a very modest reform compared to the banausic “extra attractions” of every new production of Meyerbeer's.
But there is another side to the picture. With the growing certainty of touch a stiffness of movement appears which gradually disturbs the listener who can appreciate freedom, whether in the classical forms which Wagner has now abolished, or in the majestic flow of Wagner's later style. Full closes and repeated sentences no longer confuse the issue, but in their absence we begin to notice the incessant squareness of the ostensibly free rhythms. The immense amount of pageantry, though (as in Tannhäuser) good in dramatic motive and executed with splendid stage-craft, goes far to stultify Wagner's already vigorous attitude of protest against grand-opera methods; by way of preparation for the ethereally poetic end he gives us a disinfected present from Meyerbeer at the beginning of the last scene, where mounted trumpeters career round the stage in full blast for three long minutes; and the prelude to the third act is an outburst of sheer gratuitous vulgarity. Again, the anti-Wagnerians were entirely justified in penetrating below the splendidly simple and original orchestration of the night-scene between Ortrud and Telramund, and pointing out how feebly its music drifts among a dozen vague keys by means of the diminished 7th; a device which teachers have tried to weed out of every high-flown exercise since that otiose chord was first discovered in the 17th century. The mature Wagner would not have carried out twenty bars in his flattest scenes with so little musical invention. We must not forget that these boyish demerits belong to the work of a man of thirty-five whose claims and aspirations already purported to dwarf the whole record of the classics. And the defects are in all respects commonplace; they have no resemblance to that uncanny discomfort which often warns the wise critic that he is dealing with an immortal.
The crowning complication in the effect of Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin on the musical thought of the 19th century was that the unprecedented fusion of their musical with their dramatic contents revealed some of the meaning of serious music to ears that had been deaf to the classics. Wagnerism was henceforth proclaimed out of the mouths of babes and sucklings; learned musicians felt that it had an unfair advantage; and by the time Wagner's popularity began to thrive as a persecuted heresy he had left it in the lurch.
Wagner had hardly finished the score of Lohengrin before he was at work upon the poem of Der Ring des Nibelungen. And with this he suddenly became a mature artist. On a superficial view this is a paradox, for there are many more violations of probability and much graver faults of structure in the later works than in the earlier. Every critic could recognize the structural merits of the earlier plays, for their operatic conventionalities and abruptness of motive are always intelligible as stage devices. Jealousy might prompt a doubt whether these plays were within the scope of “legitimate” music; but they were obviously stories of exceptional musical and romantic beauty, presented with literary resources unprecedented in operatic libretti. Now the later dramas are often notoriously awkward and redundant; while the removal of those convenient operatic devices which symbolize situations instead of developing them, does not readily appear to be compensated for by any superior artistic resource. But there is a higher point of view than that of story-telling. In the development of characters and intellectual ideas Wagner's later works show a power before which his earlier stagecraft shrinks into insignificance. It would not have sufficed even to indicate his later ideas. To handle these so successfully that we can discriminate defects from qualities at all, is proof of the technique of a master, even though the faults extend to whole categories of literature. The faults make analysis exceptionally difficult, for they are no longer commonplace; indeed, the gravest dangers of modern Wagnerism arise from the fact that there is hardly any non-musical aspect in which Wagner's later work is not important enough to produce a school of essentially non-musical critics who have no notion how far Wagner's mature music transcends the rest of his thought, nor how often it rises where his philosophy falls. Thus the prominent school of criticism which appraised Wagner in the 19th century by his approximation to Darwin and Herbert Spencer, appraises him in the 20th by his approximation to Bernard Shaw; with the absurd result that Götterdämmerung is ruled out as a reactionary failure. It is true that its only conceivable moral is flatly the opposite of that “redemption by love” which Wagner strenuously preaches in a passage at the end which remained unset because, he considered it already expressed by the music. Indeed, though Wagner's later treatment of love is perhaps the main source of his present popularity it seldom rises to his loftiest regions except where it is thwarted. The love that is disguised in the deadly feud between Isolde and Tristan, before the drinking of the fatal potion, rises even above the music; the love-duet in the second act depends for its greatness on its introduction, before the lovers have met, and its wonderful slow movement (shortly before the catastrophe) where they are almost silent and leave everything to the music: the intervening twenty minutes is an exhausting storm in which the words are the sophisticated rhetoric of a 19th-century novel of passion, translated into terribly turgid verse and set to music that is more interesting as an intellectual ferment than effective as a representation of emotions which previous dramatists have wisely left to the imagination. But so long as we treat Wagner like a prose philosopher, a librettist, a poet, a mere musician, or anything short of the complex and many-sided artist he really is, we shall find insuperable obstacles to understanding or enjoying his works. A true work of art is incomparably greater than the sum of its ideas; apart from the fact that, if its ideas are innumerable and various, prose philosophers are apt to complain that it has none. And every additional idea that does not merely derange an art enlarges it as it were by a new dimension in space. Wagner added all the arts to each other, and in one of them he attained so consummate a mastery that we can confidently turn to it when his words and doctrines fail us. Even when we treat him merely as a dramatist our enjoyment of his later works gains enormously if we take them as organic wholes, and not as mere plots dressed up in verse and action. It matters little that Parsifal requires two nameless attendant characters in a long opening scene, for the sole purpose of telling the antecedents of the story, when a situation is thereby revealed which for subtlety and power has hardly a parallel since Greek tragedy. The vast myth of the Ring is related in full several times in each of the three main dramas, with ruthless disregard for the otherwise magnificent dramatic effect of the whole; hosts of original dramatic and ethical ideas, with which Wagner's brain was even more fertile than his voluminous prose works would indicate, assert themselves at all points, only to be thwarted by repeated attempts to allegorize the philosophy of Schopenhauer; all efforts to read a consistent scheme, ethical or philosophical, into the result are doomed to failure; but all this matters little, so long as we have Wagner's unfailing later resources in those higher dramatic verities which present to us emotions and actions, human and divine, as things essentially complex and conflicting, inevitable as natural laws, incalculable as natural phenomena.
Wagner's choice of subjects had from the outset shown an imagination far above that of any earlier librettist; yet he had begun with stories which could attract ordinary minds, as he dismally realized when the libretto of Der fliegende Holländer so pleased the Parisian wire-pullers that it was promptly set to music by one of their friends. But with Der Ring des Nibelungen Wagner devoted himself to a story which any ordinary dramatist would find as unwieldy as, for instance, most of Shakespeare's subjects; a story in which ordinary canons of taste and probability were violated as they are in real life and in great art. Wagner's first inspiration was for an opera (Siegfried's Tod, projected in 1848) on the death of Germany's mythical hero; but he found that the story needed a preliminary drama to convey its antecedents. This preliminary drama soon proved to need another to explain it, which again finally needed a short introductory drama. Thus the plan of the Ring was sketched in reverse order; and it has been remarked that Götterdämmerung
