The Project Gutenberg EBook of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde
by George Ainslie Hight

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Title: Wagner's Tristan und Isolde

Author: George Ainslie Hight

Release Date: April, 2005  [EBook #7834]
[This file was first posted on May 20, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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WAGNER'S "TRISTAN UND ISOLDE"

AN ESSAY ON
THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA

BY GEORGE AINSLIE HIGHT







  Passing the visions, passing the night,
  Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrade's hands,
  Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of
      my soul,
  Victorious song, death's outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering
      song,
  As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling,
      flooding the night,
  Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet
      again bursting with joy,
  Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
  As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses.

  _Walt Whitman._





PREFACE

The following pages contain little if anything that is new, or that
would be likely to interest those who are already at home in Wagner's
work. They are intended for those who are beginning the study of
Wagner. In spite of many books, I know of no Wagner literature in
English to which a beginner can turn who wishes to know what Wagner
was aiming at, in what respect his works differ from those of the
operatic composers who preceded him. Some sort of Introduction appears
to me a necessary preliminary to the study of Wagner, not because his
works are artificial or unnatural, but because our minds have become
perverted by the highly artificial products of the Italian and French
opera, so that a work of Wagner at first appears to us very much as
_Paradise Lost_ or a tragedy of Sophokles would appear to a person who
had never read anything but light French novels. He must entirely change
the attitude of his mind, and the change, although it be a return to
nature and truth, is not easy to make.

Those who wish fully to understand Wagner's aims must read his own
published works. I have not attempted to give his views in a condensed
form, being convinced that any such attempt could only end in failure.
Whenever it has been made, the result has been a caricature; you
cannot separate a man's work from his personality. All that I could do
was to endeavour to lay some of the problems involved, as I conceive
them, before the reader in my own words.

SAMER, PAS DE CALAIS, _May_, 1912.



CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I.    ON WAGNER CRITICISM

II.   WAGNER AS MAN

III.  WAGNER'S THEORETICAL WRITINGS

IV.   THE ROOTS OF GERMAN MUSIC

V.    THE WAGNERIAN DRAMA AND ITS ANTECEDENTS

VI.   THE EARLIER VERSIONS OF THE TRISTAN
    MYTH

VII.  WAGNER'S CONCEPTION OF THE TRISTAN
    MYTHOS

VIII. ON CERTAIN OBJECTIONS TO THE WAGNERIAN
    DRAMA

IX.   MUSIC AS AN ART OF EXPRESSION

X.    SOME REMARKS ON THE MUSICAL DICTION
    OF "TRISTAN UND ISOLDE"

XI.   OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXT AND MUSIC

XII.  OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXT AND MUSIC
    CONTINUED

XIII. OBSERVATIONS ON THE TEXT AND MUSIC
    CONTINUED

XIV.  CONCLUSION

      APPENDIX



[Greek: Theohus d' ephame eleountas aemas sugchoreutas te kahi
choraegohus aemin dedo-ke'nai to'n te Ap'ollo-a kahi Mousas
kahi dhae kahi tri'ton ephamen, ei' memnaemetha, Dionuson.]




CHAPTER I

ON WAGNER CRITICISM


A new work on Wagner requires some justification. It might be urged
that, since the _Meister_ has been dead for some decades and the
violence of party feeling may be assumed to have somewhat abated, we
are now in a position to form a sober estimate of his work, to review
his aims, and judge of his measure of success.

Such, however, is not my purpose in the following pages. I conceive
that the endeavour to _estimate_ an artist's work involves a
misconception of the nature of art. We can estimate products of
utility, things expressible in figures, the weight of evidence, a Bill
for Parliament, a tradesman's profits. But a work of art is written
for our pleasure, and all that we can attempt is to understand it.
True, we must judge in a certain sense, we must weigh and estimate
before we can arrive at understanding; but it is one thing to meditate
in the privacy of one's own mind, quite another to publish these
constructive processes as an end in themselves, to set up critical
"laws" and expect that poets are going to conform to them.

Art, says Ruskin, is a language, a vehicle of thought, in itself
nothing. Plato's teaching in the third book of his _Republic_ is
the same, and the idea of the secondary nature of art, of its value
only as the expression of something else, of a human or moral purpose
only fully expressible in the drama, is the nucleus of all Wagner's
theoretical writing. In private conversation and in his letters he
often spoke very emphatically. "I would joyfully sacrifice and destroy
everything that I have produced if I could hope thereby to further
freedom and justice."[1]

[Footnote 1: The episode which gave rise to this remark is too long to
relate in the text, but is highly characteristic and instructive for
Wagner's attitude towards art. It will be found in the sixth volume of
Glasenapp's biography, p. 309.]

Let us clearly keep in mind the distinction here involved between the
two elements of every work of art: matter and form, substance and
technique, [Greek: onta] and [Greek: gignomena], Brahm and Maya, Wille
und Vorstellung, the emotional and the intellectual life of man, or,
untechnically, what he feels and his communication of those feelings
to others as a social being. With the first of these the critic has
nothing to do; the matter is given; all he has to consider is whether
it has found adequate expression--that is, to try to understand the
language, that when he has mastered it he may help others to do so
according to his ability. I do not say that the matter is one to which
we are indifferent. On the contrary, it is far the more important of
the two, since the thing expressed is prior to its expression. Only it
is no concern of the critic, because we may fairly assume that if the
technical expression is correct and intelligible the artist has
already told us what he wishes to convey in the most perfect language
of which that idea is susceptible, and that any attempt to put it into
the lower and more prosy language of the critic would only weaken and
distort the thought.

It does not seem to me that passions have abated very much, or
judgments have become much more sober, since Wagner has left us. In
England at least the ignorance and indifference which prevail among
the ordinary public are still profound. In truth the seed which he
sowed has fallen upon evil soil; his fate has been a cruel one. He,
the most sincere and transparent of men, whose only wish was to be
seen as he actually was, has perhaps more than any other great man
been the victim of misrepresentation, alike from his senseless
persecutors and from his equally senseless adulators. While he lived,
every imaginable calumny, plausible and unplausible, was invented to
besmirch his character and his art. Now it is, in Germany at least, no
longer safe to revile him on the ground of his technical artistic
style. The days are long past when the terms "charlatan," "amateur,"
"artistic anarchist" could be applied to him with impunity, and it is
fully recognized by all who have any title to speak that Wagner, so
far from being a revolutionary destroyer, was, like all true
reformers--Luther, for example, or Jeremiah or Sokrates--an extreme
conservative. Those who like Walt Whitman preach libertinism in the
name of democracy do not want reform; they are satisfied with things
as they are. Wagner battled, both in music and in literature, for
_der reine Satz_--purity of diction as against the untidy licence
which was then and still is fashionable among weak-kneed artists and a
thoughtless public.[2]

[Footnote 2: It is perhaps still necessary to produce some warrant for
these statements. The deep-rooted conservatism of Wagner's character
is a prominent feature of all his literary work, and especially
noticeable in his educational schemes, as, for example; the report on
a proposed Munich school of music, with its text: "The business of a
Conservatory is to conserve." On his musical diction the testimony of
Prof. S. Jadassohn will probably be considered sufficient by most
people. He writes: "Wagner's harmonies are clear and pure; they are
never arbitrary, nor coarse nor brutal, but throughout conscientious
and clean according to the strict rules of pure diction (_des reinen
Satzes_). Consequently the sequences and combinations of the chords
and the course of the modulation are easily followed by those who know
harmony. Similarly, his polyphonic style is easily intelligible to the
trained contrapuntist"--and more to the same effect, Jadassohn is here
only expressing what every competent musician knows. Before the first
performance at Bayreuth in 1876 Wagner's last word to the artists was:
_Deutlichkeit_--"clearness"--a word which sums up all his
technical teaching throughout his life.]

Mr. Hadow has truly observed that we have not yet learned to treat
genius frankly, and either starve it with censure or smother it with
irrational excess of enthusiasm. If the malicious misrepresentations
and persecutions which Wagner endured during his lifetime were the
outcome of ignorance, assuredly the hysterical raving of our day is no
less ignorant and contemptible. I hear it said that in England
"Wagnerism" is an attitude, and can only reply that it is so in
Germany too. Among the cosmopolitan audiences who crowd the theatres
of Dresden and Munich on a Wagner night and greet his works with
thundering applause, there is probably not one person in a hundred who
really knows what he sees and hears. Not that these people are not
perfectly sincere; _something_ they have undoubtedly taken in;
the marvellous euphony and balance of Wagner's orchestra under the
conductors we now have, the exquisite grace of the melodic and
harmonic structure, and the lyric beauty of so many scenes are
apparent to all, and will always awaken the boundless enthusiasm of
those who go only to be diverted. But these are only the ornaments of
the drama; to understand the drama itself requires a serious effort on
the part of the hearer which few are prepared to make, a moral
sympathy with the composer and receptive understanding of his aims of
which few are capable.

We in England seem content to remain in darkness. I am not, of course,
referring to the many competent men who have given serious attention
to the works of Wagner; I am speaking of the general public. The
English people has plenty of poetry in its heart, but our attitude
towards German literature and art is not creditable to us as a nation.
We who possess the finest literature ever produced by any people,
whose Chaucers and Shakespeares and Popes and Byrons are the models on
which the poets of other nations endeavour to form their style,
scarcely think their literature worthy of serious consideration. A
German boy when he leaves school has generally a pretty close
acquaintance with Shakespeare, and knows at least something of other
English authors and poets. An English boy at the same stage of his
education has perhaps heard of Goethe and Schiller, but has rarely
read any of their works. At the Universities it is no better. I really
believe that in England Gounod's _Faust_ is better known than
Goethe's! It would be impossible that such travesties of _Faust_
as appear from time to time upon the English stage would be endured if
our scholars and intellectuals were better informed. Towards ancient
languages, except the two which are fashionable, we are just as
indifferent. It was no less a person than Sir Richard Maine who
asserted that, except the blind forces of nature, nothing exists in
the world which is not Greek in its origin! Truly more things are
dreamed of in our philosophy than are in heaven and earth! When great
scholars make such statements as this it is scarcely surprising that
ordinary people should care little for the origins of their own
language. The parents of modern English are not Greek but Anglo-Saxon
and Scandinavian or Icelandic. Both these languages have a literature
of the very highest rank, but are little studied in this country. The
eighth-century English lyrics are amongst the finest in the language.
As for Scandinavian, not every one in England is aware that the
Icelanders are, and have been for a thousand years, the most literary
people in the world;[3] that in one important branch of literature,
that of story-telling, they are absolutely without a rival, except in
the Old Testament. From these Scandinavian sources we have received
the heritage which has grown into our magnificent language and
literature, but we trouble our heads little about them and leave them
to foreigners to study. Ignorance may perhaps be excusable; what is
wholly inexcusable is the habit of some Englishmen of criticising and
censuring the work of foreigners which they dislike because they
cannot understand it. There is a certain section of the English people
who seem to think that it shows patriotism and a becoming national
pride to belittle the work of other nations and speak of it in an
insolent tone of contempt. They habitually misrepresent the
achievements of foreigners in order to make them appear ridiculous.
Over twenty years ago a writer in one of our high-class magazines
informed an astonished world that "the Wagner-bubble has burst!" and
the preposterous nonsense has been repeated again and again in one
form or another ever since. Quite recently we read in one of our
leading English dailies the following sentences: "... Among many of
the best-known critics there is a general consensus of opinion that
with the completion of Strauss' important work [_Elektra_],
Wagnerism will diminish in popularity.... For years and years vain
attempts have been made to get away from Richard Wagner. Creative
musicians have long felt that Wagner's great and never-to-be-forgotten
art no longer suited modern times"! One feels inclined to ask whether
the writer looks upon musical composers as racehorses to be pitted
against each other, or as religious creeds which must destroy their
rivals in order to live.

[Footnote 3: Feeling some doubt as to whether this statement were not
an exaggeration, I have submitted it before publication to my friend
Mr. Eirikr Magnusson of Cambridge, whose profound knowledge of
European literature, ancient and modern, needs no attestation from me.
He replies that, except for the two centuries succeeding the Black
Death in 1402-4, the statement in the text is quite correct. With that
reservation therefore I allow it to stand.]

