Chapter III (4)

Perhaps I have given the drama some of the credit that should go to the music; and at least there is not a dramatic situation which the music does not immeasurably increase in power. But indeed the two are inseparable. The music creates the mood and holds the spectator to it so that the true significance of the dramatic situation cannot fail to be felt; while the dramatic situation makes the highest, most extravagant flights of the music quite intelligible, reasonable. It cannot be said that the music exists for the sake of the drama any more than the drama exists for the music: the drama lies in the music, the music is latent in the drama. But to the music the wild atmosphere of the beginning of the first act is certainly due; and though I have said that possibly "Tristan" might bear playing without the music, it must be admitted that it is hard to think of the fifth scene without that tremendous entrance passage--that passage so tremendous that even Jean de Reszke dare hardly face it. To the music also the passion and fervent heat of the second act are due, and the thunderous atmosphere, the sense of impending fate, in the last, and the miraculous sweetness and intensity of Tristan's death-music, and the sublime pathos of Isolda's lament. Since Mozart wrote those creeping chromatic chords in the scene following the death of the Commendatore in "Don Giovanni," nothing so solemn and still, so full of the pathetic majesty of death, as the passage following the words "with Tristan true to perish" has been written. This is perhaps Wagner's greatest piece of music; and certainly his loveliest is Tristan's description of the ship sailing over the ocean with Isolda, where the gently swaying figure of the horns, taken from one of the love-themes, and the delicious melody given to the voice, go to make an effect of richness and tenderness which can never be forgotten. The opening of the huge duet is as a blaze of fire which cannot be subdued; and when at last it does subside and a quieter mood prevails we get a long series of voluptuous tunes the like of which were never heard before, and will not be heard again, one thinks, for a thousand years to come. And in the strangest contrast to these is the earlier part of the third act, where the very depths of the human spirit are revealed, where we are taken into the darkness and stand with Tristan before the gates of death. But indeed all the music of "Tristan" is miraculous in its sweetness, splendour, and strength; and yet one scarcely thinks of these qualities at the moment, so entirely do they seem to be hidden by its poignant expressiveness. As I have said, it seems to enter the mind as emotion rather than as music, so penetrating is it, so instantaneous in its appeal. There never was music poured out at so white a white heat; it is music written in the most modern, most pungent, and raciest vernacular, with utter impatience of style, of writing merely in an approved manner. It is beyond criticism. It is possible to love it as I do; it is possible to hate it as Nietzsche did; but while this century lasts, it will be impossible to appreciate it sufficiently to wish to criticise it and yet preserve one's critical judgment with steadiness enough to do it.

"SIEGFRIED"

