Part 2
To reach the state of mind in which that end is the chief object, one must rid himself of all desire and yearn to arrive at a complete negation of the will to live. Recall "Tristan und Isolde." The first step toward the negation of the will to live is perfect sympathy with suffering. Then comes asceticism, which leads directly away from life toward a condition of abstraction.
Here the thought touches the monasticism of the early Church and avows a kinship with the Buddhistic doctrine. Withdrawal from the world and safety by absorption into the universal unconsciousness were the Buddhist's hope of peace. But neither Gautama nor Schopenhauer had any definite, positive reason for this. Here the early monk, who was looking out for the salvation of his own precious soul and letting other people's souls take care of themselves, came nearer to the ideals of Wagner as set forth in "Parsifal."
No, Schopenhauer did not teach Wagner the doctrine of "enlightenment by pity," for with Schopenhauer pity was not enlightenment, but the beginning of a personal abstraction. A man was sorry for others because they were in the world, the very worst place a man could inhabit. His sensuous nature made him like the things he found here (such as flower-maidens, for example); and his duty was to mortify the flesh, get rid of all his mortal appetites, live in asceticism, and die as soon as possible. Wagner was fond of grafting his own ideas on the philosophical systems of bigger men than himself. So he invented this doctrine of enlightenment. How he worked out his psychologic plan we shall see presently.
No doubt Wagner had his eye on Buddhism when he wrote "Parsifal." It is history that he once contemplated a Buddhistic drama, called "The Victors," in which he was to preach the doctrine of fleshly renunciation and salvation through the mortification of desire. But he abandoned the scheme. The story was Eastern, and he did some delving in Oriental literature.
How the "Four Sublime Verities" of Gautama, the founder of the Buddhistic religion, must have appealed to him! These were, first, that pain exists; second, that the cause of pain is desire or attachment; third, that pain can be ended by Nirvana; and fourth, how to attain Nirvana.
The way to Nirvana is hard, much harder than the path to the Christian Heaven, for the man must walk it without aid. There is no vicarious sacrifice in the religion of Siddartha. You must walk the wine-press alone, and drink of the dregs of life. All the best of the Ten Commandments are found in the precepts of this religion. Added to them are minor commands looking to complete abstraction.
For example, a Bhikshu (an order of monk) is forbidden to look at or converse with a woman lest emotion should disturb the serene indifference of his soul. He must not even save his mother if she is drowning, except with a long stick reached toward her.
"To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock," seems to have been the chief business of the founder. Thus is he always represented cross-legged and contemplative, with eyes downcast, "cleaving with the thunderbolt of science the mountain of ignorance," and perceiving the illusory nature of all things. So he comes at last to that state in which he breaks the bonds binding him to existence and enters into the complete Nirvana.
In this religion pity is pre-eminent, for it is sympathy with suffering. But it does not confine itself to human beings. Animals are also to share our sympathies, and here we meet with the foundation of Wagner's idea in "Parsifal" of the sacredness of the life of dumb creatures in the realms of the Holy Grail. But now let us see how Wagner works out his jumble of religious and philosophic doctrines.
Parsifal is a pure fool. Weigh that, first of all. He knows nothing; yet when he enters the flower-garden he compliments the women on their beauty, and fails to understand what they want of him. O wise young judge! this pure fool, who does not know what is the matter with Amfortas, and therefore has no desire to aid him, must be enlightened by pity. So Wagner sets Kundry to work to tell him the story of his mother's sufferings, and she ends the narration by printing a long kiss upon his lips. Wagner was fond of long kisses set to music, and he used one in "Siegfried" as an awakener.