There is another and a graver charge to be brought against some
writers whose works are popularly read in England, to which it will be
my duty to return. I have said enough here to show the state of Wagner
criticism in this country. Abroad it is little better. Wagner is
indeed fashionable. His works are regularly performed in every capital
in Europe, and he has probably saved the existence of the costly
_Hoftheater_ in Germany. But success, in the sense in which he
understood it, he has not yet achieved. It is very questionable
whether his influence has on the whole been for good, either upon
musicians and dramatists, or upon the public. It is not his fault.
Nothing would show more convincingly the utter inability of the modern
public to appreciate the highest and best in art than the literature
which has gathered round the great name of Wagner. In all the vast
mass how much is there which was worth the writing, or can be read
with any profit by reasonable people? I think that, putting aside
purely technical works on music, stage-management, etc., the number of
really good books could be counted on the fingers. The rest is feeble
rhapsody on the one hand, malicious misrepresentation on the other. Of
works of first-rate importance, works that really add anything solid
to our knowledge, I only know one: Nietzsche's _Geburt der
Tragoedie_. Of others the best are mostly in French. Lichtenberger's
_R. Wagner_ is admirable so far as it goes, but treats the
subject exclusively from the literary standpoint. The small treatise
of our marvellous countryman, Mr. H. S. Chamberlain, _Le drame
wagnerien_[4] (Paris, 1894), is thoughtful and suggestive, and
quite worthy of close attention, as are also the works of Kufferath,
Golther, etc. There may be a few more, mostly of small compass, but
not many. Glasenapp's great biography, a work of astounding industry,
and invaluable to the student, can scarcely be included among the good
books because of its terrible literary style and its fulsome
sentimentality. The magnificent work begun by the Hon. Mrs. Burrell,
of which there is a copy in the British Museum, would have been a
monumental biography had she lived to complete it, but it stops when
Wagner is about twenty. Of the rest, the less said the better. Of
works against Wagner I know of none that are even worth reading,
except Hanslick, to whom I shall have occasion to return. It is much
to be regretted that none of Wagner's opponents have ever stated their
case fairly and soberly. There is much to be said, but assuredly it
has not been said by men of the stamp of Nordau, who cites disgusting
accounts from French medical journals in order to show his abhorrence
of what he considers Wagner's immorality! Tolstoi is a writer of wide
authority among his followers, and might be expected to feel some
responsibility for his utterances; yet he thought it right to publish
his verdict to the world after having witnessed _one_ very
inferior performance of a _portion_ of Siegfried! He is often
appealed to as if he were an authority by the opponents of Wagner, but
his utterances have no more weight than the thoughtless expressions of
a Ruskin or a William Morris, which their biographers have thought fit
to drag from the privacy of private letters or conversation and
publish as their deliberate judgments. From Nietzsche at least
something better might have been expected, but I can find little in
his anti-Wagnerian writings except coarse vituperation and low
scandal. There is no anti-Wagnerian literature worthy of the name.
There are plenty of highly musical and artistic natures who honestly
dislike his art, and I am so far able to sympathize with them as to
believe that an inestimable benefit would be conferred upon all of us
if they would publish their objections in sober and reasoned form. But
they do not; or if they do speak, they descend to the slums.

[Footnote 4: Not his _Richard Wagner_, which is a more popular
work.]

Such has been the response of the public through its literature to the
man who expressly did not wish to be worshipped, but only to be
understood. Assuredly there is yet plenty of room for good work to be
done! The purpose of the following pages is criticism, not as judging,
but as selecting. In choosing certain characteristics to show them in
a different perspective from an altered point of view the critic may
hope to help others to a better understanding of the art. I have
endeavoured to do this for English readers in respect of Wagner's
dramatic works through one of the most characteristic and
representative of them. The problem resolves itself into two. First
there is the general technical one, so fully treated by Wagner himself
in his theoretical writings, whether music is capable of being used as
a means of dramatic expression; and secondly, how far the endeavour
has been successful in the particular work selected for illustration.
To treat these problems satisfactorily it will be necessary for me to
go far beyond the limits of music and dramatic art, and to enter
rather fully into questions of psychology and metaphysics, which I
fear may discourage some readers, but which cannot be shirked by those
who wish to form a judgment based upon a more solid foundation than
their own personal taste. The mistake made by nearly all writers on
Wagner hitherto has been to suppose that the mere assertion of an
individual opinion has any value at all, however illustrious the
person who holds it, however able his exposition. Of what use can be
the assertion that a certain progression of chords is acceptable and
pleasing to the healthy ear (even with the usual addition that all who
do not think so are blockheads), when some other person equally
competent asserts the contrary? Or how am I to persuade my readers
that _Tristan und Isolde_ is what I hold it to be, the loftiest
paean of pure and holy love ever conceived by a poet, when others see
in it only a "story of vulgar adultery," steeped in sensuality? The
moral law is the same to all men, and differences of judgment upon
moral acts are due to imperfect understanding. But I cannot hope to
make my own position clear without descending to the foundations of
all art, of all life, without asking: what is drama? what are its
aims, and how does it express them? what is human life which it
reflects? Wagner felt this very strongly, and soon realized that an
ontological basis was required for his own theories; that to reform
art he must reform human life. "Oh ye men," he exclaims passionately
in a letter: "feel rightly, act as you feel! be free!--then we will
have art."

We may learn the true principles of criticism from Wagner himself.
Truthfulness in literature is what correctness is in _Vortrag_.
They are objectivity, the art of seeing things as they really are,
clearness of vision, right understanding. The truthful representation
of an artist as he really is does not preclude, but rather stimulates,
enthusiasm, for we may believe that the true artist and the true work
of art as he intended it are superior to the flattering creations of
our own fancy.

Lessing observes that of ten objections raised by the critic, nine
will probably have occurred to the author; that he himself will read a
passage twenty times rather than believe that the writer contradicted
himself. Some of our critics seem to proceed upon an opposite
principle and to reject a thought at once if it does not seem to agree
with what they themselves have thought, and they observe little
restraint in expressing their authoritative judgment. One critic
speaks of Wagner meditating on problems "which any clear-headed
schoolboy could quickly have settled for him"; we are not surprised to
find the same critic sneering at Kant and Plato! Such writers there
will always be, but a nation which tolerates them cannot expect to
maintain an honourable place in the intellectual commonwealth.




CHAPTER II

WAGNER AS MAN


The distinction so often made with a genius between the "man" and the
"artist" has been justly ridiculed by Wagner himself. For the truest
individuality of an artist is in his art, not when he leaves his own
proper sphere and enters one that is foreign to him. Beethoven is the
writer of symphonies and sonatas, not the suspicious friend and
unmannerly plebeian. The _man_ is the same in both relations,
_i.e._ his character remains the same, only it manifests itself
differently under changed conditions, and the difference lies not in
him, but in the point of view from which we regard him. Let us bear
this in mind in considering Wagner as he appeared away from his art.

A genius has been aptly likened to an astronomical telescope, which is
able to scan the heavens, but is useless for things close at hand. To
some extent this is true of Wagner, but less so than with most, and
not in the sense in which it has been often asserted. The attacks
which have been made upon Wagner's private character show little
discrimination, for it is a simple truth that the particular vices of
which he has been accused are just those from which he was singularly
free. No charge has been more audaciously or persistently brought by
ignorant writers or believed by an ill-informed public in England and
America than that of morbid sensuality. Just as Wagner's dramas have
been called licentious, so his character has been described as
sensual, in defiance of easily ascertainable facts. Not long ago the
discovery was made that his health had been undermined by loose living
when he was young. It is easy to invent such charges, for which there
is not a particle of evidence, and unfortunately the reader is not
always in a position to verify the authorities, and naturally thinks
that the writer must have some ground for what he says. As a rule
these statements have originated with Ferdinand Praeger's book
_Wagner as I knew him_, a book which I am astonished to see still
quoted in England, as if it were an authority. I have not seen it, and
do not know what it contains. Its character was exposed by two
Englishmen, Mr. H. S. Chamberlain and Mr. Ashton Ellis, soon after its
publication in 1892, and it was consequently withdrawn from
circulation in Germany by its publishers, Messrs. Breitkopf und
Haertel. In England and America it still seems to be widely read, and
is, more than any other single work, responsible for the false notions
that are abroad about Wagner. Sensuality, that is in the morbidly
sexual sense of the term, was no part of Wagner's character, nor could
it be of the man who justly claimed that no poet had ever glorified
women as he had done. His Sentas, Elsas, Bruennhildes, and I must add
his Isoldes, rightly understood, afford the best answer to such
accusations.

"But," it is said, "his music is unmistakably sensual." I must defer
it to a future chapter to consider how far pure music, that is, music
apart from words, is capable of expressing a specific human quality,
but may here anticipate by saying that the nature of music is to
assimilate the elements with which it is joined; the hearer may,
within certain broad restrictions, put into it whatever he likes, and
will therefore hear in it the reflection of himself. This is why
different people hear such different things in the same music. If a
man hears sensuality in the _music_ of, let us say, the second
act of _Tristan und Isolde_, it is his own interpretation.
Another hears something very different, an anticipation of eternity,
of that world beyond which the lovers are about to enter to be united
with each other and with all nature in a higher love of which all
earthly love, with its degrading garment of sensuality, is but the
debased image. The music by itself will bear either interpretation;
each hearer will find in it just that which he looks for and can
understand. But when the words are added the meaning is clear. People
are not "sensual" when death is right before them, as it is here. I do
not wish to be understood as meaning that Wagner excluded sensuality
from his works, or that he did not treat the most universal and most
ungovernable of human impulses in accordance with its character. The
drama must include everything human, and when passionate sexuality is
a necessary part of the dramatic development, Wagner no more shirks it
than did Shakespeare or any other great dramatist. But Wagner always
treats it with such consummate grace and refinement that it ceases to
be repulsive and appears in its own uncorrupted beauty, as in the
_Venus_ music and in the flower-maiden scene in _Parsifal_. Only to
the impure are the senses impure.

An unbiassed consideration of all that is known about Wagner's life
will acquit him of all the graver vices, unless a propensity for
living beyond his income be reckoned as such. Whatever his faults
there was nothing dishonourable or mean about them, and he is entitled
to the treatment that is always accorded by one gentleman to another,
whether friend or enemy, so long as he does not disgrace himself.
Surely it ought not to be necessary to insist upon this before an
English public, but it has not always been observed.

Similar is the charge of "ego-mania," that is, of overrating his own
importance, so often heard. There cannot be any notion of his
_over_rating his importance, for all are now agreed that his
influence, whether for good or for bad, can scarcely be overrated.
Only society requires, very rightly, that a man shall speak of himself
and his achievements with a certain reticence, leaving it to others to
judge of them. Nowhere that I know of has Wagner offended against this
very proper rule. It has so long been the practice to represent Wagner
as a man of overweening vanity, a man who tried to exalt himself at
the expense of other artists, that some in England will not believe me
when I say that there is no foundation whatever for such assertions. I
only ask of those who think there is to read Wagner's own published
writings, and to judge from them, not from what is said about him. I
do not mean to say that he did not believe with the most intense
conviction in his own idea of a new German dramatic art, uniting the
separate arts in itself, and did not proclaim it as a thing of the
first national importance; every serious reformer believes in himself
in that sense. But that is not the same thing as asserting his own
powers to realize it. With regard to these he speaks very modestly of
himself as a beginner, a pioneer only. In fact the question of his own
particular genius is, he says, irrelevant, and has nothing to do with
the other one, adding rather cynically that genius is often given to
the wrong people.

It is in this sense that I understand the famous words of his speech
after the first performance of the _Ring_ at Bayreuth, in 1876,
which have been so often quoted in illustration of his arrogance: "You
have seen what we can do; it is now for you to will. We now have an
art if you will." Namely, thus: "Germany now has for the first time an
indigenous drama, not imported from foreigners; if you accept it, try
to develop and perfect it." Or shortly: "I and my friends have done
what we can; the rest is for you to do." This seems to me the natural
meaning of the words, and agrees with all his utterances at other
times, namely, that the public must not leave it all to the artist,
but must exert itself to cooperate with him. It has latterly become
almost a fashion among some German authors to transgress all bounds of
modesty in advertising themselves. Nietzsche, for example, leaves us
in no doubt whatever as to what he requires us to think about him. But
nothing of the kind will be found in Wagner.

The charge of "grapho-mania" is scarcely worth discussion, except to
show what slender arguments have to be relied upon by those who try to
prove Wagner insane. Ten, not _bulky_ volumes, as Nordau calls
them, but volumes of very moderate dimensions, some 30 per cent. of
which are accounted for by his dramatic works, are not a very large
allowance for a man who lived seventy years, and was often under the
necessity of writing to eke out his income. They are scarcely
sufficient to be regarded as an indication of insanity. The fact is,
that Wagner, either as dramatist or as author, was not a voluminous
producer. It is the quality, the intensity, of his work that is
important, not its bulk. This is only another instance of the amazing
indifference to the most easily ascertainable facts shown by Wagner's
assailants, and of the truth that if you only assert a thing, however
nonsensical, persistently enough, there will always be some who will
believe it. I cannot be expected to go through in detail the whole
string of aberrations which Nordau finds accumulated in Wagner. They
are all of the same kind, and all equally fanciful.