In all Wagner's music-plays there is shown an astonishing appreciation of the value and effect of scenery and of all the changes of weather and of skies and waters, not only as a background to his drama but as a means of making that drama clearer, of getting completer and intenser expression of the emotions for which the persons in the drama stand. The device is not so largely used in "Tristan" as in the other music-plays, yet the drama is enormously assisted by it. In the "Ring" it is used to such an extent that the first thing that must strike everyone is the series of gorgeously coloured pictures afforded by each of the four plays. For instance, no one can ever forget the opening of "The Valkyrie"--the inside of Hunding's house built round the tree, the half-dead fire flickering, while we listen to the steady roar of the night wind as the tempest rushes angrily through the forest--nor the scene that follows, when through the open door we see all the splendours of the fresh spring moonlight gleaming on the green leaves still dripping with cold raindrops. The terror and excitement of the second act are vastly increased by the storm of thunder and lightning that rages while Siegmund and Hunding fight. A great part of the effect of the third act is due to the storm that howls and shrieks at the beginning and gradually subsides, giving way to the soft translucent twilight, that in turn gives way to the clear spring night with the dark blue sky through which the yellow flames presently shoot, cutting off Bruennhilde from the busy world. The same pictorial device is used throughout "Siegfried" with results just as magnificent in their way; though the way is a very different one. The drama of "The Valkyrie" is tragedy--chiefly Wotan's tragedy (the relinquishing first of Siegmund, and his hope in Siegmund, then of Bruennhilde)--but incidentally the tragedy of Siegmund's life and his death, of Siegmund's loneliness and of Bruennhilde's downfall; and at least one of the scenic effects--the fire at the end--was thrown in to relieve the pervading gloom, and in obedience to Wagner's acute sense of the wild beauty of the old legend, rather than to illustrate and assist the drama. It is sheer spectacle, but how magnificent compared with that older type of spectacle which chiefly consisted of brass bands and ladies insufficiently clothed! "Siegfried," on the other hand, contains no tragedy save the destruction of a little vermin. It is the most glorious assertion ever made of the joy and splendour and infinite beauty to be found in life by those who possess the courage to go through it in their own way, and have the overflowing vitality and strength to create their own world as they go. Siegfried is the embodiment of the divine energy that makes life worth living; and in the scenery, as in the tale and the music of the opera, nothing is left out that could help to give us a vivid and lasting impression of the beauty, freshness, strangeness, and endless interest of life. Take the first scene--the cave with the dull red forge--fires smouldering in the black darkness, and the tools of the smith's trade scattered about, and, seen through the mouth of the cave, all the blazing colours of the sunlit forest; or again the second--the darkness, then the dawn and the sunrise, and lastly the full glory of the summer day near Fafner's hole in a mysterious haunted corner of the forest; or the third--a far-away nook in the hills, where the spirit of the earth slumbers everlastingly; or the final scene--the calm morning on Bruennhilde's fell, the flames fallen, and all things transfigured and made remote by the enchantment of lingering mists,--these scenes form a background for the dramatic action such as no composer dreamed of before, nor will dream of again until we cease to dwell in dusty stone cities and learn once again to know nature and her greatest moods as our forefathers knew them. Had Wagner not lived in Switzerland and gone his daily walks amongst the mountains, the "Ring" might have been written; but certainly it would have been written very differently, and probably not half so well.

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 Bruennhilde'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 Bruennhilde 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 Bruennhilde 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 Bruennhilde--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 Bruennhilde. 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 Bruennhilde 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 Bruennhilde 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 Bruennhilde; when listening to "Siegfried," one thinks of Siegfried and Bruennhilde 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 Bruennhilde--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 Bruennhilde: he destroys the first and puts away from him for ever Bruennhilde, who is incarnate love. The grand tragic moment of the whole cycle is the laying to sleep of Bruennhilde. 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; Bruennhilde's telling Gutrune that she, Gutrune, was never the wife of Siegfried,--all these are terrible enough tragedies. Bruennhilde'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 Bruennhilde'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 Bruennhilde, 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 "Tannhaeuser" story. However, I am willing to believe that Siegfried, when he kisses Bruennhilde 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 Bruennhilde, 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 "Tannhaeuser"--for, thank the gods, Tannhaeuser 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.

