willed it otherwise, and realism became the shibboleth.
Even that ardent young group, the Parnassians, as they called themselves, were beguiled into this quagmire of folly and half-truths. La Terre marked the lowest depths of the bog, and again a reaction began. Leconte de Lisle, Sully-Prudhomme, the graceful Banville (a belated romanticist), Coppée, Puvis de Chavannes; the impressionists, Monet, Manet, Rodin, the sculptor; the poets, René Ghil, Catulle Mendès, Verlaine, ill-fated Albert Glatigny, Anatole France, unhappy de Maupassant, and our own countrymen, Stuart Merrill and Vielé-Griffin began steering for other waters. Symbolism, Buddhism, every ism imaginable, have been at the rudder since then. Synthetic subtlety in art was the watchword of the party of new ideas, and a renaissance of the arts seemed to be at hand. For this movement, which agitated artistic Paris, the younger and fierier spirits, musicians, painters, actors, poets, and sculptors, banded, and, emulative of Richard Wagner’s Bayreuthian ideal, began the fabrication of a new art, or rather the synthesis of all arts, which seemed the wildest and most extravagant dream ever conceived by a half-dozen frenzied brains.
The history of art moves in cycles, and each cycle carries with it a residuum of the last. Richard Wagner attempted on a gigantic scale a synthesis of the arts. He wished to condense, concentrate, epitomize in his music-drama the arts of mimicry or pantomime, elocution, singing, painting, sculpture, architecture, drama, and instrumental music. He literally levied tribute on two of the senses and welded them into an ensemble, in which every shade of emotion, particularly the heroic and the tender, was depicted. But Wagner’s genius is, after all, Teutonic in its diffusiveness. He could not escape his national environment.
“Fifteen years ago,” said Paul Bourget, “poetry’s ambition was in picturesqueness and execution to rival painting. To-day it models itself on music. It is preoccupied with effects of mystery, of shadow, of the intangible. This is strikingly illustrated in the verse of Verlaine, whose poetic creed I have given you before in the ‘O la nuance, seule fiance, Le rêve au rêve et la flute au cor.’” These new men are musicians in words. They follow Wagner; above all are they descendants of Edgar Allan Poe, who has literally deflected the mighty wave of French literature into his neglected channel. Ah, if we but appreciated Poe as do our Gallic brethren! Mallarmé and Gustav Kahn produce verbal effects akin to music, with its melancholy mystery.
It is Richard Wagner who has done much of all this, preceded by Poe. Symbolism, a soft green star, is but a pin-prick in the inverted bowl of the night, but it sings like flame in thin glass. Its song is as beautiful as the twilights of Chopin’s garden, or as the wavings of the trees in Wagner’s luminous forest. Slowly but resistlessly, and despite himself,—for Wagner never bridled his tongue where the French were concerned,—this positive force conquered France, and penetrated, not alone the musical world, but to the world of letters, of moral ideas. It is nothing short of a miracle. The revolt all along the line, as manifested by the impressionists in painting, who preferred to use their eyes and see an infinity of tintings in nature, undreamed of by the painters of a generation ago; the poets and littérateurs who formed the new group called The Companions of the New Life, whose aspirations are for the ideal of morality, justice; sculptors like Marc Antokolsky and Auguste Rodin, who sought to hew great ideas from the rude rock, instead of carving lascivious prettiness,—all these new spirits, I say, but fell in with the vast revolution instituted by Richard Wagner. In the region of moral ideas Melchior de Vogüé, Ernest Lavisse, and Paul Desjardins are combating the artistic indifferentism and black despair of the school of materialists, realists, and the rest. A new idea in France germinates as in no other country on the globe, because it finds congenial soil somewhere. From an idea to a school is but a short step, hence the rapidity of the Wagner worship after it once took root.
III
ISOLDE AND TRISTAN
You notice the inversion! Wagner’s music-drama primarily concerns the woman; she is the protagonist, not Tristan. Even in Act III, where this lover of lovers lies awaiting Isolde and death, it is her psychology which most concerns the composer. So I call it Isolde and Tristan—the subjugation of man by woman.
It was Wagner himself who confessed that he had thrown overboard his theories while penning this marvellous score. In it the music stifles the action. It is the very flowering of the Wagnerian genius; his best self, his fantasy, his wonderful power of making music articulate, are there. And from the tiny acorn in the prelude grows the mighty oak of the symphonic drama.