Part 11

I have so often insisted on the pictorial power of Wagner's music, that, save for one quality of the pictures in the "Ring," and especially in "Siegfried," it would be unnecessary to say more about it now. That quality is their old-world atmosphere, their power of filling us with a sense of the old time before us. When the fire plays round Brünnhilde's fell--Hinde Fell, Morris calls it--lighting the icy tops of the farthest hills, or when Mime and Alberich squabble in the dark of early morning at the mouth of Fafner's hole, or again when the Wanderer comes in and scarifies Mime out of his wits, we are taken back to the remotest and dimmest past, to the beginnings of time, to a time that never existed save in the imagination of our forebears. This may be partly the result of our unconscious perception of the fact that these things never happen nowadays, and partly the result of our having been familiar with the story of Brünnhilde and the gods since earliest boyhood; but it is in the main due to Wagner's intense historical sense, his sense of the past, and to his unapproached power of expressing in music any feeling or combination of feelings he experienced. So cunningly do music and scenery work together that we credit the one with what the other has done; but, wonderful though the pictures of "Siegfried" are, there cannot be a doubt that the atmosphere we discover in them reaches us through the ear from the orchestra. Besides giving us a series of singularly apposite and significant pictures, Wagner has reproduced the very breath and colour of the old sagas; he has re-created the atmosphere of a time that never was; and it is this remote atmosphere which lends to "Siegfried" and all the "Ring" a great part of their enchantment. Fancy what it might have been, this long exposition of sheer Schopenhauerism in three dramas and a fore-play! imagine what Parry or Stanford or Mackenzie would have made of it! And then think of what the "Ring" actually is, and especially of the splendour and weirdness of some parts the "dulness" of which moves dull people to dull grumbling. For example, a great many persons share Mime's wish for the Wanderer to go off almost as soon as he comes on, "else no Wanderer can he be called." They tell us that this scene breaks the action, neglecting the trifling fact that were it omitted the remainder of the act would be inconsequent nonsense, only worthy to rank with the librettos of English musical critics, and that the truth happens to be that nearly the whole of the subsequent drama grows out of it. In itself it is a scene of peculiar power, charged to overflowing with the essence of the Scandinavian legends. The notion of the god, "one-eyed and seeming ancient," wandering by night through the wild woods, clad in his dark blue robe, calling in here and there and creating consternation in the circle gathered round the hearth, is one of the most poetic to be found in the Northern mythology; and the music which Wagner has set to his entry and his conversation cannot be matched for unearthliness unless you turn to the Statue music in "Don Giovanni," where you find unearthliness of a very different sort. The scene with Erda in the mountains is even more wonderful, so laden is the music with the Scandinavian emotional sense of the impenetrable mystery of things. The scene between Mime and Alberich, or Alberich and the Wanderer, gives us the old horror of the creeping maleficent things that crawled by night about the brooks and rock-holes. It is true this last will bear cutting a little; for Wagner being a German, but having, what is uncommon in the German, an acute sense of balance of form, always tried to get balance by lengthening parts which were already long enough, in preference to cutting parts that were already too long. Hence much padding, which a later generation will ruthlessly amputate.