After hearing the whole opera twice, with all the supposed advantages of the stage, the main thing borne in upon me is that the stage and actors and accessories, far from increasing the effect of the music, actually weaken it excepting in the first act. In that act there is not a word or a note to alter. The story compels one's interest, and the music is rich, tender, and charged with a noble passion. Even the killing of the duck--it is supposed to be a swan, but it is really a duck--is saved from becoming ludicrous by the deep sincerity of the music of Gurnemanz's expostulations. The music, too, with the magnificent trombone and trumpet calls and deep clangour of cathedral bells, prevents one thinking too much of the absurdity of the trees, mountains, and lake walking off the stage to make the change to the second scene. On reflection, this panorama seems wholly meaningless and thoroughly vulgar; and even in the theatre one wonders vaguely what it is all about--for Gurnemanz's explanation about time and space being one is sheer metaphysical shoddy, a mere humbugging of an essentially uncultured German audience; but one does not mind it, so full is the accompaniment of mystical life and of colour, of a sense of impending great things. The whole cathedral scene--I would even include the caterwaulings of Amfortas--is sincere, impressive, and filled with a reasonable degree of mysticism. There is no falling off in the second act until after the enchanting waltz and Kundry's wondrously tender recital of the woes suffered by Parsifal's mother (here the melody compares in loveliness with the corresponding portion of "Siegfried"); indeed, the passion and energy go on increasing until Parsifal receives Kundry's kiss, and then at once they disappear. Between this point and the end of the act there is scarcely a fine passage. Every phrase is insincere, not because Wagner wished to be insincere, but because he tried to express dramatically a state of mind which is essentially undramatic. Parsifal is supposed to transcend almost at one bound the will to live, to rise above all animal needs and desires; and though no human being can transcend the will to live, any more than he can jump away from his shadow--for the phrase means, and can only mean, that the will to live transcends the will to live--yet I am informed, and can well believe, that those who imagine they have accomplished the feat reach a state of perfect ecstasy. Wagner knew this; he knew also that ecstasy, as what can only be called a static emotion, could not be expressed through the medium that serves to express only flowing currents of emotion; he himself had pointed out, that for the communication of ecstatic feeling, only polyphonic, non-climatic, rhythmless music of the Palestrina kind served; and yet, by one of the hugest mistakes ever made in art, he sought to express precisely that emotion in Parsifal's declamatory phrases. The thing cannot be done; it has not been done; all Parsifal's bawling, even with the help of the words, avails nothing; and the curtain drops at the end of the second act, leaving one convinced that the drama has untimely ended, has got into a cul-de-sac. And in a cul-de-sac it remains. There is much glorious music in the last act; the "Good Friday music" is divine; the last scene is gorgeously led up to; and the music of it, considered only as music, is unsurpassable. But heard at the end of a drama so gigantically planned as "Parsifal," it is unsatisfying and disappointing. It is to me as if the "Ring" had closed on the music of Neid-hoehle with the squabblings of Alberich and Mime. The powers that make for evil and destruction have won; one knows that Parsifal is eternally damned; he has listened and succumbed, even as Wagner himself did, to the eastern sirens' song of the ease and delight of a life of slothful renunciation, self-abnegation, and devotion to "duty." The music of the last scene sings that song in tones of infinite sweetness; but it cannot satisfy you; you turn from the enchanted hall, with its holy cup and spear and dove, its mystic voices in the heights, its heavy, depressing, incense-laden atmosphere; and you hasten into the night, where the winds blow fresh through the black trees, and the stars shine calmly in the deep sky, just as though no "Parsifal" had been written.

"Parsifal" does not imply that Wagner in his old age went back on all he had thought and felt before. Born in a time when the secret of living had not been rediscovered, when folk still thought the victory, and not the battle, the main thing in life, he always sought a creed to put on as a coat-of-mail to protect him from the nasty knocks of fate. Nowadays we do not care greatly for the victory, and we go out to fight with a light heart, commencing where Wagner and all the pessimists ended. Wagner wanted the victory, and also, lest he should not gain it, he wanted something to save him from despair. That something he found in pessimism. In his younger days--indeed until near the last--he forgot all about it in his hours of inspiration, and worked for no end, but for the sheer joy of working. But towards the end of his life, when his inspiration came seldomer and with less power, he worked more and more for the victory, and became wholly pessimistic, throwing away his weapons, and hiding behind self-renunciation as behind a shield. He won a victory more brilliant than ever Napoleon or Wellington or Moltke won; and in the eyes of all men he seemed a great general. But life had terrified him; he had trembled before Wotan's--or Christ's--spear; in his heart of hearts he knew himself a beaten man; and he wrote "Parsifal."

