CHAPTER IV

THE SYSTEM AS COMPLETED

Wagner, in striving for a complete and natural revelation of the emotional content of his dramas, discovered that the continual flow of music which he had adopted was not possible if fixed verse-figures were employed. The verse-figure prescribes and limits the musical figure. Nevertheless there must be some rhythmic principle in the verse. Wagner found that which was most suited to his needs in the ancient staff-rhyme, or alliterative verse. The fundamental basis of this verse is consonance of sounds, not confined to the final rhyme but employed in the body of the verse and thus made a part of its inner nature. Not a little excellent information as to the exact nature of the alliterative verse may be obtained from the introductory essay to the second volume of Percy's "Reliques." It should be mentioned that Percy was acquainted with Icelandic literature and first made it known in England when he translated Mallet's "Northern Antiquities." He tells us that the Icelandic language is of the same origin as the Anglo-Saxon, and that was the reason why both employed the staff-rhyme. The alliteration consisted in "a certain artful repetition of sounds in the middle of the verses. This was adjusted according to their rules of prosody, one of which was that every distich should contain at least three words beginning with the same letter or sound. Two of these correspondent sounds might be placed either in the first or second line of the distich, and one in the other; but all three were not regularly to be crowded into one line. This will best be understood by the following examples:

"Meire og Minne Gab Ginunga Moga heimdaller. Enn Gras huerge."

This verse was used by the old poets of the Saxons in Britain. The epic of "Beowulf" is written in this style and so are the poems of Caedmon, the noted paraphraser of the scriptures. An authoritative writer says:

"The poetry of the Anglo-Saxons was neither modulated according to foot-measure, like that of the Greeks and Romans, nor written with rhymes, like that of modern languages. Its chief and universal characteristic was a very regular alliteration, so arranged that in every couplet there should be two principal words in the first line beginning with the same letter, which letter must also be the initial of the first word on which the stress of the voice falls in the second line. The only approach to a metrical system yet discovered is that two risings and two fallings of the voice seem necessary to each perfect line."

A specimen of this alliterative verse from the works of Caedmon shows the peculiarity of the construction.

"Se him cwom to frofre. & to feorh-nere. Mid lufan & mid lisse. Se thone lig tosceaf. Halig and heofon-beohrt. Hatan fyres. Tosweop hine & toswende. Thurh tha swithan miht. Ligges leoma."[31]

[Footnote 31:

Who to them came for comfort, And for their lives' salvation, With love and with grace; Who the flames scattered (Holy and heaven-bright) Of the hot fire, Swept at and dashed away, Through his great might, The beams of flame. --Paraphrase of the Song of Azariah.

Thorpe's translation.]

The reader will note the alliteration of the l's in the third and fourth lines, and the h's in the next two. The change in vowel sounds following the consonants was deemed by Wagner as of especial value in music.

As the English language developed, this method of rhythmic construction remained in use, and we find that it is used in such old poems as "Piers Plowman's Vision" (about 1350).

"In a Somer Season when hot was the Sunne, I Shope me into Shroubs as I a Shepe were; Habite as an Harmet, unHoly of werkes, Went Wyde in thys world Wonders to heare."

Wagner, however, modelled his verse on that of the original writers of it, as their language was more closely affiliated with German than the early English was. He made an exhaustive study of the constitution of the staff-rhyme, and saw in its conservation of the elementary principles of poetic speech the factor necessary to the perfection of an organic union with music. For those who have studied the conventional formulas of musical expression--the major and minor modes, chromatic progressions, the declamatory style as opposed to the pure cantilena, the crescendo and diminuendo, the agitato--know that all these have been transferred from the natural employment of vocal tone and articulation in speech as influenced by the emotions which these musical symbols are intended to represent. And we know, too, that the reflex action of music in producing in the hearer the emotions which it aims to depict is due to its adoption of methods founded on man's oral expression of his feeling. Wagner saw in the staff-rhyme the first attempt to systemise into poetry the elevated speech of emotion, and he discerned in it technical features admirably suited to his plan. In "Opera and Drama" he says:

