“Tolstoi?” suggests Mrs. Ogi.
“Tolstoi considered them from the point of view of Christian primitivism, a quite different thing. But now at last I have help; the economic interpretation of Richard Wagner has been done by Bernard Shaw in a little book, ‘The Perfect Wagnerite,’ published more than twenty-five years ago. So I feel like a small boy taking shelter from his enemies behind the back of his big brother.”
“If you would talk like that more frequently,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you wouldn’t have so many enemies!”
Richard Wagner was a towering genius, a master of half a dozen arts, perhaps the greatest compeller of emotion that has ever lived. He invented a new art-form, the “music-drama,” in which the arts of the musician, the poet, the dramatist, the actor, the scene-painter, and the costumer are brought together and fused into a new thing, “the music of the future.” It is a terrific engine for the evocation and intensification of human feelings; in creating it, and forcing its recognition by the world, Wagner performed a Titan’s task.
He was born in 1813, which made him thirty-five years of age when the revolution of 1848 drove King Louis Philippe from the throne of France and sent an impulse of revolt all over Europe. Wagner at this time was the conductor of the Royal Opera House at Dresden, having a life position with a good salary and a pension. Previous to that time he had had a ghastly struggle with poverty; a young and unknown genius, he had almost starved to death in a garret in Paris. He had married an actress, who had no understanding whatever of his power, but who had starved with him, and now clung with frenzy to security. He himself had the full consciousness of his destiny as an artist; he had already written three great operas, and had sketched his later works. He had thus every reason in the world to protect his future, and to shelter himself behind the art for art’s sake formula.
Instead of which, he attended a meeting of a revolutionary society of Dresden, and delivered an address appealing to the king of Saxony—the royal personage whose servant and pensioner he was—to establish universal suffrage, to abolish the aristocracy and the standing army, and to constitute a republic with His Majesty as president. Needless to say, His Majesty did not follow this recommendation from his operatic conductor; and next year the people of Dresden rose, and built barricades in the streets, and Wagner joined the revolutionists and actively took part in organizing their forces. When the Prussian troops marched in and put down the insurrection, three men were proscribed in a royal proclamation as “politically dangerous persons,” and condemned to death. One was Roeckel, assistant conductor of the opera house, who was captured and spent the next twelve years in a dungeon; another was Michael Bakunin, who became the founder of the Anarchist movement; and the third was Richard Wagner, royal operatic conductor.
Germany’s greatest living genius spent his next twelve years as a political exile in France and Switzerland. He utilized the time, in part to pour out political pamphlets, and in part to embody his revolutionary view of life in his greatest art work. Those who are interested in the pamphlets may find extracts in “The Cry for Justice.” Here is a sample from a manifesto entitled “Revolution,” published in the Dresden “Volksblaetter”:
Arise, then, ye people of the earth, arise, ye sorrow-stricken and oppressed. Ye, also, who vainly struggle to clothe the inner desolation of your hearts with the transient glory of riches, arise! Come and follow in my track with the joyful crowd, for I know not how to make distinction between those who follow me. There are but two peoples from henceforth on earth—the one which follows me, and the one which resists me. The one I will lead to happiness, but the other I will crush in my progress. For I am the Revolution, I am the new creating force. I am the divinity which discerns all life, which embraces, revives, and rewards.
The art work in which Wagner embodied these revolutionary ideas is known as “The Ring of the Nibelung.” It consists of four long operas, based upon the old German mythology. It begins with a charming fairy story and ends with a grim tragedy; and from first to last it is a study of the effects of economic power upon human life.