BAYREUTH IN 1897

To Bayreuth again, through dirty, dusty, nasty-smelling, unromantic Germany, along the banks of that shabby--genteel river known as the Rhine, watching at every railway station the wondrously bulky haus-fraus who stir such deep emotions in the sentimental German heart; noting how the disease of militarism has eaten so deeply into German life that each railway official is a mere steam-engine, supplied by the State with fuel in case he should some day be needed; eating the badly and dirtily cooked German food,--how familiar it all seems when one does it a second time! One week in Bayreuth was the length of my stay in 1896; yet I seem to have spent a great part of my younger days here. The theatre is my familiar friend in whom I never trust; the ditch called the river has many associations, pleasant and other; I go up past the theatre into the wood as to a favourite haunt of old time; I lunch under the trees and watch the caterpillars drop into my soup as though that were the commonest thing in the world; I wander into the theatre and feel more at home than ever I do at Covent Garden; I listen to the bad--but it is not yet time for detailed criticism. All I mean is, that the novelty of Bayreuth, like the novelty of any other small lifeless German town, disappears on a second visit; that though the charm of the wood, of the trumpet calls at the theatre, of the greasy German food, and the primitive German sanitary arrangements, remains, it is a charm that has already worn very thin, and needs the carefullest of handling to preserve. Whether, without some especial inducement, the average mortal can survive Bayreuth a third time, is, to me, hardly a question. As for my poor self, it suits me admirably--certainly I could stand Bayreuth half a dozen times. I like the life--the way in which the hours of the day revolve round the evening performance, the real idleness, passivity, combined with an appearance of energy and activity; I like to get warm by climbing the hill and then to sit down and cool myself by drinking lager from a huge pot with a pewter lid, dreamily speculating the while on the possibility of my ever growing as fat as the average German; I like to sit in a cafe with my friends till three in the morning, discussing with fiery enthusiasm unimportant details of the performance we have lately endured; I like being hungry six times a day. All these trifles please me, and please others. But the majority of the crowd of visitors are not pleased by them; and what can they do in Bayreuth after the freshness of novelty is worn off? They go to Villa Wahnfried and look for a few seconds at the spot where Wagner is buried--as I heard it said, like a cat in a back garden; they look for a few seconds at the church; they lunch; they buy and partly read the English papers; and then? Inevitably the intelligent reader will say, the opera in the evening. And I, who have been to the opera in the evening, gasp and remark, Really!

