(vi) An actor who tried to look like a statue going through a variety of poses would only make the audience laugh; or we should think he had been taken ill.
At every point Wagner's reasoning goes to the ground. His basic facts are no facts, and his reasoning is absurd. All the essays on music and on drama and on the music-drama are as much an expression of himself as his music-dramas. I have in earlier chapters gone so far as even to labour the point that he could not get on in music without the aid of drama; and as he could never look beyond himself nor imagine that what he could not do—i.e. compose pure music—some one else—e.g. Schumann or Brahms—could do, he went out with absolute confidence to persuade the world that he was right and all others were wrong. To those who may be interested in the study of Wagner, the mighty creative artist, as a cerebral curiosity, I commend Mr. Newman's book aforementioned. Mr. Newman points out that Wagner was so magnificently self-centred that he attributed all opposition to "misunderstanding." To him it was incomprehensible that any one should say, "Yes, I perfectly understand your argument; but I beg leave not to agree with you." Any one who said that at once aroused his suspicions; such an one, thought Wagner, cannot possibly be sincere. Hence the hot denunciations of all and sundry who differed from him; hence the nightmare phantom of an organized body of "persecutors." Had he not been blinded by his wrath, and looked a little closer, he might have seen that the persecutors, far from being an organized body or confederacy, were fighting angrily, bitterly, amongst themselves. Many of them had this in common: they could not understand and did not like Wagner's music. That is different from the "wilful misunderstanding" Wagner moaned about. These musicians could not help themselves; as Sancho Panza remarks, "Man is as God made him, and generally a good deal worse."
The essay which provoked the widest and fiercest hostility, especially amongst the Jews, was the Judaism in Music. Wagner started from two premises, (i) That the Jews, being alien in thought and feeling, could not express themselves in our (i.e. German) art; and (2) that had they thought and felt like Germans, they would have succeeded no better; for music—that is, song—is idealized speech, and the gurglings and bubblings which do duty for speech with the Jews cannot be idealized into anything beautiful. The answer is that very great music has been written by Jews; that music was an English, a Flemish and an Italian art before the Germans knew anything about it; that if music must be idealized German speech, with its guttural chokings, the less we have of it the better. The Jews paid little attention to Wagner's arguments, but objected to his "personalities." Now, the reader must have observed that of all people practical jokers are those who can least tolerate a practical joke played at their own expense, and that those whose staple of conversation is banter or "chaff" become irascible the moment they are flicked with their own whip. For years Wagner had been the victim of unprovoked personal attacks in the Jew-controlled press, and some of the worst of these can be traced to Jew scribblers. Yet on the publication of Judaism in Music in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, a wail went up from these journalistic descendants of Elijah; and several prominent Jew musicians signed and presented to the authorities of the Leipzig conservatoire of music a petition praying that Brendel (the editor who published the essay) might be dismissed from his post in the conservatoire. These underhand tactics put the Jews out of court. Nevertheless, Wagner's essay was a bad mistake. It is bad science, bad history, bad argument; it did no person, no cause, any good, and it worked a very great deal of harm.
Wagner was at his best when writing about music or about musicians he had known. A paper on Spontini, belonging to this period (Spontini died in 1851), has a pleasant, generous note; and the account of the pompous old gentleman's visit to Dresden a few years previous is amusingly lifelike. The Communication to my Friends, a trifle egotistical, is still full of interest. The article on musical criticism is not so good as it might have been. Wagner had the utmost contempt for the ordinary press criticism of the day: with that sort of thing, he wrote Uhlig, one could not tempt the cat from behind the stove. He knew what criticism should not be, but when he came to what it should be his view was warped by the obsession that pure music had reached its boundaries, and the future of music was involved with the future of the music-drama. When his prejudices were not aroused, he himself was the greatest critic who has lived: his programmes of the Choral and Eroica Symphonies are masterpieces in their kind; and his analysis of the Iphigenia in Aulis overture can never be surpassed. Stage-managers have found his directions for the performing of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and the Dutchman invaluable; they are also sometimes read by conductors, and should be read by singers. They show how in composing his operas Wagner meant every note he put to paper: the most minute fibres of the musical growth are alive, a living part of the organism.
III
"I shall probably never come back to Germany." So wrote Wagner from Paris on March 2, 1855, to his friend Wilhelm Fischer, stage-manager and chorus-master at the Dresden opera. Wagner was then on his way to London to direct a series of Philharmonic concerts. "It was a great piece of folly for me to come to London...." So wrote Wagner from London to Fischer a little—perhaps a month—later. It was, says Mr. J.S. Shedlock in his admirable translation of the Letters to Dresden Friends, "an unfortunate visit." But was it? and, if so, in what sense? "The public of the Philharmonic concerts is very favourably disposed towards me." "The orchestra has taken a great liking to me, and the public approves of me." And as a matter of fact Wagner had no reason to be dissatisfied with the visit, nor has Mr. Shedlock for calling it "unfortunate." The whole situation is summed up in another communication to Fischer, dated London, June 15, 1855—
"... The false reports about my quarrel with the directors of the Philharmonic Society here and my consequent departure from London are based upon the following incident—
"When I went into the cloak-room after the fourth concert, I there met several friends, whom I made acquainted with my extreme annoyance and ill-humour that I should ever have consented to conduct concerts of such a kind, as it was not at all in my line. These endless programmes, with their mass of instrumental and vocal pieces, wearied me and tormented my aesthetic sense; I was forced to see that the power of established custom rendered it impossible to bring about any reduction or change whatever; I therefore nourished a feeling of disquietude, which had more to do with the fact that I had again embarked on a thing of the sort—much less with the conditions here themselves, which I really knew beforehand—but least of all with my public, which always received me with friendliness and approbation, often indeed with great warmth.
"On the other hand, the abuse of the London critics was a matter of perfect indifference to me, for their hostility only proved to all the world that I had not bribed them, while it gave me, on the contrary, much satisfaction to watch how they always left the door open, so that had I made the least approach they would have turned to different pitch; but naturally I thought of nothing of the kind....
"On that evening I was really in a furious rage, that after the A minor Symphony I should have had to conduct a miserable vocal piece and a trivial overture of Onslow's; and, as is my way, in deepest dudgeon I told my friends aloud that I had that day conducted for the last time; that on the morrow I should send in my resignation, and journey home. By chance a concert-singer, R—— (a German-Jew youth) was present; he caught up my words and conveyed them all hot to a newspaper reporter. Ever since then rumours have been flying about in the German papers, which have misled even you. I need scarcely tell you that the representations of my friends, who escorted me home, succeeded in making me withdraw the hasty resolution conceived at a moment of despondency.