All these things are the accessories, the environment, of the principal figure; and their presence is justified by their beauty, significance, and interest, and also by their being necessary for the development of the larger drama of the whole "Ring." But in following "Siegfried" that larger drama cannot altogether be kept in mind: it is the hero that counts first, and everything else is accessory merely to him. That Wagner, in spite of his preoccupation with the tragedy of Wotan, should have accomplished this, proves how wonderful and how true an artist he was. Siegfried is the incarnation, as I have said, of the divine energy which enables one to make the world rich with things that delight the soul; he is Wagner's healthiest, sanest, perhaps most beautiful creation; he is certainly the only male in all Wagner's dramas who is never in any danger of becoming for ever so brief a moment a bore, whose view of life is always so fresh and novel and at the same time so essentially human that he interests us both in himself and in the world we see through his eyes. Never had an actor such opportunities as here. The entry with the bear exhibits the animal strength and spirits of the man, and the inquiries about his parents, his purely human feeling; his temper with Mime the unsophisticated boy's petulant intolerance of the mean and ugly; the forging of the sword the coming power and determination of manhood. The killing of the dragon is unavoidably rather ridiculous; but the scene with the bird is fascinating by its naturalness and simplicity as well as its tenderness and sheer sweetness. Finally, after the scene with the Wanderer, the scene of the awakening of Brünnhilde affords an opportunity for love-making, and it is love-making of so unusual a sort that one does not feel it to be an anti-climax after all the big things that have gone before. In fact, not even Tristan has things quite so much to himself, nor is given the opportunity of expressing so many phases of emotion and character. And the music Siegfried has to sing is the richest, most copious stream of melody ever given to one artist; in any one scene there is melody enough to have made the fortune of Verdi or any other Italian composer who wrote tunes for the tenor and prima donna; not even Mozart could have poured out a greater wealth of tune--tune everlastingly varying with the mood of the drama. Every scene provides a heap of smaller tunes, and then there are such big ones as the Forge song, Siegfried's meditation in the forest and the conversation with the bird, and the awakening of Brünnhilde--every one absolutely new and tremulous with intense life.

"THE DUSK OF THE GODS"

Quite a fierce little controversy raged a little while ago in the columns of the "Daily Chronicle," and all about the "meaning" of "The Dusk of the Gods" and the behaviour of Brünnhilde. Mr. Shaw played Devil's Advocate for Wagner, declaring "The Dusk of the Gods" to be irrelevant and operatic (as if that mattered); and Mr. Ashton Ellis and Mr. Edward Baughan, two mad Wagnerians, rushed in to protect Wagner from Mr. Shaw (as if he needed protection). In reading the various letters, my soul was moved to admiration and reverent awe by the ingenuity displayed by the various correspondents in their endeavours to make the easy difficult, the perfectly plain crooked. Wagner took enormous pains to make Brünnhilde a living character--that is to say, to show us her inmost soul so vividly that we know why she did anything or everything without even thinking about it; he set her on the stage, where we see her in the flesh behaving precisely as any woman--of her period--would behave. And then these excellent gentlemen come along and tell us that because Wagner at one time or another thought of handling her story, and the story of Wotan and Siegfried, in this or that way, therefore Wagner "meant" this or that, and failed or succeeded, or changed his original plan or held fast to it. All these things have nothing to do with the drama that is played on the stage: by that alone, and by none of his earlier ideas, is Wagner to be judged: he is to be judged by the effect and conviction of the finished play. Now, it seems to me that in the finished play Brünnhilde is neither "a glorious woman "--_i.e._ an Adelphi melodramatic heroine--nor "a deceitful, vindictive woman"--_i.e._ an Adelphi melodramatic villainess. Also, while considered by itself "The Dusk of the Gods" is interesting mainly on account of the music, considered in association, as Wagner wished, and as one must--for, after all, it is but the final act of a stupendous drama, and it is unfair and foolish to consider any one act of a drama alone--with the other minor dramas of the greater drama, "The Nibelung's Ring," it is dramatically not only interesting, absorbing, but absolutely indispensable, true, inevitable. It is true enough that the "Ring" suffered somewhat through the fact that Wagner took nearly a quarter of a century to carry out his plan, and during this period his views on life changed greatly; yet nevertheless "The Dusk of the Gods" stands as the noble--in fact, the only possible--conclusion to a story which is, on the whole, splendidly told.

