We have already seen that, according to his ideas, the union of poetry, painting, music, and action in the “art work of the future” could be effected only by some sacrifice on the part of each art. Wagner plainly saw, as we must see, that the special feature which must yield to the necessary modification was form, or, more strictly speaking, formality. It was not form in the abstract that must be sacrificed, but forms in the concrete,—forms which owed their preservation to tradition, and not to any intrinsic worth or imperative demand of art. To preserve the old-fashioned operatic forms would have been to continue the dominance of music in the drama; for the poet would still have been a mere librettist, bound to provide for the aria, the duet, and the finale. To introduce a distinctive kind of versification, such as the Alexandrine, or the Spencerian stanza, would have made poetry the controlling element. The first problem set before Wagner, then, was to find subjects which would admit of the utmost freedom and unconventionality of treatment. Already in the embryonic state of his theories, the myth had forced itself upon his mind as the necessary kind of subject; and in the final working out of those theories to their end, the myth stood the test, with this important corollary, that it must be a myth embodying one of the great elementary thoughts of mankind. Turn which way he would, he found support for his belief. Did the legendary beings of the Greek stage lack the humanity and the ethical conditions necessary for great tragedy? On the contrary, as Mr. Stedman has put it:—

“The high gods of Æschylus and Sophocles for the most part sit above the thunder: but the human element pervades these dramas; the legendary demigods, heroes, gentes, that serve as the personages,—Hermes, Herakles, the houses of Theseus, Atreus, Jason,—all are types of human kind, repeating the Hebraic argument of transmitted tendency, virtue and crime, and the results of crime especially from generation to generation.”[[16]]

And when Wagner turned from the Greek drama to the philosophy of his beloved Schopenhauer, he found the same convictions forced upon him again by his teacher’s art theory. This theory is propounded in Book III. of “The World as Will and Representation.” The writer begs leave to quote a summary of it which he has made in a study of “Tristan”:—

“Divested of its robes of metaphysical terminology, it is this: When the human mind rises from the study of the location, period, causes, and tendencies of things to the undivided examination of their essence, and when, further, this consideration takes place, not through the medium of abstract thought, but in calm contemplation of the immediately present natural object, then the mind is brought face to face with eternal ideas. Art, the work of genius, repeats these eternal ideas, which are the essential and permanent things in the phenomena of the world. In other words, art endeavors to exhibit to us the eternal essence of things by means of prototypes.”[[17]]

RICHARD WAGNER.
From a family group, photographed shortly before his death.

Of course, Wagner could not find prototypes embodying “the eternal essence of things” in the small and shallow stories to which the librettists of the majority of the popular operas of his time had turned. He must seek for material which had its roots in the great heart of the people; which was not the fancy of a single mind, but the formulation of a people’s ideal. To the myth, then, he turned, impelled by his own reasoning, by the arguments of divine philosophy, as he read them, and by the equally eloquent example of revered antiquity. And, indeed, we must all admit that the true myth is the individualization of an abstract ideal, and if we accept the Wagnerian theory, that abstract ideal should be embodied in the personages of the drama, we must also accept the myth. Even if we refuse to believe that ideals, or even types, should be the actors in a drama, we shall probably have no hesitation in admitting that for musical exposition only the broad, elementary emotions of humanity are well suited; and these are always found most freely and powerfully displayed in the great world-thoughts of mythology. Thus Wagner’s Tristan and his Isolde are plainly intended to be embodiments of the elementary man and woman, standing in primeval barbarian grandeur at gaze one upon the other, and overwhelmed by the tragic power of mastering passion. The history of the Tristan legend, which has found its way in different forms into the literature of several languages, is proof that the world has so regarded it. For six hundred years poets have accepted Tristan and Isolde as the most convincing representatives of the mastery and the misery of love. In this they stand sharply distinguished from the hero and heroine of Wagner’s comedy, “Die Meistersinger.” Walther and Eva, moving in a story whose design is to touch the manners of a time with the gentle reproof of satire, are not the embodiments of elementary thoughts, but are circumscribed by the manifest environments of locality and period. But Tristan and Siegfried are the unfettered, unconventioned man of all times and places; while Brünnhilde and Isolde are visible forms of the highest of Wagner’s ideals, the eternal womanhood. It is a significant fact that this master, in the first works produced after he had abandoned the old style,—“The Flying Dutchman,” and “Tannhäuser,”—dealt with these eternal types, while in “Lohengrin” he confined himself within comparatively narrower limits, returning to his first position when he had fully formulated the theories whose promptings rose within him as only vague, artistic instincts in his early works. And having cleared his theories from all doubts in his own mind, he emphasized the humanity of his mythical characters by some of his finest touches.

“The northern Scalds created tremendous myths. The spirit of their poems was colossal. Passions and sweetness stood side by side and were delineated with master strokes. Lofty sentiment and heroic deed were darkened by unspeakable crime and black tragedy. The German bards denuded these old poems of their glory and made their personages small. The heroes and heroines of the Sagas were enormous unrealities; those of the Nibelungen Lied were almost pretentious nonentities. Wagner seized upon every trait of character and every incident that was most human and made masterly use of it. It is the ease with which we recognize in the people of ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ primeval human types that makes us receptive of their influence and movable by their greatness.”[[18]]

Having found his people, the next object of the poet-composer was to select a flexible and yielding form for their utterance. He must find a form of verse which could be organically united with music, which would suggest a rhythmical basis for the melody, yet not control its construction. The various forms of modern versification, founded on the rhetorical accent of words, offered him no advantages, but, on the contrary, placed difficulties in the path of his movement. Rhyme, for instance, has no value whatever for the composer, unless he constructs the phrases and sections of his melody with the same number of feet and the same metrical pauses as are found in the verse; and this method, of course, gives the mere formalism of the poetry the government of the process of composition. On the other hand, blank verse is bound to find the same treatment in music as prose does. Wagner, therefore, turned to the metrical basis of all Teutonic poetry, namely, the alliterative line, as it is found in the “Eddas.” The peculiarity of this line is the emphasizing of its rhythm by the employment of similar sounds at the beginning of the accented syllables. A fair specimen of it is the opening of Siegmund’s love song in “Die Walküre”:—

“Winterstürme wichen