The endeavours to prove Wagner a "degenerate" are professedly made in
the name of science, so often a cloak for the most unscientific
vagaries, by men who are disciples of the late Professor Lombroso of
Florence. Lombroso was a serious man of science, and many of his
investigations into the nature and indications of insanity have
permanent value, but it is certain that he went much too far, and his
views are only very partially accepted by those who are qualified to
judge of them.[5] When a theory of insanity is made to include such
men as Newton, Goethe, Darwin, and others who are generally supposed
to be the very types of sober sanity, a Richard Wagner may well be
content to remain in such company. We are reminded of Lombroso's own
story of the lunatic's reply to one who asked when he was coming out
of the asylum: "When the people outside are sane." In fact the
theories when pushed to their extreme consequences become absurd.
There is nothing discreditable to a serious student of science who in
the enthusiasm of discovery presses his inferences beyond their valid
limits, since all theory must at first be more or less tentative. Very
different is the case when these dubious theories are applied by men
with very modest scientific acquirements, or with none at all, to
injure the reputation of a man whom they dislike. We may then fairly
ask, with Lichtenberger, on which side the degeneration is more likely
to be. These are the men who bring science into discredit.

[Footnote 5: For a very fair estimate of his work, see an article in
the _Times_, October 20, 1909.]

It would not have been worth my while to dwell at such length upon the
calumnies of irresponsible writers did I not know that they represent
the popular opinion among the less well-informed in England of to-day,
as in Germany thirty or forty years ago. They begin with people who
ought to know better, and in time find their way into the magazines
and popular literature of the day, to be greedily read by a public
which, next to a prurient divorce case, likes nothing so well as
slander of a great man. We have heard much of late years about the
decadence of the English Press, but editors know very well the public
for whom they cater.

That Wagner's was one of those serene and universally lovable
characters who live at peace with God and man it is far from me to
wish to convey. Such men there are, and women, who seem lifted above
the meaner elements of human existence, without envy, without
reproach, untouched by its iniquities, unsullied by its vileness. Pure
themselves and self-contained they see no guile in others, or if they
see it they notice it not. Who has not met with such? who has not felt
their power? When such innate purity of soul is united with high
intellectual gifts we have the noblest creation of nature, and to have
been called "friend" by one such is the highest honour that life has
to offer.

But Wagner was not one of these. His was a stormy spirit--"The
never-resting soul that ever seeks the new." He likens himself to a
wild animal tearing at its cage and exhausting itself with fruitless
struggles. He could not make terms with falsehood and sophistry, or
leave them to perish naturally, but lived in ceaseless defiance of
them. He was a man who inspired intense, devoted love, or intense
hatred, according to the people with whom he was dealing. With his
moral character in itself we have indeed no concern, but it seems
necessary to explain why so many high-minded men who knew him
intimately, and loved him passionately, at last fell away from him.
The common theory of Wagnerites, that they were actuated by petty
motives of jealousy, and the like, cannot be entertained for a moment.
With Nietzsche it may well be that ill-health and drugs had begun
their fatal work in 1876; they may account for the violence of his
anti-Wagnerian writings, but surely the cause of his aversion lay
deeper. Similarly with Joachim. Even the noble Liszt, who had stood by
him and battled so bravely for him through the years of his deepest
distress, though he never failed in his admiration of Wagner's art,
seems to have cooled towards him personally when he was in prosperity.
His staunch band of Zurich friends one and all became to some extent
estranged after his exile was annulled. His acknowledged hasty temper
will not account for it; hastiness wounds, but in a generous and
ardently loving nature it does not estrange.

The cause is, in my belief, not far to seek. It lay in the domineering
spirit which is so noticeable in every act of his life, every page of
his writings. His life was his art. He was above all things a man of
action, and all who belonged to him in any relation whatever had to
serve him in his art or cease to be his. His power must be absolute;
talents, energies, life itself if necessary, must be surrendered to
the service of that one supreme purpose. Many were the men and women
who did not flinch from the sacrifice. I need only mention musicians
like Richter, Cornelius, Porges, literati like Glasenapp and Wolzogen.
Many, especially women, were ready to fling to the winds all thought
of personal wellbeing, and life itself. Cosima, to save him and his
art, sacrificed every worldly consideration. Ludwig of Bavaria did the
same, and brought his country to the verge of revolution. Singers,
like Hedwig Reicher Kindermann, literally gave their lives for him.
And no less than this did he exact from all who aspired to be his
disciples and supporters.

But Nietzsche's was a different character. He was Wagner's peer, and,
though thirty years his junior, had his own purposes to follow.
Nietzsche was, as he afterwards realized, under a delusion from the
first. His highly organized musical nature had been taken captive,
intoxicated by Wagner's music. But Nietzsche was a thinker, and it is
contrary to the natural order that the man of thought should serve the
man of action. Nietzsche was incapable of serving Wagner's art and had
to leave him.

Was this a fault in Wagner? Who shall say? If it was, it was a fault
which he shared with every earnest reformer who is not content with
preaching, but enforces his precepts with action. Reform is no
plaything; it cannot be achieved by listening to the well-meant advice
of friends who know no higher goal than personal success, who have no
glimmering of the motives that impel a great soul, who would fain tell
the thunderbolt where it shall strike. Every great man lives alone; he
has no friends and no disciples. His equals follow their own ends; his
inferiors cannot breathe in the regions where he dwells. He must rely
upon himself. Without this full dominion Wagner would not have been
himself; he would never have founded Bayreuth, never have had his
greater works performed, never even have composed them. And this
brings us to the most conspicuous feature of his character, the centre
of everything, namely, his uncompromising sincerity and truthfulness,
qualities so magnificent in him that I doubt whether they have ever
been equalled in any other, qualities which show Wagner no less great
"as man" than he is "as artist."

It is certain--and no one knew it better than himself--that Wagner
might easily have been successful from the first if he had liked. He
might have been wealthy, popular, petted by the great, have lived in
the luxury that he loved, at peace with all the world, if he had only
consented to traffic with his art and to produce what the public
wanted. For assuredly his talent for writing operas on the old lines
was not inferior to that of Meyerbeer or Rossini. His _Rienzi_
was the greatest immediate success of his whole life when grand
operas, of which it is the type, were fashionable, and a few more
works of the kind would have raised him above all anxiety for his
livelihood. This can scarcely be questioned now; it has been asserted
again and again by those who most hated him, and who were in the habit
of denouncing him as "past help" because he refused to listen to them.
To do so he would have had to sacrifice all that he held sacred. He
had "hitched his waggon to a star," and deliberately chose poverty,
exile, public calumny and ridicule, domestic unrest, rather than allow
the purity of his art to be sullied by departing for an instant from
the ideals after which he strove. Witness the events of the fateful
seventies, when his financial straits were perhaps at their worst,
when all the powers of Germany, statesmen, theatrical Intendants,
press, singers, seemed in league together to thwart the project of
Bayreuth upon which his all depended; when even King Louis of Bavaria
cooled for a time; when Buelow and Liszt had withdrawn their help, and
Nietzsche had seceded in horror and despair; when the first effort of
Bayreuth had left a ruinous debt, and the failure of the
_Patronat-Vereine_ shut off the last faint ray of hope. Well
might the _Meister_, now advancing in age, have thought of
accepting one of the dazzling offers which repeatedly reached him from
Russia, from America, from Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, and other places.
But he only saw in them lures to tempt him into degrading his art by
commercial speculation with all its paraphernalia of advertisement and
other sordid abominations. Never once did his courage falter; no
thought of any concession, however small, however seemingly
reasonable, which he held to be dishonourable to his art ever found a
place in his mind. The surrender of _Die Walkuere_ alone would
probably have turned the tide in his favour, and he was pressed for it
by most of the great theatres, but in vain. To mutilate the
_Ring_ was in his opinion to dishonour it and prepare the way for
its being misunderstood. So far from adopting any one of the many
courses which could not fail to lead to success and popularity we find
him occupied during this time in coaching singers personally, in
building his theatre, and devising schemes for a school of technique
where musicians, and especially singers, could learn the true methods
of their art, naturally--though perhaps imprudently--believing that
before his works could be understood as he meant them they must be
rightly represented. Without funds! without patronage! with nothing
but his own determined will! Can we wonder that the world's head was
turned by such a gigantic personality?

Let those who call Wagner self-willed and perverse because he could
not conform to _their_ notions of what is right for an artist,
who attempt to measure an infinite mind by the paltry canons of
self-interest, reflect upon the harvest that we are now reaping from
his unswerving loyalty to his art. To him alone, and to the conductors
whom he trained, do we owe the almost perfect performances of our
modern orchestras. It has been truly observed that Wagner's own
immensely difficult works are better performed at the present day than
were the far easier works of his predecessors before he came. The
Richters and Mottls and Schuchs of our day are a very different race
from the Reissigers and Lachners and Costas of a past generation. It
was Richter who taught us in London how a symphony of Beethoven ought
to sound; before he came, performances were approved which the present
day would not tolerate. He, as well as his great compeers, was brought
up in the school of Wagner, the essence of which lies in
_correctness_, in rendering the work as the composer intended it,
with conscientious attention to every detail, not only of notes, but
of rhythm, tempo, phrasing, dynamics, instead of the slovenly muddling
which then passed for breadth of style, and the substitution of the
conductor's own subjectivity for that of the composer. It has been
well expressed in a few incisive words by one of the greatest of the
school: "The privilege of an interesting subjectivity is given to few,
its expression will always give evidence of that instinctive logic
which is a necessary condition of intelligibility."[6] Call Wagner
perverse, dislike his art, say that his dramas are chaos and his music
discord--all this you have a right to do; but you cannot refuse your
homage to his rectitude of purpose, his courageous and resolute
struggle for the ideals which were before him.

[Footnote 6: I have translated rather freely so as to give the general
sense, as von Buelow's German is not always very easy to follow. It
will be found in his comments upon Beethoven's _Fantasie_, Op. 77.]

This is the secret of what is known as the modern German spirit--close
attention to every detail, faithfulness to the work in hand, with the
conviction that no part of the organism is so trifling as not to be
vital. This it was, and not bookish education, that inspired the
German army in its victories of 1870-71; this spirit it was that
enabled the Meiningers in 1882 to fill our Drury Lane Theatre to
overflowing with performances of our own Shakespeare in a foreign
language. At the present day it still continues to actuate German
trade and German handicrafts, while we English in our blindness think
to dispose of it by cant phrases and sneers.

To the nearer friends of his home-circle Wagner's personality must
have been singularly attractive, from the intelligent sympathy which
he showed with everything human, and from the irrepressible gaiety
which never forsook him for long. In times of stress it helped those
around him to tide through the most crushing disasters.

Genius is not a thing apart by itself, severed from the rest of the
world. Its one distinguishing mark is its intense humanity. If I may
speak in paradox, the true poet is more truly ourselves than we are.
The astronomical telescope is constructed upon the same principles as
the terrestrial one, only it is more powerful and more perfectly made.
Not only the lenses, but all the details of the mechanism are more
highly finished; more thought and more labour are bestowed upon them;
the parts are more skilfully co-ordinated together; it is a better
instrument. We do wrong to genius in connecting it with mental
aberration; it is more normal, more perfectly human, than we are; more
human in its virtues, in its faults, in its follies, above all, in its
consummate beauty; only with its greater perfection the organism
becomes more delicate, and is more easily injured. For genius is
exposed to heavier strains than we are, because it is in uncongenial
surroundings. If one part happen to be imperfect, if, as we say, "a
screw be loose," the injury is more serious than in ordinary natures,
and the exquisite adjustments may suffer in the rude handling of a
stupid and clumsy environment, wrecking the whole system. This, and
not natural proclivity, is the reason why genius so often shows a
tendency to eccentric and abnormal conduct. The fault is with society,
which feels instinctively that those who rise too high in excellence
must be crushed. And this is the theme of every real tragedy. Othello,
Lear, Njal, Grettir, Clarissa Harlowe, the Maid of Orleans, Antigone,
Prometheus, and, as I hope to show, Tristan and Isolde, these are but
a few among those who must perish from no fault in themselves, but
because they are too noble for their surroundings.

"The greater the man, the greater his love." We should not set the
genius on a pedestal to be first gaped at and then ridiculed. He needs
before all else our love and our sympathy; for his nature is
essentially that of a child, and, childlike, he craves for human love
as the first necessity of his life. To those who set up an idol of
their own fancy and worship that as his image, he will be cold and
repellent, but to those who know him as he really is he will return
their love with all the warmth and purity of his childlike nature. Two
things are intolerable to a healthy-minded child--rough brutality and
mawkish caressing; Wagner was fated to endure a full share of both. It
is touching to read of Wagner's simple affection for those who were
around him in humble capacities. Every one who has read his life knows
of his kindliness to his domestic servants. Now it is the village
barber who is "gar zu theuer," now his gondola-man in Venice. His love
for animals has been perhaps too much dwelt upon by his biographers,
but it is very characteristic.