When seeing "The Valkyrie," one thinks of Sieglinde or Siegmund or Brünnhilde; when listening to "Siegfried," one thinks of Siegfried and Brünnhilde and no others; but when one thinks of the complete "Ring," the person of the drama most forcibly forced before the eye of the imagination, the person to whom one realises that sympathy is chiefly due, is Wotan. Wotan, not Siegfried or Siegmund, is the hero of the "Ring." His tragedy--if it is indeed a tragedy to emerge from the battle in the highest sense of the word triumphant--includes the tragedy of Siegfried and Siegmund, Sieglinde and Brünnhilde--in fact, the tragedy of all the smaller characters of the play. "The Rheingold," in spite of its glorious music, is entirely superfluous--dramatically, at all events, it is superfluous--but there, anyhow, the problem which we could easily understand without it is stated. Wotan, who has been placed at the head of affairs by the three blind fates, has caught the general disease of wishing to gain the power to make others do his will. So anxious is he for that authority that he not only makes a bargain for it with the powers of stupidity--the giants, the brute forces of nature--which bargain is afterwards and could never be anything but his ruin, but also he stoops to a base subterfuge to gain it, and with the help of Loge, fire, the final destroyer, he does gain it. So determined was Wagner to make his point clear, that even in "The Rheingold," the superfluous drama, he made it several times superfluously. He was not content to let his point make itself--the humanitarian, the preacher of all that makes for the highest humanity, was too strong in him for that: it was a little too strong even for the artist in him: he must needs make the powers of darkness lay a curse on power over one's fellow-beings, the Ring standing as the emblem of that power. While Wotan takes the power, his deepest wisdom, which is to say, his intuition--represented by the spirit of the earth, Erda--rises against him and tells him he is committing the fatal mistake, and he yields to the extent of letting the giants have the supreme power. But he thinks, just as you and I, reader, might think, that by some quaint unthinkable device he can evade the tremendous consequence of his own act; and, instead of at once looking at the consequence boldly and saying he will face it, he elaborates a plan by which no one will suffer anything, while he, Wotan, will gain the lordship of creation. From this moment his fate becomes tragic. The complete man, full of rich humanity--for whom Wotan stands--cannot exist, necessarily ceases to exist, if he is compelled to deny the better part of himself, as Peter denied Jesus of Nazareth. And in consequence of his own act Wotan has immediately to deny the better part of himself, to make war on his own son Siegmund, and then on his own daughter Brünnhilde: he destroys the first and puts away from him for ever Brünnhilde, who is incarnate love. The grand tragic moment of the whole cycle is the laying to sleep of Brünnhilde. Wotan knows that life without love is no life, and he is compelled to part from love by the very bargain which enables him to rule. Rather than live such a life, he deliberately, solemnly wills his own death; and a great part of "Siegfried" and the whole of "The Dusk of the Gods" are devoted to showing how his death, and the death of all the gods, comes about through Wotan's first act. In "Siegfried" and "The Dusk of the Gods" there is no tragedy--how can there be any tragedy in the fate of the man who faithfully follows the impulse that makes for his highest and widest satisfaction, for the fullest exercise of his beneficent energies, for the man who says I will do this or that because I know and feel it is the best I can do? "The Dusk of the Gods" is Wotan's most splendid triumph; he deliberately yields place to a new dynasty, because he knows that to keep possession of the throne will mean the continual suppression of all that is best in him, as he has had already to suppress it. Incidentally there are many tragedies in the "Ring." The murder of Siegmund by Hunding, aided by Wotan, before Sieglinde's eyes; the hideous incident of Siegfried winning his own wife to be the wife of his friend Gunther; the stabbing of Siegfried by Hagen; Brünnhilde's telling Gutrune that she, Gutrune, was never the wife of Siegfried,--all these are terrible enough tragedies. Brünnhilde's is the most terrible of them all, though she too takes her fate into her hands, and by willing the right thing, and doing it, goes victorious out of life. What there is difficult to understand about her, why she should be accused of deceit and have her conduct explained, I can hardly guess. In "The Valkyrie" she is a goddess; but when she offends Wotan by disobeying him and walking clean through all the Commandments, he is bound, for the maintenance of his power, to punish her. So he takes away her godhead, and she is thenceforth simply a woman. Siegfried treats her treacherously--as she necessarily thinks--and she very naturally takes vengeance on him. Mr. Shaw speaks as though he wished her to be a bread-and-butter miss; but a woman of Brünnhilde's type, a daughter of the high gods, could scarcely be that.