Now what happens? This salacious kiss of an unchaste woman, imprinted on the lips of a youth who was, according to Wagner's delineation of him, as innocent as a child of eight or ten, instantly opens up to him the entire experience of Amfortas, and fills him with pity and horror! That is, indeed, a miracle. And to make the thing psychologically more absurd, Wagner shows us this "pure fool" battling madly with the simultaneous working of these two emotions. What has become of the enlightenment by pity? Plainly the enlightenment comes first and the pity afterward! Furthermore, Parsifal prays to the Redeemer for forgiveness for his failure to understand the scene in the hall of the Grail. But, as H. E. Krehbiel pertinently asked in an article in the "New York Tribune," what could the boy have done when he had not yet got the sacred spear from Klingsor?
What a hold, then, the Buddhistic ideas, toward which Wagner was led by Schopenhauer, had taken upon him! The religion of the crucial scene of the drama is not Christian at all. The outward and visible signs of the scene are purely pagan, but the underlying philosophy is Buddhistic. It is the final issue of the dreams which this master visionary had in his mind when he planned "The Victors." The only remnant of Christian story in this act is the reminiscence of the drama which Wagner once planned relating to the Saviour.
In his "Jesus of Nazareth" he intended to show Mary of Magdala in love with the Divine One. Wagner was no fool. Nor was he a madman, as Nordau has tried to show. But he was first, last, and all the time a theatrical thinker. His imagination dwelt in the show-house, and all was grist that came to his mill. If he had thought the meditations of the Creator good material for a music drama, he would have laid his artistic hands upon the eternal throne itself.
Thus, he shrank not from grafting spectacular show, Schopenhauerian ethics, and Buddhistic dogmas on the legend of the Holy Grail. As a matter of absolute fact, the Christian elements in this drama are almost wholly spectacular and in the nature of accessories. If ministers of the Gospel desire to be shocked by "Parsifal,"--and they have reason to be, if they look for it in the right place,--let them consider the place which the Holy Grail and the ceremony of the communion occupy in this play.
They are merely stage devices to heighten the picture of the suffering of Amfortas, and to impress upon our minds the vital need of the enlightenment of the pure fool. The processional of the Grail is spectacle pure and simple. The eating of the Last Supper is spectacle pure and simple. It has absolutely nothing to do with the story of the drama.
The unveiling of the Grail is necessary because it shows how Amfortas is made to suffer agony. But it is no assistance to such Christian ethics as there are in this muddle. If Amfortas has an incurable wound, which is merely the outward symbol of conscience, he ought not to need the sight of the Grail to make him feel worse. The thought of his unworthiness to be a member of the chaste brotherhood should be enough.
The foot-washing incident is theatricalism of the crassest kind. Can any one show that it has a direct connection with the development of the story? The argument in its favor is that it shows Kundry as a penitent, and establishes her in relations of atonement with Parsifal. Quite unnecessary, for the significance of the second act is that Parsifal, having resisted her tempting, is spiritually her master and also her redeemer. The act of absolution is made possible by his triumph over the flesh. He could have baptized her and bidden her trust in the Lord without offering us a portrait of the Saviour as represented in the seventh chapter of St. Luke:--
"And behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment,
"And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment."
Wagner brings on the tears after the foot-washing, so that he can show us how Kundry was released from the curse of laughter. Or was the curse imposed solely that this theatrical picture might be introduced?
The sacred spear has some connection with the story, but the weapon is not an important feature of Christianity. There is even room for doubt as to whether there ever was a sacred spear at all. The wound certainly existed; but who can vouch for the preservation of the spear as an object of reverence? So let us for the present dismiss the profound religious basis of Richard Wagner's "Parsifal." Buddha and Arthur Schopenhauer taught the dramatist more essentials than the Holy Bible did. The foundations of the drama rest on the philosophy of negation. The Christianity is merely ornamental, spectacular, and delusive.
III.--THE NATIONAL RELIGIOUS DRAMA
I shall lay down a type of theological orthodoxy to which all the divine legends in our city must conform.
PLATO, _Republic_ (_Grote's abstract_).