Mankind is not divided into Wagnerites and anti-Wagnerites; nor is it
divided into Romanists and Protestants, nor into theologians and
rationalists, nor into Tories and Radicals, nor into any other of our
familiar party divisions. The true division is into great men and
small, lovers of truth and sophists, honest men and thieves. Thieves
and sophists wrangle, but the great and true "join hands through the
centuries," and between them is eternal peace.




CHAPTER III

Wagner's Theoretical Writings


Nothing probably has more tended to discredit Wagner's art with
thoughtful people than the statement sometimes made by his following
that he has created a new art. Wagner himself never made any such
claim. When he speaks of a new indigenous art of pure German growth,
he is merely contrasting it with the foreign art--Italian operas and
French plays--upon which Germans had lived hitherto. When an art, like
music or the drama, begins to flourish on a new soil, it is certain to
exhibit new features, to show new developments, so that with respect
to its external physiognomy it may in a sense be called new; but far
truer is the very opposite statement, that Wagner's art is as old as
art itself; its greatness lies not in any novelty of invention, but in
his having developed the old forms into something dreamed of by his
predecessors but never achieved before.

We often hear about Wagner's "theories," as if he had composed his
art-works in accordance with some theoretical scheme. After a fairly
close study of Wagner's writings extending over a great many years I
must confess my inability to say what his peculiar theories were. The
employment of music as an element of the dramatic expression was no
invention of Wagner. What he found out was how to maintain the
different elements, words, acting, music, in a natural relation to one
another in the drama. This is art, not theory; we learn it from his
works, not from his writings. It is true that Wagner's writings
contain many very interesting and valuable speculations on artistic
problems. If these are his theories, he must have abjured them the
moment that he set to work composing. In _Oper und Drama_, for
example, he has a very interesting discussion on the value of
consonants in the German language and on the characteristic difference
between the expression of the consonant and that of the vowel,
arriving at the conclusion that alliteration is better suited for the
German musical drama than the imported rime. Further, he shows--rather
convincingly, I think--that the true subject for the drama is
mythical. But not long after this he wrote _Tristan und Isolde_,
in which alliteration is generally discarded for rime or blank verse,
and a little later _Meistersinger_, which is a comedy of domestic
life, and has nothing to do with mythology. Then there are the
_Leitmotivs_ which are used so methodically in the _Ring_
that it would seem there must have been some preconceived system. But
Wagner never once mentions _Leitmotivs_ in his writings, nor did
he invent them. They have been dragged into the light by von Wolzogen,
and whatever theories we have about them are due to him, not to
Wagner.

There is indeed one doctrine which runs through all his writings, and
may be taken as their general text, namely, that art is not an
amusement but a serious undertaking, consequently that purity and
truthfulness are just as necessary in art as in actual life. It is no
excuse for the artist who deceives to say that his work is "only
poetry," and has no serious significance. He carried this exalted
notion of the mission of art almost to excess, if such a thing is
possible with so noble an idea, when he insisted upon art being a
matter of national concern. All the serious mistakes which he made in
his life, those acts which the sober judgment of his most ardent
admirers must condemn as ill-advised, sprang from his desire to
identify art with national life, for example, his part in the Saxon
revolution of 1849, his proceedings in Munich, in 1865,[7] his
attempts to influence Bismarck, etc.

[Footnote 7: See Note I. at the end of this chapter.]

Wagner's literary works are not easy reading; his German style, though
grammatical and idiomatic, is generally very involved and obscure,
often turgid. There is a want of self-discipline about the thought,
and he is too hasty in committing ill-digested thoughts ill-arranged
to print, while his style is full of tedious mannerisms, such as his
constant use of futile superlatives for positives, the constant
occurrence of certain words not always in their natural meaning, such
as _Bewusstsein_, _Erloesung_, etc. It is in marked contrast
to the lucid and finished workmanship of his dramatic and musical
composition. His dislike for theoretical exposition, and the
constraint under which he wrote are too manifest in his language.
Nevertheless, the reader who perseveres will be rewarded. The
fascination which Wagner's writings have for thinking minds is due to
the importance of the problems involved. As Dannreuther has observed,
wherever Wagner was brought to a stand a social problem lies buried;
the problems which engage his attention are those which lie at the
root of all art and all life. We may not always approve of the
solutions which he offers, but we cannot fail to be interested. And as
we travel on we gradually become aware of brilliant spots of verdure,
passages here and there--sometimes sudden flashes, sometimes whole
pages where the language and the thought are equally remarkable. What,
for example, could be more admirable than this description of Mozart?

  His artistic nature was as the unruffled surface of
  a clear watery mirror to which the lovely blossom of
  Italian music inclined to see, to know, to love itself
  therein. It was but the surface of a deep and infinite
  sea of longing and desire rising from fathomless depths
  to gain form and beauty from the gentle greeting of the
  lovely flower bending, as if thirsting to discover
  in him the secret of its own nature.[8]

Could any words give more concisely the peculiar character of the much
misunderstood Mozart, "the most delicate genius of light and love,"
"the most richly gifted of all musicians"? Does it not tell us more
than all the outpourings of Oulibichef?

[Footnote 8: _Ges. Schr._ (1872), iii. p. 304.]

Or this, in speaking of the formation of the opera and the demand for
better libretti after the period of Spontini?

  The poet was ashamed to offer his master wooden
  hobbies when he was able to mount a real steed and
  knew quite well how to handle the bridle, to guide
  the steed hither and thither in the well-trodden
  riding-school of the opera. Without this musical
  bridle neither musician nor poet would have dared to
  mount him lest he should leap high over all the fences
  away into his own wild and beautiful home in nature
  itself.[9]

I must apologize for these extracts to those of my readers who are
able to follow the original, and I hope that others may yet feel
something of the warmth of Wagner's language even in the feeble shadow
of a very free paraphrase. Many more might be gathered from his works
to show how vivid and forcible was Wagner's prose when he once threw
off the restraint of cold logical reasoning. Other passages well
worthy of perusal as specimens of his better style are the description
of the theatrical sunset in _le Prophete_, and especially the
admirably worked-out metaphor of the _Volkslied_ as a wild flower
in vol. iii. of his collected works, pp. 309 and 372 seq.

[Footnote 9: _Ges. Schr_., iii, p. 298.]

Very different views have been expressed about Wagner in his capacity
of philosopher. To some he appears as a verbose dilettante totally
unable to put two ideas logically together, while others look up to
him as a teacher of the profoundest truths. I cannot say that either
view is wrong. On the one hand he possessed the deep insight which is
the first qualification for a philosopher, but is found in so few; on
the other he lacked the patience to express himself logically, feeling
that in his art he wielded a far more powerful means of persuasion
than logic. Those who persevere in studying his writings until they
master what he really was aiming at cannot fail at last to admit that
as philosopher he is at least suggestive, as art-critic he is amongst
the very first of all times, worthy of a place beside Plato,[10]
Lessing, Ruskin.

[Footnote 10: See Note II. at end of this chapter.]

A critical discussion of only the more important of the problems
raised by Wagner would require not one volume but several. For the
purpose of this book, which is only to help readers in understanding
his works, I must confine myself to the one which directly bears upon
his artistic production, namely, that of the organic union of all the
arts into one supreme art, which as their crown and completion may be
designated "art," as a universal, in distinction from the separate
individual "arts." Such art, [Greek: kat' e'xochaen], can only be the
drama, which already holds a position of its own above all the other
arts from the fact that these only _depict_ or _describe_
while the drama _represents_; its characters actually enact the
events to be expressed, whence the expression is marked by a
directness and vividness not possible to the other arts. The natural
tendency which different arts show to unite and support each other is
evident in many familiar phenomena, as, for example, illustrated
books. Lessing, in his luminous essay, has traced the limits of the
arts of depicting (painting and sculpture) and of describing (poetry).
Painting with him is the art of rest, poetry that of movement.
Wagner's theory asserts that each art, when it reaches its natural
limits, tends to call in the help of another art to express what lies
beyond its own domain. If the two are able to coalesce so as to become
organically one, it will be found that the expressive power of each
has been enormously enhanced by the union, just as the union of a man
with a woman in marriage enhances the value of each for the community.

With Lessing painting and sculpture are determined by the law of
beauty (_Schoenheit_); poetry is the wider art, including all the
elements of painting, but not bound by the same restrictions. Who can
forget his fine contrast of the howling Philoktetes in _Sophokles_ with
the gently sighing Laokoon, both in mortal agony, but the latter unable
to express his pain because, being in marble, he dared not distort his
countenance? With Wagner the notion of beauty (_Schoenheit_)[11]
belongs by its very definition exclusively to the arts that address the
sense of sight, painting and sculpture, and from them it has been
transferred to music, but as a metaphor only. To speak literally of
"beautiful music" would be a contradiction in terms.

[Footnote 11: It should be noted that the German and English words,
having a totally different origin, differ somewhat in meaning.
"_Schoenheit_" comes from "_schauen_," and has therefore
reference to the sense of sight, while "beauty" is from the root of
_bene_, _bonus_, and was originally a moral conception, not
a sensual one at all. In modern language the meaning of the two words
is practically identical, but the distinction is very important for
the understanding of Wagner. _Schoenheit_ with him means
_sensual_ beauty.]

The one aim of dramatic technique must always be to obtain the utmost
clearness, truthfulness, and completeness of _expression_. I must
confess that many years ago, when I first began the study of Wagner,
filled with the enthusiastic Hellenism of Schiller, I was not a little
startled at Wagner's apparent insistence upon truthful expression at
the expense of beauty, and could not but feel that it was contradicted
by every movement of his music. No doubt many others have felt the
same hesitation; but there really is no cause for alarm. Wagner's is
the true doctrine. Let us turn for a moment to another art, that of
architecture, where the line of demarcation between decoration and
construction is easy to recognize. Wagner's position, if applied to
architecture, would be that the builder has only to consider how to
construct in the best possible way to attain the purpose for which the
building is intended, and elegance of external appearance must be
subservient to that. If he do this skilfully, so that every part is
seen to unite harmoniously with all the others to form an organic
whole, there will emerge quite of itself a gracefulness, an artistic
beauty, founded in truth, which are high above all intentionally
constructed decoration. It is the beauty and truth of nature, that of
adaptation to an end. There is no question of sacrificing euphony,
melody, or anything at all; on the contrary, the doctrine declares
that by right adaptation the expressive power and beauty of every part
will be enhanced. The notion that Wagner's music is unmelodious had
its origin in the bad musical ears of his early critics.

The arts of design, i.e. painting, sculpture, and the kindred arts,
are in space alone, and movement is excluded from them. The arts of
expression, gesture, poetry, and music are all arts of movement in
time. The first named, therefore, must necessarily take external
beauty (_Schoenheit_) as their sole guide and must confine their
attention exclusively to the superficial appearance of the objects
they imitate. They can only arrive at the inner character indirectly,
through its external manifestation, and in the hands of an inferior
artist the step is an easy one to pretence and falsehood. Defective
construction can easily be hidden beneath an outer covering of
graceful forms which distract the eye from noticing the weakness and
falsehood beneath. We need only look around us at the decoration of
any modern drawing-room to find gross examples of such perversion of
art. This explains Wagner's mistrust--noticeable especially in his
earlier writings--of the arts of design with their principle of
beauty. An artist who possesses true poetic inspiration will be in no
danger of falling into errors of this kind; with him external beauty
is expression of inner goodness, as it is in nature, who never covers
up defects by external ornament.

We have therefore to recognize two distinct kinds of beauty in art,
two kinds of pleasure that we experience: external, with which
painting and sculpture are alone directly concerned--beauty in the
narrow sense; and inner or organic. Wagner has expressed it in a
sentence which defies even a free translation. Speaking of the lovely
melodies of the Italian opera he says: "_Nicht das schlagende Herz
der Nachtigall begriff man, sondern nur ihren Kehlschlag_." Men
cared only for the pleasing sound of the nightingale's voice, nothing
for the beating heart from which it sprang.

We are now able to understand his famous doctrine that the drama is
the end, music the means, and therefore secondary. In the Italian
opera the relation was reversed; music was made the end, the drama
being only a vehicle for the music. This is dramatically wrong, and
has led to a false and unnatural form of art; in the drama music can
only be a means of dramatic expression.