In short, "The Dusk of the Gods" seems to me perfectly clear, and in no more need of explanation than "The Valkyrie" or "Siegfried." Of course there are a thousand loose ends in the "Ring," as there are in life itself; but to count them and find out what they all mean would occupy one for an eternity. To throw away "The Dusk of the Gods" because one cannot understand the loose ends, is ridiculous; instead of wishing there were fewer of them, I wish Wagner had been more careless, less German, and left more. It was through his endeavours to get unity, to show the close relation of each incident to every other incident, that he nearly came to utter grief. The drama was so gigantic, to secure sympathy for Wotan it was so necessary to secure sympathy for the minor characters whose story helps to make up Wotan's story, that Wagner seemed perpetually afraid that the real, main drama would be forgotten. And it is true that the story of Siegmund and Sieglinde, or of Siegfried and Brünnhilde, absorbs one for a time so completely that one forgets all about Wotan and his woes. So Wagner came near to spoiling one of the most tremendous achievements of the human mind, by shoving old Wotan on to the stage again and again to recapitulate his troubles. But of these interruptions "The Dusk of the Gods" has none. The story proceeds swiftly, inevitably to the end; from the first bar to the last, the music is as splendid as any Wagner ever wrote. It is the fitting conclusion to the vision of life presented in the "Ring": it is a funeral chant, mournful, sombre, but triumphant. The seed has been sown, the crop has grown and ripened and been harvested, and now the thing is over: a chill wind pipes over the empty stubble-land where late the yellow corn stood and the labourers laboured: there is nothing more: "ripeness is all" that life offers or means.

"PARSIFAL"

"Parsifal" is an immoral work. One cannot for a moment suppose that Wagner, who had written "Tristan" and "Siegfried," meant to preach downright immorality, or that he meant "Parsifal" to stand as anything more than the expression of a momentary mood, the mood of the exhausted, the effete man, the mood which follows the mood of "Tristan" as certainly as night follows day. Nevertheless, in so far as "Parsifal" says anything to us, in so far as it brings, in Nonconformist cant, "a message," it is immoral and vicious, just as in so far as "Siegfried" carries a message it is entirely moral, healthful, and sane. It is useless to quibble about this, seeking to explain away plain things: the truth remains that "Siegfried" is a glorification of one view of life, "Parsifal" of its direct opposite and flat contradiction; and anyone who accepts the one view must needs loathe the other as sinful. To me the "Siegfried" view of life commends itself; and I unhesitatingly assert the sinfulness of the "Parsifal" view. The two operas invite comparison; for at the outset their heroes seem to be the same man. Siegfried and Parsifal are both untaught fools; each has his understanding partly enlightened by hearing of his mother's sufferings and death (compare Wordsworth's "A deep distress hath humanised my soul"); each has his education completed by a woman's kiss. All this may seem very profound to the German mind; but to me it is crude, a somewhat too obvious allegory, partly superficial, partly untrue, a survival of windy sentimental mid-century German metaphysics, like the Wagner-Heine form of "The Flying Dutchman" story, and the Wagner form of the "Tannhäuser" story. However, I am willing to believe that Siegfried, when he kisses Brünnhilde on Hinde Fell, and Parsifal, when Kundry kisses him in Klingsor's magic garden, has each his full faculties set in action for the first time. And then? And then Siegfried, with his fund of health and vitality, sees that the world is glorious, and joyfully presses forward more vigorously than ever on the road that lies before him, never hesitating for a moment to live out his life to the full; while Parsifal, lacking health and vitality--probably his father suffered from rickets--sees that the grief and suffering of the world outweigh and outnumber its joys, and not only renounces life, but is so overcome with pity for all sufferers as to regard it as his mission to heal and console them. And having healed and consoled one, he deliberately turns from the green world, with its trees and flowers, its dawn and sunset, its winds and waters, and shuts himself in a monkery which has a back garden, a pond and some ducks. There is only one deadly sin--to deny life, as Nietzsche says: carefully to pull up all the weeds in one's garden, but to plant there neither flower nor tree--and this is what "Parsifal" glorifies and advocates.