"In Stabreim the kindred speech-roots are fitted to one another in such a way that, just as they sound alike to the physical ear, they also knit like objects into one collective image in which the Feeling may utter its conclusions about them. Their sensibly cognisable resemblance they win either from a kinship of the vowel sounds, especially when these stand open in front without any initial consonant ('Erb und eigen.' 'Immer und ewig'); or from the sameness of the initial consonant itself, which characterises the likeness as one belonging peculiarly to the object ('Ross und Reiter.' 'Froh und frei'); or again, from the sameness of the terminal consonant that closes up the root from behind (as an assonance), provided the individualising force of the word lies in that terminal ('Hand und Mund.' 'Recht und Pflicht')."

The fruits of these philological considerations reveal themselves to the hearer of the works in a wonderfully delicate perfection of accentuation and cadence, which simulates that of the spoken line in a vivifying manner. One has only to read, as one would naturally speak, such words as "Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond," and then sing them to the opening notes of "Siegmund's Love Song" to see how beautifully this staff-rhyme adapts itself to the needs of what Wagner called "Word-tone-speech," an expression which explains itself. Furthermore, these lines of staff-rhyme have no metrical domination over the music. A single reading of any familiar passage in the later works will show the reader that the lines of the verse do not set the limits for the phrases of the music as they do in the old song forms, but that the composer is entirely free in his phraseology, while he can never quite obliterate the rhythmic basis of the verse. This plasticity was of inestimable importance in the Wagnerian system, with its endless melody, its independent accompaniments, and its disuse of the old forms.

We have now made an examination of the artistic aims and methods of Wagner. The reader should now be able to grasp the basic truth that his mature works are not to be viewed as operas but as poetic dramas. The argument is frequently made that no serious criticism of opera is necessary because it is an absurdity throughout. People do not sing; therefore all attempts at dramatic verity in the lyric drama are useless. And from this is drawn the conclusion that it makes no difference whether composers write pretty tunes merely for their own sake, and use the set forms and conventions of the old opera, or write an endless recitation with an orchestral background. The object should be to please, and since the entertainment is musical, let us have pretty tunes at all costs.

The same arguments, of course, apply in a way to all forms of the poetic drama. People do not speak blank verse, nor talk in metaphors. It is altogether improbable that Henry V. or Richard II. or Macbeth even rose to such heights of speech as Shakespeare's personages. The ground upon which the poetic drama rests is that of symbolism, and in the lyric play this, by reason of the flexibility of music, may reach its highest elevation. The symbolism of the Wagnerian drama is both poetic and musical. With the former I shall attempt to deal in the study of the individual plays; but of the musical symbolism it may here be said that while technically the speech of the Wagnerian drama is but blank verse raised by song to its highest power, the representation of emotional moods by the musical symbols, vocal or orchestral, is cast in a mould far grander than that of the spoken drama, and its influence upon the auditor is immeasurably larger. If by the employment of these musical symbols the dramatist can cause the auditor to throb with the emotions of the personages in the drama, he has accomplished the ultimate aim of his art and justified his form.

To achieve this result requires perfect sincerity on the part of the dramatist and the most exquisite adaptation of the theatrical means to the end in view. The old opera had abandoned all but a shallow pretence of these, and had given itself to the easy business of tickling the ear. Wagner's work is an appeal to the intelligence through the feeling. His ambition was to give the lyric theatre vitality and an influence with the public. To do this he was forced to abandon all that he found ready to hand, and to build again from the foundations. In doing so he restored some of the outward semblance of the conventions. He wrote duets, as in the second act of "Tristan und Isolde." But he did this with a perfect comprehension of the power of music to symbolise an emotional state shared by two lovers. On the other hand, he raised the orchestra to the position of an exponent of the dramatic thought, and this, again, was done with a masterly conception of the potency of absolute music in painting mood-pictures. Here he found an agency for symbolism in the poetic drama far beyond the loftiest dreams of the poet of the spoken play.