Lest this ejaculation be entirely misinterpreted by the irreverent, let it be said at once that the performances are not, on the whole, very bad. But I wish to consider whether they are of a quality and distinction sufficient to drag one all the way from England, and to compensate those who find the day dull for the dulness of the day, whether they are what Bayreuth claims them to be--the best operatic representations in the world, the best that could possibly be given at the present time. The circular sent out by amiable Mr. Schulz-Curtius states that, "while not guaranteeing any particular artists, the aim of Bayreuth will be to secure the best artists procurable" (or words to that effect). Is this genuinely the aim of Bayreuth, and does Bayreuth come near enough to the mark to make some thousands of English people think they have spent their time, money, and energy well in coming here? For my part I say Yes: even were the representations a good deal poorer, they form, as I have said, a centre for the day; I rise in the morning with them before me, and make all my arrangements--my lunches, discussions, and lagers--so as to reach the theatre at four o'clock; they save me from a life without an object, and add a zest to everything I do; they correspond to the trifling errand which renders a ten-mile walk in the country an enjoyment. But those who come here for nothing but the theatre, who do not feel the charm of the Bayreuth life, will, I am much afraid, answer No. Had I no friends here, or did I not enjoy their company and conversation, if my stomach refused lager and I could not smoke ten-pfennig German cigars, if I were not violently hungry every two hours, I am very much afraid I should answer No. The working of the scenic arrangements is, of course, as perfect as ever. Of course there are one or two mistakes,--stage machinists, after all, are built of peccable clay,--but these occur so seldom that one can sit with a feeling of security that is not possible at Covent Garden. In "The Valkyrie" the fire does not flare up ten minutes late; the coming of evening does not suggest an unexpected total eclipse of the sun; the thing that the score indicates is done, and not, as generally happens at Covent Garden, the reverse thing. The colours of the scenery are likewise as intolerably German as ever--the greens coarse and rank, the yellows bilious, the blues tinged with a sickly green, the reds as violent as the dress of the average German frau. On the other hand, many of the effects are wonderful--the mountain gorge where Wotan calls up Erda, Mime's cave, the depths of the Rhine, the burning of the hall of the Gibichungs. But the most astounding and lovely effects in the setting of the drama will not avail for long without true, finished, and beautiful art in the singing and acting; and, with a few exceptions, the singers do not give us anything approaching true, finished, and beautiful art. The exceptions are Van Rooy, Brema, Gulbranson, Brema, and Schumann-Heink. Van Rooy has a noble voice, admirably suited to Wotan, and he both sings and acts the part with a majesty and pathos beyond anything dreamed of by any other Wotan I have heard. He appears to have been the success of the Festival; and certainly so strong and exquisite an artist deserves all the success he can gain in Bayreuth. Brema's Fricka is noble and full of charm; Schumann-Heink sings the music of Erda with some sense of its mystery and of Waltraute in "Siegfried" with considerable passion; and Gulbranson has vastly improved her impersonation of Bruennhilde since last year. She is still unmistakably a student, but no one can doubt that she will develop into a really grand artist if she avoids ruining her fine voice by continually using it in a wrong way. Her Bruennhilde is just now very beautiful and intensely pathetic, but it owes less to her art than her personality. She does not interpret Bruennhilde--rather she uses the part as a vehicle for her private emotions; to an inordinate degree she reads into it her real or imaginary experience; and she has not learnt the trick of turning her feelings into the proper channels provided, so to say, by the part--of so directing them that Gulbranson disappears behind Bruennhilde. Still, it is a great thing to find an artist of such force and passion and at the same time such rare delicacy; and I expect to come here in 1899 and hear an almost perfect rendering of Bruennhilde. As for the rest of the singers, the less said about most of them the better. They have no voices worth the mentioning; the little they do possess they have no notion of using rightly; and their acting is of the most rudimentary sort. We hear so much of the fine acting which is supposed to cover the vocal sins of Bayreuth that it cannot be insisted on too strongly that the acting here is not fine. I can easily imagine how Wagner, endeavouring to get his new notion into the heads of the stupid singers who are still permitted to ruin his music because they are now veterans, would fume and rage at the Italian "business"--the laying of the left hand on the heart and of the right on the pit of the stomach--with which incompetent actors always fill up their idle intervals, and how he would beg them, in Wotan's name, rather to do nothing than do that. But to take the first bungling representation of the "Ring" as an ideal to be approached as closely as possible, to insist on competent actors and actresses standing doing nothing when some movement is urgently called for, is to deny to Wagner all the advantages of the new acting which modern stage singers have learnt from his music. The first act of "The Valkyrie," for example, will be absurd so long as Sieglinde, Hunding, and Siegmund are made to stand in solemn silence, as beginners who cannot hear the prompter's voice, until Sieglinde has mixed Hunding's draught. And some of the gestures and postures in which the singers are compelled to indulge are as foolish as the foolishest Italian acting. Who can help laughing at the calisthenics of Wotan and Bruennhilde at the end of "The Valkyrie," or at Wotan's massage treatment of Bruennhilde in the second act? The Bayreuth acting is as entirely conventional as Italian acting, and scarce a whit more artistic and sane. Even the fine artists are hampered by it; and the lesser ones are enabled to make themselves and whole music-dramas eminently ridiculous. On the whole, perhaps, acting and singing were at their best in "Siegfried." In "The Rheingold" some of the smaller parts--such as Miss Weed's Freia--were handsomely done; the Mime was also excellent; but I cannot quite reconcile myself to Friedrichs' Alberich. "The Dusk of the Gods" was marred by Burgstaller, and "The Valkyrie" by the two apparently octogenarian lovers. That is Bayreuth's way. It promises us the best singers procurable, and gives us Vogl and Sucher, who undoubtedly were delightful in their parts twenty years ago; and it would be shocked to learn that its good faith is questioned so far as lady artists are concerned. Whether it is fair to question it is another matter. In Germany feminine beauty is reckoned by hundredweights. No lady of under eighteen stones is admired; but one who is heavier than that, instead of staying at home and looking after her grandchildren, is put into a white dress and called Sieglinde, or into a brown robe and called Kundry; and a German audience accepts her as a revelation of ideal loveliness through the perfection of human form.