It is necessary here to enter a caution against a very serious
misunderstanding into which many of Wagner's critics have fallen, a
misunderstanding very natural to those who look upon the drama as a
literary production. It has been supposed that Wagner intended to
subordinate the music to the poetry, as if the function of music were
to illustrate and vivify the more definite thought contained in the
words. This view has been held by many critics, from Aristotle
onwards. It was the view of Gluck, and will be found formulated in the
_epitre dedicatoire_ prefixed to his _Alceste_. Wagner's theory is
essentially different and is peculiarly his own. With him the _drama_
denotes, not the text-book, but the actual performance on the stage,
in which there are three co-ordinate elements, acting, words, and
music, not one of which is subordinate to the others, but all of equal
value, expressing different sides of the dramatic subject-matter. Of
the inability of words in themselves to inspire music, he is very
emphatic: "No verses of a poet, not even of a Goethe or a Schiller,
can determine the music. The drama alone can do this, i.e. not the
dramatic poem, but the actual drama as it moves before our eyes as
the visible counterpart of the music."

In order to be effective the union of the three elements must be
_organic_, and I must now explain what is meant. When we speak of
a work of art as an _organism_ we mean that the different parts
of which it is composed co-operate together towards the purpose of the
whole in such a way that not one of them is superfluous or could be
dispensed with. It resembles in this respect the products of nature,
and life, which is only a complex form of organized activity. In the
higher natural products, especially those we speak of as
_living_, the single parts are not dead weights, but are
themselves organisms, containing within them individual and complete
systems of living forces, acting independently, and at the same time,
as subordinate units contributing to the purpose of the whole, so that
shortly we may say that, as each part is conditioned by the whole, so
the whole is conditioned by the single parts. When a person loses a
limb, and has it replaced by an artificial one, his first impression
is of the enormous weight of the new limb, although it may only weigh
about a quarter of the old one. This is explained by the fact that the
new limb is a dead weight, whereas the former one was a living
organism. That is to say, when he lifted it, the nervous impulses
transmitted from the brain were sustained and enforced by forces
within the limb itself; being alive it _helped_ in the effort,
whereas the mechanical limb, however perfect its adaptation, will
always remain a piece of dead mechanism, a separate thing from the
body to which it is attached and simply opposing its own inertia to
the nervous effort.

In the _mechanical_ joining together of parts, each remains
isolated; if one be abstracted the others remain as they were, while
in an _organic_ union they combine to a whole, and if one be
withdrawn the whole is destroyed, or at least vitally impaired. This
furnishes us with a criterion for the technical construction of every
work of art, whatever it be; each single part must contribute its
share towards the whole; there must be nothing superfluous. The work
has an idea to express; if we find (in a drama, for example) that no
scene, no single speech even, or sentence, can be omitted without
impairing the work as a whole, and weakening its expression, then the
work is technically as perfect as it can possibly be made; its value
will then depend only on that of the idea to be expressed.

Now let us turn to Wagner's criticism of the sunrise scene in _le
Prophete_, which I mentioned a few pages back, in the first part of
_Oper und Drama_.[12] Here was a unique opportunity for a great
dramatic artist. After the representation, not unskilfully contrived,
of the victorious career of a young and aspiring hero, in the supreme
moment of his destiny, the sun rises, adding its glory to his triumph,
as if the very heavens were shedding their blessing upon the deeds of
a noble man;--so it might have been. But Meyerbeer and Scribe care
nothing for that; such is not the effect either felt by the audience
or intended by the poet. The latter had nothing higher in his mind
than a grand spectacular effect, which may be omitted without the rest
of the drama being any the worse, and the result is in the worst sense
theatrical, but not poetic--"effect without a cause."

[Footnote 12: _Ges. Schr., iii, p. 372.]

Compare with this the scene in the third act of _Parsifal_. The
verdant landscape is here no mere theatrical decoration; if it were,
we should scarcely go into a theatre to see what can be seen in far
greater perfection in any green place on a spring morning. It is the
dramatic representation of an idea perhaps suggested to Wagner by
Goethe's _Faust_, but as old as Christianity itself. The task is
achieved; the spear has been regained, and all nature smiling in its
flowery robes rejoices in the redemption of that Easter morning; even
the withered flower-maidens add their strains to the universal chorus.
How is such a miracle possible? Only by music in organic union with
the dramatic situation. Persuasive as a living person it is able to
carry us into realms far beyond those of language and reason, to the
realm of wonder. The decorations of the Grand Opera are as artificial
and mechanical as modern dress; they are imposed by the fashion of the
day, the caprice of the luxurious, and stand in no relation to the
body to which they are fitted.[13]

[Footnote 13: Those who are interested in the subject will find some
admirable observations in Lessing's _Hamburger Dramaturgie_,
11tes. and 12tes. Stueck, where the critic compares the ghost of Ninus
in Voltaire's _Semiramis_ with the ghost in _Hamlet_. He
condemns the former because it is nothing more than a poetical
machine, while Shakespeare's is one of the persons of the drama. His
position is essentially the same as Wagner's.]

The loose construction of the Italian opera has at least one
advantage; it can be trimmed to suit the local exigencies of
performance. With the new drama this was impossible. Wagner's
insistent refusal to permit any mutilation of his work always appeared
to Intendants and Impresarii who were anxious to meet him halfway like
monstrous egotism. What Rossini and Meyerbeer had always consented to
without the smallest hesitation might, they thought, content a Richard
Wagner. The reports of the Intendants to their respective Governments,
of Luettichau in the forties, of Royer in Paris in 1861, show how far
the authorities were from understanding the nature either of the work
which they were undertaking or of the man with whom they had to deal.
Rossini and Meyerbeer had never had any other aim than their own
personal success; with Wagner the integrity of his art was far above
all personal considerations. On this point no concession on the
composer's side was possible. You may take five shillings out of a
sovereign and there still remain fifteen shillings, but if you take a
wheel from a watch the whole mechanism is destroyed; it was just this
that distinguished his productions from operas, and in conceding the
principle that they might be trimmed he would have surrendered
everything.

It might seem superfluous to have dwelt so long upon a point which,
when clearly laid out, can scarcely be controverted, were it not that
it has been continually misunderstood, not only by nearly everybody at
the present day, but even by critics of the rank of Gluck, Goethe, and
Grillparzer. To speak either of music as enforcing the words or of the
words as forming a basis for musical expression is to place one of
them--in the former case music, in the latter the words--in an
inferior position towards the other, whereas they are organic parts of
the whole, and co-equals. Wherever either principle is adopted it will
result in that very looseness of construction which is the vital
infirmity of the Italian opera. And the poetry will be of the kind
fashionable with some literary people under the name "lines for
music," the principle of which seems to be Voltaire's: _Ce qui est
trop sot pour etre dit, on le chante_. Once the principle of
organic unity is conceded as the first and most vital condition of a
work of art, the rest of Wagner's doctrine follows directly. The
governing whole is the drama, the thing to be enacted in its actual
representation on the stage, and the different elements, gesture,
music, words, are the instruments of its expression, to be so
co-ordinated together that each shall express just that which it alone
is able to express and no more. The first outcome of the union when
rightly and skilfully effected is to impart the one quality which is
the final and only aim of all artistic technique--clearness of
expression. The new drama can represent not only higher ideas, but can
express them more intelligibly than that which uses words alone.

It will now perhaps be asked why these three particular arts and no
others have been selected for dramatic purposes. Because they are the
three ways in which all living beings utter their thoughts. They have
belonged together from the beginning, and still do so; they have
parted company for a time, but have never been divorced.

Before considering this it will be well for me to explain some terms
which I shall have to use in the following. Poetry has commonly been
divided into "lyric", "epic," and "dramatic"; these terms answer to
three different phases of expression. Lyric poetry is the purely
subjective emotion of the poet uttering itself in words. Epic poetry
on the other hand deals with things and people external to the poet.
The drama is, as we have seen, not poetry at all; the actors perform
the acts themselves, using words only to explain the reasons for their
acts; dramatic poetry therefore involves both lyric and epic elements.

The most primitive, most natural, and simplest means by which a living
being can utter itself is gesture--action. It is not necessary to
speculate on prehistoric conditions. We need only observe the world
around us, the behaviour of our friends and acquaintances,
particularly those of South-European blood, to recognize how direct
and eloquent is the expression of gesture. On the stage a simple
series of dramatic actions can be fully represented by gesture and
scenery alone with a very high intensity of emotional expression.

All movement in nature is rhythmic. I need not trouble my readers with
the evidences of a fact which is well known in science, but will refer
them to the lucid demonstration in Herbert Spencer's _First
Principles_, Pt. II., ch. 10.

Rhythmic gesture then, or dancing, is the most primitive art, and it
is purely lyric, i.e. subjective. It is very important to bear this
fact of dancing, of which acting is only a species, as the primitive
form of art before our minds. It is common to men and animals. I have
often wondered whether the extraordinary development of Wagner's
histrionic faculty did not stand in some mysterious relation to the
close sympathy which existed between him and that most consummate of
all actors--the dog.

The vital activity of the throat and vocal cords becomes sound; song
may therefore be considered as a peculiarly specialized form of
gesture, but with the radical difference that as a vehicle of
expression it addresses the ear, not the eye. The fact that it enters
the brain through a different channel gives the art of sound an
entirely different character from that of gesture proper; moreover,
from being in time only, not in space, it is apprehended more
immediately by the inner sense, and the impression received is more
intimate, more forcible. Still it retains the same lyric or subjective
character.

It was, I believe, Lord Monboddo who first observed that inarticulate
sound, music in its most primitive form, is the earliest form of
utterance, and is prior to language. Lord Monboddo's researches into
the origin and progress of language (1773) were valued so highly by
Herder that they were at his instance translated into German. The
conclusion at which he arrived, that the most primitive form of
utterance is not language but music, that language grew out of song
just as the art of writing grew out of picture-painting, is especially
valuable from the fact that it was afterwards adopted by Charles
Darwin.[14]

[Footnote 14: Descent of Man, Pt. III., ch. 19. The whole of that part
of the chapter may be read in this connection. Unfortunately, the
speculations are somewhat vitiated by the _idee fixe_ of modern
science that everything must be referred to "courtship." i.e.
sexuality.]

The "music" which Darwin and Lord Monboddo conceive as the vocal
expression of primitive man is of course not the highly-wrought
product which we now understand under that term; we may suppose it to
have been _rhythmic_ but not _metric_. It was nearer to the
cries of wild animals, and to some it may seem at first absurd to
describe such sounds as music at all. I do not think so; on the
contrary I find in the cries of some animals and many birds all the
essential qualities of music. They have tone, rhythm, cadence, in a
very high degree, and also melody, though vague and rudimentary. The
essential difference between melody and mere succession of sounds
consists in its being intelligible, that is, in its conforming to a
scale or musical scheme of some sort, but that scale is not
necessarily the one recognized in modern music. Our ears are so
accustomed to associate melody with a certain diatonic scale, and with
accompanying harmony, actual or potential, that it is very difficult
for us to comprehend as melody successions which do not conform to
that scheme, as, for example, the melodies of Oriental nations, the
scales of which are far more complex and difficult to understand than
ours. It is a very remarkable fact that while the course of evolution
is generally from simpler to more complex organisms, that of the
musical scale is just the reverse. Primitive scales are highly
complex, and involve intervals not appreciable by us as melody; with
time they gradually become simpler; and in the diatonic scale,
especially in its most modern developments, where the distinction
between major and minor tends to become effaced,[15] we seem to have
reached the limit, and the scale is reduced to the simplest possible
numerical relations. However this may be, I know that to a person who
has lived in close converse with nature and possesses a musical ear
the cries of wild animals and birds are full of melody in the strict
sense, though it is rudimentary and different from that of our
concert-rooms. And it is reasonable to suppose that man, when he first
emerged with far more highly organized faculties than any beast, would
gradually raise his musical expression into something higher,
something more melodious, than that of other creatures. Particularly
as his reason developed he would devise a scale; the rhythms would
become more definite and at the same time more varied and complex. The
result of these improvements would be to make his utterances more
intelligible.

[Footnote 15: Such is the deduction which I draw from recent theories
of harmony. See in this connection _Neue musikatische Theorien und
Phantasien_ (Stuttgart, 1906), sec. 40. Also Louis and Thuille,
_Harmonielehre_ (1908), especially Pt. I., ch. 6. The idea can be
traced back to Hauptmann.]

Helmholtz has observed that there is much more in a musical sound than
its mere _timbre_, and Wagner has noticed how every musical
instrument has not only its vowel sound, or _timbre_, but also
its peculiar consonant. We need not go so far as to connect the flute
with an "f," the trumpet with a "t," etc., since the instrumental
consonants need not conform exactly with those of the alphabet; it is
enough that each instrument has its own characteristic way of
attacking the tone. So we gain the idea of articulation; the point of
its entry into the musical expression marks the beginning of
_language_.