Now, far be it from me to go hunting a moral tendency in a work of art, and to praise or blame the art as I chance to like or dislike the tendency. I am in a state of perfect preparedness to see beauty in a picture, even if the subject is to me repulsive. But in the case of a picture it is possible to say, "Yes, very pretty," and pass on. In the case of a story, a play, or a music-drama, you cannot. You are tied to your seat for one or two or three mortal hours; and however perfect may be the art with which music-drama or play or story is set before you, if the subject revolts or bores you, you soon sicken of the whole business. And in the highest kind of story, play, or music-drama, subject and treatment merge inseparably one in the other, substance and form are one; for the idea is all in all, and the complete idea cannot be perceived apart from the dress which makes it visible. Besides, in the Wagnerian music-drama, it is intended that beauty of idea and of arrangement of ideas shall be as of great importance as beauty of ornament. Wagner certainly intended "Parsifal" to be such a music-drama; and indeed the idea is only too clearly visible. The main idea of the "Ring" is so much obscured by the subsidiary ideas twined about it that very few people know that the real hero is Wotan, and the central drama Wotan's tragedy, that Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried and Brünnhilde, and their loves--all the romance and loveliness that enchant us--are merely accessory. But in "Parsifal" there is nothing superfluous, no rich and lovely embroidery on the dress of the idea to divert us from the idea itself--the idea is as nearly nude as our limited senses and our modern respectability permit. And the idea being what it is, it follows that the play, after the drama once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining all manner of wounds and evils where no evils or wounds existed, had he made Parsifal a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to learn this, and brought him back to break up the monastery, to set Amfortas and the knights to some useful labour, and to tell them that the sacred spear, like Wotan's spear, had power only to hurt those who feared it, then we might have had an adequate working-out of so noble a beginning. Instead of this, Kundry kisses Parsifal, Parsifal squeals, and we see him in a moment to be only an Amfortas who has had the luck not to stumble; and he, the poor fool who is filled with so vast a pity because he sees (what are called) good and evil in entirely wrong proportion--as, in fact, a hypochondriac sees them--he, Parsifal, this thin-blooded inheritor of rickets and an exhausted physical frame, is called the Redeemer, and becomes head of the Brotherhood of the Grail. Beside this inconsequence, all other inconsequences seem as nothing. One might ask, for instance, how, seeing that no man can save his brother's soul, Parsifal saves the soul of Amfortas? This is a fallacy that held Wagner all his life. We find it in "The Flying Dutchman"; it is avoided in "Tannhäuser"--for, thank the gods, Tannhäuser is _not_ saved by that uninteresting young person Elizabeth; it plays a large part in the "Ring"; it is the culmination of the drama of "Parsifal." Had Wagner thought more of Goethe and less of the Frankfort creature who formulated his hypo-chondriacal nightmares, and called the result a philosophy, he might have learnt that no mentally sick man ever yet was cured save by the welling-up of a flood of emotional energy in his own soul. He might also have seen that Parsifal is as much the spirit that denies as Mephistopheles. But these points, and many others, may go as, comparatively, nothings. The first act of "Parsifal" is unsurpassable, the second is an anti-climax, and the third, excepting the repentance of Kundry, which is pathetic, and strikes one as true, a more saddening anti-climax. There is one last thing to say before passing to the music, and this is that "Parsifal" is commonly treated with respect as a Christian drama--a superior "Sign of the Cross." I happen, oddly enough, to know the four Gospels exceedingly well; and I find nothing of "Parsifal" in them. It is much nearer to Buddhism in spirit, in colour: it is a kind of Germanised metaphysical Buddhism. Schopenhauer, not Christ, is the hero; and Schopenhauer was only a decrepit Mephistopheles bereft of his humour and inverted creative energy.