"Parsifal" is the supreme test of the outcome of Wagner's theory that the modern theatre ought to bear the same relation to the life of the people as the theatre of the Greeks did. All students of the master's writings know that he preached this especially in those years when his system had attained definite and detailed form in his mind. In the Greek theatre he saw an art influence far-reaching and mighty,--an influence which dominated because it dramatized the artistic and religious ideals of a people. That he failed to discern the identity of religion and art in the symbolical embodiments named gods by the imaginative Greeks is another story.
Furthermore, he objected strenuously and rightly to any criticism of his philosophic and artistic system based on the study of his early works, which were written before his system was fully developed. In the "Communication to My Friends" he says:--
"Certain critics who pretend to judge my art doings as a connected whole have set about their task with this same uncritical heedlessness and lack of feeling. Views on the nature of art that I have proclaimed from a standpoint which it took me years of evolution step by step to gain, they seize on for the standard of their verdict, and point them back upon those very compositions from which I started on the natural path of evolution that led me to this standpoint.
"When for instance--not from the standpoint of abstract æsthetics, but from that of practical artistic experience--I denote the _Christian principle as hostile to or incapable of art_, these critics point me out the contradiction in which I stand toward my earlier dramatic works, which undoubtedly are filled with a certain tincture of this principle so inextricably blended with our modern evolution."
Excellent. The italics are not Wagner's. Let us, then, avoid falling into the error of chaining Wagner to the beautiful Christianity idealized by dramatic art, which he, unwise youth that he was, poured into his "Tannhäuser," and confine ourselves to the full-fledged "Parsifal," in which we are not, as he tells us, to regard the Christianity as a vital art principle, but as one opposed to true art. What does the man mean?
One thing is clear. Wagner did endeavor to theatricalize religions and to parody in his feeble modern manner the theatre of the Greeks. But if he failed (and who can doubt that he did after studying the bloodless philosophy of the last product of his genius?), it was because he was trying to do with calculating forethought what the Greek did spontaneously, and because his religion supplied him plentifully and unconsciously with the Schopenhauerian materials of art; namely, Eternal Ideas represented by means of prototypes.
How came Wagner to fail in his puerile attempt to make a drama out of a supposed incident in the life of Christ? Misled by the similarity of his conception of the Saviour of mankind as a pure human being resisting the seductions of a temptress in the person of Mary Magdalen to his Tannhäuser battling with carnal passion typified by Venus, or his Parsifal, remaining innocent through sheer guilelessness, he set out to thrust into the glare of the footlights the personality of Jesus. And then he found that the personality was not merely human, nor the poetic embodiment of an idea, even an Eternal Idea, but an everlasting miracle and mystery, a divinity beyond the reach of his trap-doors, purple lights, and tenor tubas.
The story of Christ is tremendously dramatic, but it has eluded every attempt at theatrical treatment. The thing done at Oberammergau is not drama, but an old-fashioned mystery play. It is a moving panorama. Pinero, Belasco, or even Ibsen would shrink from an attempt to dramatize for the ordinary theatre the story of the Saviour. But Wagner, blinded by his own ambition to make a show of all things, to seize upon every suggestion of religion as material for music, thought for a time that he could turn the Son of Man into a mime.
What a different art work was that of the Greek dramatist! How much more direct and thornless was the path by which he reached the theatrical representation of his gods and goddesses and the dramatic relation of the fables in which they were the actors! With his stylus in hand he sat at gaze upon a world of personated ideas, of symbols in action. All was poetic and imaginative. All was the creation of the human mind speculating upon the operation of unseen forces and subtle passions. There was no almighty revelation to baffle him. The infinite did not come and stand before him in an incomprehensible mortalization of itself. What he had of the world beyond the skies was the dreaming of his own kind.
What were Zeus and Hermes, Aphrodite and Hera, Artemis and Apollo, Pallas and Poseidon, but personifications of ideas, those eternal types which even the nugatory speculation of Schopenhauer postulated as the materials of true art? When the Greek tragic dramatist was not utilizing the gods, he employed the people of the mythologic tales. When Phrynicus, in 511 B. C., wrote a tragedy on the capture of Miletus, melting an audience to tears with the pathos of a well-known contemporary event, he was fined a thousand drachmæ for his ill-chosen subject.