Hitherto the expression has been, as we have seen, purely lyric; the
lower animals have no other. But as man rises out of his bestial
condition and acquires reason his wants become more numerous and
diverse. The mere expression of his inner feelings no longer suffices;
he differentiates objects in the external world, and needs
sounds--names--to express them. For this he utilizes the newly
developed faculty of language. It is the most momentous crisis of his
development, the point where he becomes a human being, severed by a
wide gap from other animals, and incomparably above them. The mark of
language has from the first rightly been made the _crux_ of the
theory of the evolution of man; it is the natural inevitable outcome
of his developing the faculty of reason. Thus the need for
communicating the perceptions of external objects calls forth
_epic_ expression.[16]

[Footnote 16: "Auf das was vor mir steht zeige ich; was in mir vorgeht
druecke ich durch Toene und Gebehrden aus; was aber abwesend oder einst
geschah bedarf, wenn es vernehmlich werden soll einer zusammenhangend
geordneten Rede. So ward das Epos."--Herder, _Kalligone_.]

We may now lay down a scheme of the three fundamental vehicles of
human expression based on their historical development. We have

  _Emotional or subjective:_
      Gesture--obvious and material.
      Music--warmer, deeper, and more spiritual.
  _Rational or objective:_
      Language.

But a warning must be added against pressing this classification
unduly. All schemes of nature are only approximate; there are no such
sharply divided compartments into which our notions may be
pigeon-holed. Language may of course be intensely emotional, but we
may notice that just in proportion as it becomes emotional it calls in
the aid of music; the voice becomes melodious, it develops rhythm,
accent, cadence, and ultimately becomes poetry, which is language
united with a large element of music.

Students of economic science have of recent years given attention to
ethnology, and their researches into the origin and primitive
characteristics of labour have brought to light some facts which are
very interesting to us. The familiar distinction between _work_
and _play_ has no root in nature. Animals do not look upon their
labours as a painful task, only to be endured for a time and then to
be rewarded by an interval of diversion; to the horse or the dog the
day's work is the day's treat; and so with those men whom we
contemptuously call "savages." It is the same with artists; no artist
has mastered the technique of his work until it has become a pleasure
and a plaything to him. There could not be a more significant comment
on the unnaturalness of a civilization in which periods of leisure for
the workman have to be wrung from the community by legislation. The
true workman, like the true artist, is never happy unless he is at
work; he needs no diversion.

Of the greatest interest to us are the results of the inquiries of
economists into the relations between work, rhythm, and song amongst
primitive people. Especially valuable is a treatise by Dr. Karl
Bucher, professor of national economy in Leipzig, entitled _Arbeit
und Rhythmus_, which ought to find many readers in England if it
were translated. I know few modern books that are more fascinating,
and it would be hard to say whether its charm lies more in its solid
scientific method or in its admirable literary presentation and apt
illustrations from the delicate verse-song of the most primitive
peoples.

"_Im Anfang war der Rhythmus_." According to Dr. Buecher, all
work, when efficient, tends to be rhythmic and each kind of work has
its peculiar rhythm. This is especially the case when the labour is
carried out in common by a number of people, and the rhythm is
embodied in a song, or rhythmic word of command sung by the leader.
Innumerable instances will at once occur to everybody--rowing,
hauling, marching, sewing, mowing, etc. In primitive people the
impulse to sing the rhythm is even more marked than it is among
ourselves, with whom the pressure of civilization helps to suppress
all natural expression of feeling, and the disturbance of so many
cross rhythms tends to obliterate the primary pulsations. The rhythm
is an essential part of the work, and not a mere ornamental adjunct;
people sing, not to "keep their spirits up," but to help on the work;
until the workman has acquired the rhythm he works imperfectly, and
tires very quickly. Those forms of work which do not admit rhythm,
such as adding figures, copying MSS., etc., are the most fatiguing.
Still more so is labour where the natural rhythm is subject to
frequent interruptions. Hence walking in the streets of a town is much
more wearying than walking in the country; you have to break the
rhythm at every few steps and never get the "swing." The constant
interruptions of rhythm by goods in shop-windows, advertisements,
etc., is, I am sure, largely the cause of nervous degeneracy in towns.

It cannot surprise us to find that amongst primitive people dancing is
the most universal occupation. All dance, dance to frenzy. Originally
the dance does not express joy or any other emotion; it is simply the
human impulse to activity, work, the most fundamental thing in human
nature. From the dance rhythm finds its way into music and poetry,
both being in the beginning intended to accompany dancing. One thing
is certain, that neither music nor the dance originated in sexuality.
Eroticism scarcely ever occurs in the poetry of primitive peoples. It
enters at a later stage.

It is not necessary to trace how, out of these primitive beginnings,
there grew the ancient drama of the more civilized countries, always
retaining the three elements from which it had sprung in closest
union. Speaking of the Indian drama in the time of the semi-mythical
Bharata, the Indian Thespis, Sir Monier Williams writes:

  The drama of these early times was probably
  nothing more than the Indian Nautch of the present
  day. It was a species of rude pantomime, in which
  dancing and movements of the body were accompanied
  by mute gestures of the hands and face, or by singing
  and music. _Subsequently dialogue was added_....

In Greece the early lyric epoch is represented by the Paians,
Dithyrambs, etc., at the festivals of Apollo and Dionysos, rhythmic
dances to accompaniment of cithara or flute, with words generally
improvised. Out of the Bacchic dithyrambs grew the tragedy. In the
works of the great Attic tragedians the chorus, or dance-song, which
had descended from earlier times still remained the principal feature
of the representation. It was the drama that crystallized out of the
music and dance, not the music that was called in to support or adorn
the drama. Not until the time of Euripides did the chorus become a
secondary element of the representation, and from this time on the
drama begins to decline, becoming more and more a literary product.

It would be a worthy undertaking for a competent student to set
himself the task of bringing order into the chaos of Wagner's
theoretical writings. They are crowded with thoughts of the deepest
import, which seem to point the way to further inquiry, but which
remain suggestions only. The most tiresome quality in Wagner's
literary style is that he scarcely ever comes to the point. Whenever
he asserts a rule in clear and unmistakable language, it is either
brought in almost parenthetically amidst a mass of rhetoric, or--as,
for example, in the dictum of music being a means to the dramatic
end--he treats it with scorn, as something too obvious to be stated.
In either case its chances of gaining the reader's attention are
seriously diminished by such wrong method. A student who should
undertake the task of ordering his thought would need to possess, in
addition to the highest musical and dramatic qualifications a
metaphysical habit of mind such as is rare at the present day, and a
sympathetic capacity for discerning the grains of golden truth amidst
the dross. He must construct anew. Wagner's theoretical edifice will
not stand as it is; it is too loosely jointed; but the materials are
valuable. That there will ever be a real science of aesthetics I do
not believe; art would cease to be art if it lost its mystery. For the
present at least we must be content to remain in darkness as to the
precise conditions of musical expression, and eschew theory. That
music does reveal the nature of things in a way different from words
can scarcely be questioned. So, too, does all nature through its
silent music reveal more than meets the senses. But we cannot say
exactly how or why. Enough that the divine reason whereby the world is
fashioned is not the same as our human reason, and will not be forced
into its forms.


NOTES

I

LUDWIG II. AND WAGNER

Although I have no intention of defending the extravagances of the
Wittelsbach kings and may say at once that my sympathies are entirely
with the patriotic citizens of Munich who in 1865 succeeded in turning
Wagner out of a position which he ought never to have held, it is only
fair to point out that even from the standpoint of material gain the
lavish expenditure of those art-loving princes has proved a splendid
investment, of which the results may now be seen. What is it that has
enabled Munich to double its population in about twenty years and has
raised it from being a rather sleepy old-fashioned German town to its
present flourishing condition and made it the most delightful capital
in Europe, a meeting-place for the cultured of every country of Europe
and America? What else but the art-collections and musical
performances? Had Wagner then succeeded in founding his art-school and
theatre, with Semper, the builder of Dresden, as his architect, and
his own supreme mind directing the whole, who can say what the result
might have been?


II

PLATO AS AN ART-CRITIC

I ought to say here that I find nothing more admirable in Plato than
his criticism of poetry, and I cannot understand the difficulties
which scholars find in his treatment of artists in the _Republic_
and elsewhere. After all, scholars have as a rule little experience of
any art that lies outside the narrow range of their own studies.
Plato's remarks appear to me the perfection of common sense. Would any
sane statesman, when devising such a revolutionary political scheme as
is contemplated in the _Republic_, not take the opportunity of
putting a bridle upon the mischievous vapourings of political poets,
reformers, dreamers, schemers, _et hoc genus omne_? It should
never be forgotten that the poet with the attractive fascination which
he possesses in his art is an enormous power in society, all the more
dangerous because his power is so subtle, and his doctrines not in
themselves untrue. Can it be doubted that our own Byrons and Shelleys,
with their frothy extravagances about freedom, have largely
contributed both to the socialism and to the libertinism with which
the politics of every nation in Europe are now infected? Even the
great Schiller was led astray by the false watchwords of his time, and
highly as I revere Goethe I cannot deny that the sensuality of his
poetry has had a most baneful influence upon modern Germany. Many more
might be named, and the subject is well worthy of fuller treatment.
With regard to Schiller, however, it ought to be explained that
"freedom" at that time in Germany meant only one thing, freedom from
the foreign tyrant--Napoleon.

Remember that it is not all poets whom Plato wishes to banish, not
those who feel the responsibility of their high calling, but only a
certain class. Nowadays poets do not slander the gods; it is not worth
their while, because nobody believes in the gods. They have other ways
of undermining society. Plato everywhere shows an unerring feeling for
art. Aristotle is a recorder and classifier, but no critic.




CHAPTER IV

THE ROOTS OF GERMAN MUSIC


Dr. Milman, in his great _History of Christianity_, observes that
no religious revolution has ever been successful which has commenced
with the Government. Such revolutions have ever begun in the middle or
lower orders of society. The same is true of other branches of the
intellectual life of man. Neither Governments nor academies and
schools can ever originate anything new in art, politics, language.
All growth springs from the unsophisticated masses; growth is organic,
from below. The blossom must fade, and the seed fall to the earth
before it can bring forth new life. Academical training concerns
itself with the models of the past; its useful work consists in
criticizing, purifying, directing the raw material into something
higher, better, more useful than it was in the rough, as the gardener
produces new and better varieties; but it can no more originate than
the gardener can create new plants; and in perfecting it often
emasculates.

The reason why the Elizabethan drama is so infinitely more impressive
than the technically more perfect drama of the Restoration is that it
is steeped in nature and reality, whereas the later stage represents
men and women under the fashionable conventions of polite society.
"The people" indeed includes high as well as low, but none but the
very strongest natures--a Shakespeare, a Beethoven, a Goethe--can
endure the stress of Court favour. Where the national nourishment from
below is deficient, an elegant artificial semblance may indeed be
forced; but it is felt to be wanting in root and to lack that
spontaneity and universality which are the very life's breath of all
true art and specially mark the art of the people.

In England culture has severed itself entirely from popular life. The
very word "popular," unlike the German _volksthuemlich_, carries
the notion of vulgarity. Yet the lower classes among themselves are
never vulgar; they only become so when they copy the manners of those
above them, and their poetry is the very reverse of what we understand
by that word. The _Volkslied_ exhales the very perfume of nature.
It may be uncouth, harsh, weather-beaten, but the perfume remains, and
it is never offensive like the modern music-hall song, which is the
_Volkslied_ of a class that tries to ape its social superiors.

All, or nearly all, our foremost English poets of recent times have
been products of that system of public school and university education
which is justly the pride of modern English upper-class life.
Admirable in many ways as this system is, it is essentially one of
artificial forcing. The routine is rigidly prescribed by fashion, and
is so devised as entirely to exclude all intimate fellowship with the
common people. Nature and reality have no part in English scholastic
life; "good form" and "sound scholarship" count for more than the
heart of man. That such a system fosters character and produces
first-rate men of action and rulers is undeniable, but it is fatal to
poetry, and the poetry which we produce is what might be
expected--refined, highly polished, but artificial and wanting in
sincerity. It bears the same relation to true poetry that etiquette
and polished manners do to truth and nature. To realize the difference
between the poetry of the school and the poetry of nature compare the
faultless English and elegant sweetness of the Idylls of the King with
the vigorous and expressive, but often ungrammatical, prose of
Mallory, or compare Virgil with Homer, Horace with Sappho, a chorale
by Mendelssohn with a chorale by Bach. Or compare a modern refrain
dragged in for no other reason than because the poet has felt that the
form requires a refrain of some kind and has tried to find one that is
suitable--compare such a refrain by Morris or Rossetti with

  In the spring time,
  The only pretty ring time
  When birds do sing,
  Hey ding a ding ding.

sung in the very joy of its heart by a childlike and poetic soul. Both
are poetry: but one is poetry of the drawing-room, the other of the
fields and forests; one is pretence, the other reality; the latter is
hardly poetry at all, and cannot be criticized logically; it is rather
human feeling finding its natural expression in verse of greater or
less perfection according to the skill of the versifier, but always
truthful, never posing, using no sophistic formulas, meaning just what
it says.

