but do we give the palm to the musician who has worked with a loosely-hung plot, converts the stage every few minutes into a mere concert platform, and the orchestra into a large agency of accompaniment? Or is it not the case that opera is subjected to as severe an ordeal from the standpoint of the dramatist as from the standpoint of the musician? There seems to be but one demurring person—that is Mr. Rowbotham. He is still content that the chorus should be arranged in a semicircle, permitted to make an occasional automaton-like jerk of the hand, otherwise strictly attending to the delivery of the music which is their proper and conventional business. He prefers that the tenor should leave his mistress at the back of the stage, take up a position at the footlights, and pour forth his impassioned sentiments to the audience who have paid to hear him. And so on through the whole archaic method; Mr. Rowbotham finds it natural, and there an end. He simply does not realise that a dramatic sense has been formed in audiences who are now finding infringements of the logic of drama as ridiculous or as painful as false notes are to an ordinarily fastidious ear.
It is never wise to take on his own terms an artist's statements of his motives and ideals, but Mr. Rowbotham will not even accept Wagner's performances. Had he chosen to be reasonable instead of frenetic, he might have shaped a criticism helpful to Wagnerians and useful for general edification. It is not necessary to salvation that one should believe the Trilogy in its complete form to be immortal; the conditions of time and space are against it; the exclusiveness of its appeal to the Teutonic genius also argues impermanence. Nor is it an article of faith that Wagner's system of aesthetics with its wider sociological extensions is impregnable. Wagner was by no means moderate in his claims, and the future will have to discount them. Mr. Rowbotham's offence is in slumping Wagner's whole work as extravagance in aim and nothingness in result, originating in audacity and proceeding in ill-temper. He crows, for example, over Wagner's ambition to be known as a poet rather than as a musician. A fair-minded critic would have asked, What of that? Milton, as all know, was less in love with Paradise Lost than with another poem which the world sets much less store by. Goethe was proud to think that the world would remember him, not as a poet, but as the author of a theory of colours now known to be three-parts error. Such curiously awry personal estimates and revelations are to be utilised in the all-round summing up of character, not for the belittling of specific achievement. In the same narrow spirit, and at no small length, Mr. Rowbotham quotes passages of declamation from Tristan, demanding triumphantly, Is this jargon poetry? Well, it is, and it is not. It is poetry if a good half of Wordsworth's ponderous preachments be entitled to that description. It is not, if Tennyson's formal perfection or Browning's complexity be vital constituents of poetry. There is no obligation to accept Wagner's librettos as fine literature for enjoyment in the quiet of the study; it is enough that they are a sufficiently poetised material containing the right quality and quantity of ideas for serving along with music as a vehicle of emotion. But with what can Mr. Rowbotham compare them? With the jingles set to airs for brigands, roystering soldiers, and the other picturesque riffraff of Italian opera? One, indeed, is constantly at a loss to know where Mr. Rowbotham finds his standards. He speaks of the 'little' opera of Lohengrin. Where is the larger overshadowing work outside this charlatan of a composer. Music, he tells us, has gone one way, Wagner another; and the musical enthusiast anxiously searches among the giants of to-day to find the man of might who has outstripped Wagner, or has even escaped his influence. Wagner, we are assured, had not the genius to work within the lines that satisfied his predecessors, and we are driven to ask where, in respect of mere musical accomplishment, there is evidence of a greater abundance of ideas and of richer fertility in their management. And lastly, one wants to know in what quarter to find, outside the productions of this great arguer and poor artist, an equal number of noble conceptions nobly sustained. It is the sovereign virtue of Wagner—the splenetic musical iconoclast—that every part of his work is impregnated with thought, so that one may turn to it again and again, and still depart rewarded. But this cannot appeal to Mr. Rowbotham. He does not desiderate any application of intellect to the work of imparting vividness and consistency to the lyric stage, and making the theatre the home of the unified arts. His heart is with the tenor at the footlights, and with composers who do not agitate the world.
T. Carlaw Martin.