When Wagner delved in the pagan mythology of the Northmen, he fell upon metal like that of the Greeks. Nearly every personage in the burg of Wallhal has a companion on Olympus. In the Eddas Wagner found eternal types created by the human imagination by the same processes as those of the Greeks. Hence the splendid humanity of his Wotan, his Brünnhilde, his Fricka.
What had the Greek? The entire Grecian religion grew out of the worship of the powers of nature. It recognized one power as the head of all, Zeus, the god of heaven and light. "And God said, Let there be light, and there was light." The Greek's notion of the beginning of all things was the same as the Hebrew's. With Zeus abode in the clear expanse of ether Hera, representing the eternal feminine element in the divinity. The other gods were partly representatives of the attributes of Zeus himself,--as Athene, knowledge, sprung from his head; Apollo, beauty and purity; Hermes, who brings up the treasures of fruitfulness from the depths of the earth; and Cora, the child, now lost and now recovered by Hera, typifying the winter and the summer. Poseidon and Hephæstus represented the elements, water and fire. But why go farther with this catalogue? It is known to every school-boy.
Together with these symbols the Greek dramatist had Hercules and Prometheus, Paris and Orestes, Jason and Medea, and other earth-born mythologic personages, the Siegfrieds and Gunthers and Sieglindes of their mythologic world, demigods and heroes all, acting in fables of wondrous poetic power, built on imaginative developments of ideals. The Greek world knew these tales. The dramatist of the Æschylean age was situated as Weber was when he put "Der Freischütz" before Germany. He utilized the fairy tales of the people, and offering them in a novel form made them eloquent with a new glory.
Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were the masters of the Greek tragedy; and their plays all deal with either mythologic or legendary stories and personages. The ideas preached in the ethics of their dramas were those of Greek morality. The gods and goddesses introduced or referred to were the embodiments of Greek ideals. Though the populace was not so able a doctrinaire as to know that there was in truth but one deity, Zeus, of whom all the others were but aids and expressions, it had the enormous advantage of intimate acquaintance with the poetic attributes of the galaxy of gods. It was a public ripe for its religious drama.
Now, when Richard Wagner set out to build up a modern theatre which should have the same relation to the life of the people as the theatre of the Greeks had to theirs, he started on the right path. He took the legendary materials to be found in German literature. He wrote with unerring judgment when he created his operatic version of "The Flying Dutchman." The pity of it is that he did not compose this work when he was at the period of the maturity of his genius. We should have had something almost as splendid as "Tristan und Isolde," for while the story is not so suggestive as the old legend treated by Gottfried von Strassbourg, it is not far behind it. At any rate, it is purely Teutonic in its character, though in its origin it is Greek. For, of course, Vanderdecken is but a modern replica of Ulysses. The Germans knew the story, for Heine had made it theirs. Wagner wrote wisely and well in this drama.
In "Tannhäuser" again he found his materials in the vast treasure-house of German literature and legend. Possibly this story was known to fewer Germans than "The Flying Dutchman," but its character was sympathetic to them and there was no mistaking the force of its moral lesson. Yet the religious doctrines of this drama are not essentially those of the Christian Church; they are those of religion and morality in general. The idea of salvation through love of a pure woman is the Goethean doctrine of the eternal womanly leading us upward. It was not original with Wagner, but it was beloved by him.
In "Lohengrin" we come nearer to the mystical thoughts of such a work as "Parsifal," yet here humanity operates in the natural desire of Elsa to reach into the secrets of her husband's heart and life, and still more powerfully in the vengeful character of the sexless and inexorable Ortrud.