The motto of the attendant at Wagner performances, then, must be, "The play's the thing," and he must measure their value and estimate their influence upon him wholly from that point of view. A drama in music was the conception of the originators of what came to be called Opera; but it had been, as we have seen, lost to sight in Wagner's youth by reason of the immense popularity of the easily made productions of Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini, in which the music was the ultimate object and the libretto only a means toward its production. Wagner's ideal was a drama in which music should be a factor valuable wholly because of its power to embody and convey emotions. That such a form of drama departed from the more material realism of the spoken play was not a matter to trouble a profoundly æsthetic intellect. Wagner, like the greatest masters in all forms of art, was opposed to that kind of realism which bases its claims on its copying of mere objects or external phenomena. This is the cheap realism of the sensational drama, which puts fire engines and hansom cabs and professional burglars on the stage, and holds that it thus reproduces human life. It is, perhaps, a form of art, but it is a low one, because it has not the imaginative or symbolical elements which are essential to high art. It is the art which copies, not that which creates. The painter who reproduces on his canvas a group of flowers or a human form may be a master of the technics of painting, but the fervid imagination of Turner's "Slave Ship," with its ill-drawn figures, is worth a thousand copies of real things.

As art rises in the scale of nobility, it appeals more and more to the imagination, till it reaches that point at which, in Schumann's words, "only genius understands genius." Advancing along this path, art tends always toward the employment of symbolism. Poetry is in every nation the first and most convincing demonstration of the feeling of humanity for symbolical expression. Poetic forms are in themselves symbolic, and the figures of speech employed in them are word-symbols meant to awaken the imaginative powers of the reader. The drama in its earliest phases was purely artistic, coupling, as it did, the symbolism of a highly organised mythology with poetic speech. The blank-verse plays of Shakespeare are filled with the noblest symbolism of the spoken play, and those who decry them as unreal because of their poetic form and diction show an utter inability to understand artistic design.

In its inception the opera was, as we have seen, an attempt to revive the form of the antique drama of Greece. Its originators cherished an honest purpose, but their knowledge was not sufficient to carry it to a successful issue. Neither had they at their command a rich enough _materia musica_, for until their day composers had devoted themselves to the expression of contemplative religious feeling and the musical symbols of human passion were yet undeveloped. Unfortunately for the "Drama per musica," as the early masters called it, the first attempts at the construction of definite operatic forms led directly away from the honesty of dramatic art and turned opera into a series of tunes, each complete in itself, and strung upon a slender thread of recitative. Wagner, setting out as he did to build a national drama, had no reason whatever for following the methods of the Italian composers. His aim was to embody certain national thoughts, as projected in the great folk-legends of the Teutonic people, in artistic plays, and to use for that embodiment the most influential means at his command. Music was his vocal instrument instead of speech, not simply because he was a musician, but also because he was convinced that it would afford him the loftiest utterance for the emotional substance of his dramas.

For these were not to be dramas in which the mere telling of a story was the object in view. The drama was to be, not a series of incidents of pictorial efficiency, but a development of feelings and an exhibition of typical humanity, embracing those wonderful world-heroes and heroines into whose conception have been poured the concentrated imaginings of several races and centuries. For such a play as "Tristan und Isolde," in which the movement is entirely emotional and not incidental, the spoken form would have been prolix and wearisome. This play, given without music, would become a dreary stretch of talk. On the other hand, the simplicity of the action and the intensity of the emotions permit the composer to expend his entire force upon the musical expression of feeling, thereby confining himself strictly to the province of music and raising the symbolism of the drama to the highest power. Herein lies one of the principal differences between the spoken and the sung play. Yet in it also is to be seen a demonstration of the indisputable fact that the works of Wagner are dramas. So, then, we must view them; and, so doing, we shall approach the contemplation of Wagner's art work from the point desired by him. We shall enter into his domain in the spirit of sympathetic understanding, and it will be to us not a valley of shadows, as it is to those who enter with closed eyes, but a sea of splendour and sunlight, where the spirit may

"Burst all links of habit--there to wander far away On from island unto island at the gateways of the day."