These preliminary remarks were necessary because I am sure that it is
to the narrow notions of classical elegance prevailing in England, and
to the want of sympathy with nature and the children of nature, that
so many fail to understand Wagner. German art, at least all that was
produced before the Franco-German war, is redolent of nature. When
reading a volume of typically German songs such as _des Knaben
Wunderhorn_ (whether they are technically genuine _Volkslieder_ or
not, is of no consequence) one feels as if one were walking through
a German forest. Even in the art which is necessarily confined within
a room the artist's mind seems to be wandering outside, and the
portrait-painter will admit through some open window or crevice a
breeze from field and forest beyond. In the same spirit the musicians,
and particularly the most German of all, Bach, Haydn, Schubert,
Beethoven, delight in the rhythms of the popular dance. Of all modern
composers Wagner was the most _volksthuemlich_; the roots of his
art are in the _Volks-Sage_, the _Volkslied_, and the dance, and the
masses have always been true to him. He makes it his boast that while
intellectuals were raging and warning men not to heed his siren-tones,
the public in Germany, France, Italy, England, wherever the
performance was tolerably adequate, paid no heed, but invariably met
him with the warmest enthusiasm.

Jakob Grimm, in his essay on the _Meistergesang_, illustrates the
deep and pensive innocence of the _Volkslied_ by the story of the
infant Krishna, into whose mouth his mother looked and beheld within
him the measureless glories of heaven and earth while the child
continued its unconscious, careless play. "Such," he continues, "is
the completeness (Ganzheit) of Nature as compared with the halfness
(Halbheit) of human effort."

The condition for the growth of truly popular art is that society
shall present a coherent whole, the upper and lower classes united in
a bond of common sympathy with a feeling of brotherhood between them.
English society was not always so divided as we see it now. We possess
a wealth of popular song which has come down to us from mediaeval
times, a heritage nobler than that of any other nation; But can it be
said that our national life is in the smallest degree inspired by
these songs? They have indeed latterly become a fashion; we collect
them, arrange them with pianoforte accompaniments, listen to them at
concerts. It is a mere fashionable craze, like that for "the simple
life," and differs in no whit from that ridiculed by Wagner in the
Italian opera, and in Meyerbeer, as an attempt to extract the perfume
from the wild flower that we may have it conveniently to put upon our
pocket handkerchiefs and carry about with us, to enjoy the sweets of
nature and care nothing for the soul. To know the _Volkslied_ we
must descend from our fine palaces, and know it in the place where it
grows, and become one with them who brought it forth. We must live
their life, must learn so see what they see, to love what they love,
if we would understand their language.

Precisely parallel is the art in which the English genius specially
delighted, architecture. Noble and simple, learned and lewd, severed
by the Conquest, were united in the church, and our cathedrals are in
the truest sense the creations of the people. Like the _Volkslieder_,
like the great epics and the Icelandic Sagas, these works are anonymous.
No one knows, and no one seems to have cared, who made them. They were
built for the glory of God, not for that of man.

In about the twelfth century in Germany the whole community was one
body, scarcely differentiated into classes as regards their
Intellectual life. There were masters and servants, noblemen and
plebeians, as now, but they followed the same ends, received the same
education, and shared the same amusements. The _Volk_ was the
entire community, from the prince on the throne to the village child.
Literary education was confined to the clerical orders. The word
"ballad," which is, or was, the English equivalent of _Volkslied_,
signifies a dance, and at this early period the bond between dance and
song was still intact; the song was danced, and the dance sung to, as
it is to this day in the Shetland and Faroe islands, and in parts of
Norway and elsewhere. The ballad was a popular composition, in the sense
just described, but this does not mean that ballads grew up of
themselves, as wild flowers. Each owed its origin to some poet, who
composed music and words together. But the people who sang it cared
little for the personality of the poet; so long as his song was a good
one it was received and sung, but he was forgotten. Nor did they show
much respect for his text or tune; they trimmed both as they pleased, cut
away what they did not like, added and altered, changed names, turned
sense into nonsense, or less often nonsense into sense, moved by their
sweet will alone. It can be seen going on now in Germany among
students and foresters, and in all places where they sing. In a society
where men are free to follow their own natural bent, their minds
uncorrupted by books, the public taste is generally not only healthy, but
often very dainty and critical. They will find at least what they like
themselves, and have no need to consult any one else. Thus the
_Volkslied_ was the creation as it was the property of the people in
just the same sense as were our mediaeval churches. The fact that the
authors are not recognizable is vital for this kind of art.

The recreations of the people at this time were "_Sagen, Singen,
Tanzen_," story-telling, singing, dancing, in which all joined,
high and low together; no others were known. At the close of the
twelfth century, a great change began to take place in German song,
partly through the influence of foreign troubadours, but far more
owing to changes in social conditions. The reviving interest in
letters is indicated by the founding of universities in Italy and
France, by the publication of cyclopedias and other educational
treatises. There arises a cultured class outside the Church. When the
nobleman received a scholastic education, and consequently could form
a literary circle of his own, he began to look down upon the ignorant
rustic and popular poetry was affected accordingly. The Courts
attracted a special class of professional singers, the _Minnesingers_,
and it was natural that the more talented among the people should be no
longer content to blossom unknown, but should seek engagement at the
Courts where they were honoured and paid. Thus the _Volk_ was
drained of its talent; the poet becomes famous, art loses its native
innocence and becomes more like what we see it now, where the name
of the poet is of more consideration than the pleasure to be derived from
the poem.

The Court poets of the thirteenth century do not here concern us for
their own sake. Their song was short-lived and eventually withered
under the degenerate _Meistersingers_. But their work was not
lost.

With the decline of chivalry and the disappearance of Court life as a
thing apart the _Volkslied_ began once more to flower. From the
fourteenth century to the sixteenth song was universal, and it is from
this time that the ballads of our collections are mostly gathered. But
now its character has changed; the short period of fashionable
prosperity has not failed to leave its mark. Words, music, and dance
are no longer bound together in such close alliance. The first to part
company from the rest to begin an independent existence is always the
text, which becomes literary poetry for silent perusal or recitation.
Song is then no longer poetry set to music, but rather music
accompanied by verse. Instead of the two being co-ordinate, music is
now first, and the words are only its vehicle. The change was very
gradual, but the _Volkslied_ in its latest and most complete
development is practically an instrumental composition, retaining,
however, its bond with the past on the one hand through the words, on
the other through the _canto fermo_ in the tenor, the familiar
ancient tune round which the counterpoint was woven in a kind of
canonical imitation, first (fifteenth century) in three parts then
(sixteenth) in four, but always with the _canto fermo_ in
rhythmic contrast to the rest of the composition. It has been pointed
out by Liliencron[17] that what appears at first sight to be rhythmic
chaos in the polyphonic _Volkslied_ is really a highly artistic
and effective device for bringing the _canto fermo_--the ancient
tune--into prominence; whilst the other voices are generally in
_tempus imperfectum_ or square time, the tenor is in some other
contrasting rhythm. The standard of musical education must have been
exceedingly high at this period in Germany, since we hear of these
difficult compositions being sung, not only at concerts and festivals,
but in private circles as a common recreation. Indeed, as Sir H. Parry
has observed,[18] the practice of combining several tunes is by no
means so uncommon among people destitute of all musical training as
might be expected. At the present day in Germany, a girl of the lower
classes may often be heard singing at her work while her companion
adds an extempore part with considerable skill.

[Footnote 17: _Deutsches Leben im Volkslied_. Introd., p. xxix.]

[Footnote 18: _Art of Music_, pp. 99 seq. For an account of the
musical culture in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
see the Introduction to Dr. Naylor's _Shakespeare and Music_, a
most interesting and useful little work.]

The divorce between music and words became complete when songs were
arranged in transcriptions for various instruments. For now the
orchestra and the _Kapellmeister_ have come into being and the
further development of music is instrumental. With the invention of
printing and the influence of the Italian Renaissance with its
humanistic and pseudo-classical ideals the dissolution is completed.
Poems are no longer sung but only read, while instrumental music
follows its own paths alone.

In the Middle Ages instrumental music can scarcely be said to have
existed as an art. Musical instruments--"giterne and ribible"--were
known and played upon. "Fiddlers, players, cobblers, and other
debauched persons" tramped the country and appeared at festivals in
company with jugglers and mountebanks. Towards the beginning of the
sixteenth century, private orchestras were maintained by the noble and
the wealthy. Still the instrumental band held at best but a secondary
place beside the vocal choir. "Harping," says the ancient bard, "ken I
none, for song is chefe of myn-strelse." The music which it played
differed in no essential respect from that intended for singing;
indeed the part-song was often arranged without alteration for
instruments, and so instrumental technique grew out of vocal technique,
but--and this is important--retaining important rhythmic characteristics
from the dance. Exactly as all stone architecture--Gothic, Classic,
Saracenic--bears the features of its wooden parent, so does our modern
instrumental music reproduce the physiognomy of its origin, uniting the
flowing cantilene of the voice with the marked rhythm of the dance, and
we may notice in any modern instrumental composition how the two are
contrasted together, now the one feature predominating, now the other.

There remains yet another current in the stream of musical development
of at least equal importance with the growth of dance and song. I
cannot here enter fully into the history of ecclesiastical music. We
are only concerned with the influence exerted by Dutch and Italian
composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries upon the
development of later German music.

While pope and prelate cared only for the outer logical shell of
Christian doctrine, which they could use as a weapon in their struggle
for power, art laid hold upon its vital essence. Those politicians who
are in the habit of sneering at Wagner's steadfast belief in the
saving power of art for human society would do well to cast a glance
at the course of each development of the Christian ideal, the
political and the artistic respectively. In the Middle Ages the one
showed itself in councils like those of Nicea and Ephesus, in
political popes like Gregory VII. and Innocent III., in Isidorian
decretals, excommunications, interdicts, tortures, indulgences; the
other in our mediaeval cathedrals, in the poetry of a Dante, the
paintings of a Giotto and a Raphael, the sculpture of a Michael
Angelo, the music of a Palestrina, and our politician might then ask
himself which he thought had been the more beneficial as a social
force. There still remain as our meagre heritage from these times of
"faith," on the one hand the orthodoxy of the Nicene Creed, on the
other certain festivals and celebrations in the cathedral of a small
Bavarian town, little known, scarcely noticed, but still in the full
glory of their pristine mediaeval beauty.

No one who has not attended the celebrations in the cathedral of
Regensburg can fully measure what has been lost for mankind through
the domination of human rationalism in the place of religious
devotion. Here alone in Europe all who will may yet hear the great
masters of the sixteenth century rightly performed with the ancient
ritual, and Gregorian chant that belongs to it, without pretence,
without pomp or pageant, with the single purpose of serving God
worthily in that true spirit of mediaeval sincerity and purity which
our historians are apt to pass over unnoticed in their rancorous
eagerness to proclaim the sins of the Church. The compositions of
Palestrina and his compeers represent music in its highest form as
pure song in its most perfect consummation, attaining as song an
elevation which has never even been distantly approached since. "The
centuries have no power over the Palestrina style," says its
historian; "it can neither fade nor die." Truly does Wagner say we
shall never believe the vocal school which followed it to have been
the legitimate daughter of that wondrous mother.

The predominant feature of this music is harmony, brought forth by the
union, not of sounds, but of melodies--different and contrasting
melodies united in harmony, that is the characteristic of the
polyphonic school, and the rhythm is marked, not by accents, but by
changes of the chords. It is a rhythm of quantity alone, not of accent
and quantity combined, as in the song and the dance and in modern
music. Thus, although dancing was by no means excluded from the church
in early times--its trace still remains in the name choir [Greek:
choros] for that part of the church where the dancing was
performed[19]--its most characteristic element, accent, came to be
banished from the music of the church as something foreign to the
character of religious worship. But the loss was amply repaid by the
wealth and richness which the harmonic structure was able to acquire,
and which was rendered intelligible by that fine and expressive method
of handling the separate voices which we know as counterpoint. This is
not without some interest for us, because, widely as Wagner's
harmonies differ from those of Palestrina, we shall find that they too
can often only be understood through the progression of the voices.
The same is true of Bach's harmonies. Harmony was generated by
polyphony, and not _vice versa_; that is, men first tried fitting
melodies together, not chords, and when they had learned to do this
skilfully, so that they sounded well together, harmony came into
being. It does not follow that the music was unrhythmic because it was
unaccented, and because in writing it was not divided into bars. No
music can be intelligible without rhythm. The rhythmic pulsations are
there; they are distinctly felt by the hearer in the performance, and
in modern editions the barring is always introduced; but it is less
crude, less obvious, through not being enforced by strong accents.

[Footnote 19: Menil, _Histoire de la Danse_, where an interesting
account of church dancing in the Middle Ages will be found.]