In both of these splendid dramas of Wagner's genius we are confronted at every step with the normal working of human passions, and love throbs through both of them. In "Parsifal" we have no single pulse of love. In "Parsifal" salvation is brought by ignorance and miracle. In "Tannhäuser" it comes triumphantly through suffering, repentance, and prayer. In "Parsifal" the sufferings of Amfortas are relieved by the purity of another man. In "Tannhäuser" the misery of the hero is assuaged by his own repentance and the holy love of Elizabeth. The religion of "Tannhäuser" is human; that of "Parsifal" is ceremonial, panoramic, abstract.
"Parsifal" is a dramatization of ceremonials. In the first and third acts we behold the pageant of religious rites; in the second the diorama of bacchanalian orgies. Externals are thrust upon us constantly; the depths are hidden under a veil of scenic pretence and musical delusion. The bulk of the music of the work is external and descriptive. Little, indeed, is there of the tonal embodiment of subjective ideas. Compare the three acts of "Parsifal" with the three great emotional episodes of "Tristan und Isolde." What a stupendous development the latter work shows of the tragedy of fatal passion!
In its first act the operation of a magical agency breaks down the hitherto safe bonds of restraint and plunges two typical human beings into the very vortex of flaming love. In the second act they rush together and forget honor. The stroke of retribution falls; fate deals her deadly blow. In the third act remorse, agony, death, and the salvation of suffering souls by negation.
There is a drama which preaches no religious doctrine, which has no dogma save the Buddhistic one of release from suffering by death, yet which stands in closer relation to the life of the people than all of Wagner's religious dramas, because it deals with world-thoughts.
When Wagner worked with the purely mythical and legendary tales of the German people, he built dramas of national character and power. When he undertook to turn into theatrical pageants the teachings of Christianity, he failed utterly. The Greek succeeded because his religion was one of symbols, of deifications of the powers of nature, with its literature developed from tales of the fabulous doings of gods and goddesses, tales embodying in imaginative form fundamental facts of nature.
When Wagner sought his inspiration in the mythology of the North, which was developed in precisely the same manner as the Greek mythology, he found material of poetic and suggestive kind. But when, by dramatizing Christian doctrine and history, he tried to bring his national theatre into such relation to the life of the people as the Greek dramatists brought theirs, he failed, for the simple reason that at this point his entire theory as to the suitability of mythical and legendary material to the use of the dramatist broke down.
There is nothing mythological in the teachings of the Christian religion, nor in the acts of its Founder or apostles. These things stand apart from mythology and are differentiated from it absolutely. They are not and could not have been the product of human imagination, symbolizing human experience and speculation. The profoundest philosophers of antiquity never hit upon the basic doctrines of Christianity.
Beautiful as the teachings of Socrates are, they are essentially human. The Sermon on the Mount sets up a system of ethics never dreamed of by Aristotle or Plato. Only Buddha ever approached Christ, and the outcome of the Hindu's entire system was not eternal salvation and glory, but endless silence and the negation of death. From this Wagner could not escape, even in his "Parsifal," for Kundry, in the final scene, dies of what? Of a Buddhistic ethical idea!
Wagner's greatest works are unquestionably those in which the fundamental myths or legends were symbolical of human passions, of the worldwide experience of mankind. "Tannhäuser," "Die Walküre," "Siegfried," "Götterdämmerung," and "Tristan und Isolde" are Wagner's masterpieces of serious drama, not the saccharine "Lohengrin," nor the tinselled ritual, "Parsifal." Are not those, with the matchless comedy of manners, "Die Meistersinger," enough for one mind to have created? Why should we believe it incumbent upon us to uphold all that Wagner did?
We can say of him as Prentice said of Napoleon, "Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his own originality." Taking him by and large, as the sailors say, he was the most striking figure in musical history. Why discredit him by trying to show that "Parsifal," the feeble child of his artistic senility, was filled with the vigor of his young Volsung or the radiant power of his immortal song of love insatiate?
DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN
I.--A FUTILE GOD AND A POTENT DEVIL