We have already seen how the _Volkslied_ became fertilized by the
polyphony of church-music. At the same time the music of the mass
itself received an important impulse from the _Volkslied_. The
employment of well-known popular song-melodies as _canti fermi_
in sacred contrapuntal compositions had a very beneficial effect upon
those works, inasmuch as it introduced a bit of fresh popular life
into music just at the moment when it was in danger of degenerating
into pedantry and triviality.[20] Possibly the secularization of
church music went too far, and at the Council of Trent the proposal
was very seriously considered whether the music of the church should
not be restricted to the traditional Gregorian chant, which had never
been popular and never will be, because priests cannot ordinarily be
found to sing it properly. The point at issue in this celebrated
discussion really was whether in polyphonic song the words could be
made intelligible,[21] for if not the music would become a mere
decorative feature, and the mass itself unmeaning. Precisely as in the
Wagner controversy of three centuries later, the question was whether
art was a diversion only to be enjoyed for the sake of the pleasure
which it afforded, or whether it had a serious didactic purpose
founded on a reality. It is impossible not to be struck with the
similarity of the issues involved with those of the Wagner struggle.
In both the question was raised whether music could be justified in
detaching itself from its basis--in the one case religious, in the
other dramatic--and assert an absolute existence for itself. Still
closer is the resemblance when we consider the dramatic character of
the Roman ritual, with its sublime conceptions of Real Presence and
Transubstantiation. The ritual during Holy Week, for example, is the
story of the Passion, partly narrated, partly in a sort of idealized
representation. When the solemn moment of the Crucifixion is reached
on Good Friday, when the officiating priests advance in turn to
adoration while the Cross itself lifts its voice in "Reproaches" to
the multitude with Palestrina's music, who does not feel the dramatic
directness of the representation?

  Popule meus, quid feci tibi? aut in quo contristavi
  te? responde mihi.

  _Chor_. [Greek: agios ho theos, agios hischuros, agios
  'athanatos.]

  Quia eduxi te de terra Aegypti: parasti crucem
  Salvatori tuo.

  _Chor_. Sanctus deus, sanctus fortis, sanctus et immortalis.
  Miserere nobis.

--The chorus answering each "Reproach" alternately in the Greek of the
Eastern Church and the Latin of the Western Church. Such music as this
has quite a different character from that of our concert-rooms; it is
music which means something.

[Footnote 20: Ambros., Gesch., ii. p. 286.]

[Footnote 21: Ambros., Gesch., iv, pp. 14 seq.]

The problem was definitely settled for the church by the music of
Palestrina. But he did not change the course of history, and with his
death in the same year (1594) as that of his great contemporary
Orlando Lasso, his work came to an end. His influence had indeed been
profound, and he left as his disciples and successors men of gifts
scarcely inferior to his own; but the fashion had changed; Italian
humanism and the sway of the Press destroyed worship, destroyed
spontaneity, and by the year 1600 the pure vocal style and the
_Volkslied_ had both passed away.

Our results so far can be very shortly summed up. Modern music has
three main elements, which were fed from three sources:

      Rhythm    --    Cantilene    --    Polyphony.
         |                |                  |
      The dance      _Volkslied_         Church music.

It has been my endeavour in the preceding to show how these three
intermingled with and reacted upon one another. The outcome of all
three has been modern German orchestral music; for the distinctive
music of modern Germany up to Beethoven is orchestral. In saying this,
I have not forgotten the great German song-composers, but even their
work is insignificant beside that of the instrumentalists, and has
been so affected both in design and in technique by instrumental music
as in a great degree to lose its vocal character. The choruses of
Handel and Bach are almost entirely instrumental in character.

The change which came over artistic expression from about 1600 on
implied a deeper and more vital change in the conception of art
itself. Till then men had believed the things they told in their art.
Byzantine saints, Cynewulf's Scriptural legends, German
_Heldenerzaehlungen_, Icelandic _Sagas_, down to the saints
and angels of the pre-Raphaelites, all represented realities to the
poet; he would have felt no interest in telling of things which he did
not believe to be true. But henceforward we have art for its own sake;
the truthfulness of the subject-matter is of no account; the sole
canon of art is beauty of form; its purpose not instruction but
pleasure.

I know no episode in the history of art that is more instructive than
the birth of the Italian opera. It was typically a product of the
Renaissance, but it came at the very end of that movement, when the
freshness of its early vigour was past, when learning had declined
into pedantry, and its graceful art was lost in _barocco_.

The period of Italian history known as the Renaissance is important
because it brought forth a greater number of geniuses of the highest
rank than ever existed together in any country before or since, except
perhaps in the great time of Athens. But in itself it was a falsehood.
It was an attempt to revive former _Italian_ greatness,
forgetting that the greatness of Italy had been exclusively military
and political, whereas the modern movement was literary and artistic.
It committed the blunder of confusing together under the term
"classic" two very different forms of culture, the Greek and the
Roman, very much as we now group Hindus, Moslems, and Chinamen
together as "Orientals." All that was really great in art was Greek,
but they were content to receive it through the tradition of the most
inartistic nation that ever lived. Far indeed were the Renaissance
humanists from the noble simplicity of Hellenic art.

The Renaissance movement in Italy was not only, like the German
Reformation, anticlerical; it was atheist and immoral, at least in its
later degenerate period, and it is likely that the representatives of
the latest modernism who met and aired their views in the Florentine
salons at the end of the sixteenth century, were inspired as much by
hatred of religion, or by what is called love of freedom, as by
enthusiasm for art. Hitherto the Renaissance had taken little notice
of music. It was a barbarian art; how could Florentine exquisites,
disciples of Machiavelli, men of the vein of Lorenzo di Medici, Leo
X., and Baldassari Castiglione be expected to occupy themselves with
the art of men bearing such names as Okeghem or Obrecht? Popes and
Cardinals, however, had shown themselves much better connoisseurs of
art than the humanists, and had brought these barbarians to Italy, had
given them high appointments and become their pupils. The fact that
the antipathy of the humanists to music was extended to that of their
own great countrymen, to Palestrina, Vittoria, Suriano, cannot be
entirely accounted for by their dislike of everything clerical, still
less by want of taste. The cause lay far deeper. It was the transition
from the old order to the new, from mediaeval faith to modern
rationalism, from art to science.

Art and science both contemplate Nature, and seek to turn her gifts to
account to better and ennoble human life. Art accepts the beautiful
objects of Nature as they are, without questioning. The artist says:
"Let me lead you by the hand; I have seen something new and beautiful;
here it is; try to see it too, with my help, that we may both enjoy it
together." But he uses no compulsion; with those who turn a deaf ear
to him he is powerless. Science on the other hand tries to compel
belief by irresistible processes of logic; the scientist's axiom is
that if the premises be true the conclusion _must_ follow, and he
pours scorn upon all who refuse assent to his interpretations,
denouncing them as ignorant, superstitious, if not wilfully blind and
perverse. Mystery, according to the ancients the beginning of
philosophy, has no place in science; what cannot be explained is
superstitious and must be rejected as false. The source of art, as of
religion, must be sought not in the ineffable, incomprehensible
phenomena of nature, but in the human mind, in reason, to which all
art must conform.

This was the spirit in which the founders of the _nuove musiche_
sought to carry out their reforms; their intolerance rivals that of
Lucretius or Haeckel. It is impossible to suppose that men of their
highly-cultured aesthetic sense were deaf to the purely musical beauty
of polyphony. They were trained in its school, and had employed it
themselves most skilfully in their madrigals. It was the _mystery_ of
the mass and of its attendant music which they detested.

Another consideration must be added. Hand in hand with this
rationalizing tendency, indeed only another phase of the same
phenomenon, is the striving for self-assertion of the individual,
which is the mark of all progress towards higher civilization. The
contrapuntal mass or motet expressed the commonwealth of the Church,
where the individual disappears, absorbed in the community. The
_nuove musiche_ sought to emancipate the individual, and allow
him to express his own independent existence. Thus the progress of the
modern musical drama presents an exact parallel to that of the Greek
drama, from before Thespis onwards, except that here the change from
lyric to dramatic representation was slower, because, there being no
preconceived plan or model for the reformers to work by, the
development was gradual and natural instead of violent.

The year 1600 marks with considerable accuracy the transition from the
old order to the new. The two greatest masters of the old school had
recently died, and with them their work expired. At the wedding of
Henri IV. of France with Maria de' Medici in Florence, in that year,
was performed the opera _Euridice_, the joint work of Caccini and
Peri, which is the starting-point of the new music.

The details of the invention of the _nuove musiche_, the ideas
which brought it forth, how these were nursed in the salons of
Florentine noblemen, especially in that of Bardi Conte Vernio, are all
well known. They did not proceed in the first instance from musicians,
but from scholars, who, having read in the course of their studies
about Grecian (or Roman--it was all the same to them) dramatic music,
determined to add to the other accomplishments of the new order that
of reviving the ancient drama with its music. They were vehement in
their denunciations of the barbarous institutions of counterpoint and
loudly called for a return to the only true principles of music as
taught by the ancients. With this end in view they drew into their
circle the most gifted musicians whom they could find, and expounded
to willing and zealous ears the principles of music as embodied in the
rules of Plato and Aristotle, omitting, however, to state where they
found them in the works of those philosophers. The first result was
the opera, or operas (for there seem to have been two, one by Caccini
and one by Peri, welded into one) _Euridice_ performed at the
royal wedding. It was followed by other similar works and the series
has continued in unbroken course for three centuries, through
Monteverde, Carissimi, A. Scarlatti, down to our own time. The
physiognomy of the early operas of the classic revival is still
distinctly traceable in Rossini, Donizetti, and the early Verdi, after
whom its career was suddenly cut short almost in the height of its
fame by the publication of the first part of Wagner's _Oper und
Drama_ in 1851.

From the very beginning the Italian opera was what it is now,
frivolous, insincere, imbecile. Its sole function was, and always has
been, to help idlers of the upper classes to while away their
evenings. The absurd notion of a Platonic music was rivalled by the
absurdity of the composition. The inane dialogue was made up of
interminable recitative, in the midst of which an occasional
chorus--introduced in conformity with supposed classical
practice--must have come as a most refreshing relief; for choruses
they could write. It was dramatic in so far that it was provided with
all the paraphernalia of the stage and that the singers walked about
as they sang. Possibly, too, the performers had some initiation into
modern methods of operatic acting, and would raise one arm at the word
_cielo_, two arms at certain other words, etc.; but it would be
hard to detect any living dramatic idea in those mythological heroes
and heroines, Dafnes, Amors, Tirsis, Ariannas dressed up as stage
shepherds and shepherdesses. The only _raison d'etre_ of the
music in the minds of the fashionable audience was--then as now--to
provide a stimulus for conversation and flirting, or a pleasant
diversion in the intervals of their business transactions.

But it is easy to ridicule the follies and failures of men who were
striving after an ideal. More profitable to us it will be to trace
what substantiality their dream of dramatic revival really possessed,
and if we strip it of the false garment of classicity in which it
masqueraded, and of its self-asserting intolerance, there is no
question that, whatever the results of the efforts of these reformers,
their intention was admirable. They themselves, the composers, were
deeply in earnest; their objects were not what they supposed, but they
were entirely worthy, and though we may wonder at their failure to
appreciate the entrancing beauty of polyphonic music, we must admit
even here that their objections were not without some force. To
realize this we must transfer ourselves in imagination to their
conditions and endeavour to consider the problems from their
standpoint, remembering how they were impelled by the irresistible law
of progress, the assertion of individualism, and by the desire for
dramatic treatment.

The main objection brought by the reformers against polyphony was that
the elaborate imitative treatment of the voices made the words
unintelligible. We may remember that exactly the same objection had
already been raised at the Council of Trent by clericals themselves.
Vocal music alone, the reformers contended, can be recognized as true
music, for music is essentially language and rhythm, and only in the
last place tone.[22] Consequently, _right declamation_ is of its
essence. On this ground they objected to mixing together high notes
and low, fast movement and slow, to dividing a syllable between many
notes, to repetition of words and phrases. Especially significant is
the advice given by Vincentio Galilei to composers to study the
expression of gifted actors.[23]

[Footnote 22: Ambros., iv, p.165.]

[Footnote 23: _Ib._., p. 170.]

It is impossible not to treat seriously a movement founded upon such
arguments as these. They are in the main incontrovertible. We seem to
be breathing the very atmosphere of Wagner, and it would be scarcely
too much to say that the humanist movement of the Bardi salon was in
its _intention_ the forerunner of the German movement dreamed of
by Herder, Schiller, Jean Paul, and accomplished by Wagner, who at
last succeeded in finding what the others had sought, namely, the true
relations between words, music, and acting. Even the idea of
concealing the orchestra originated with them. Why, then, did it not
succeed? Why did