RICHARD WAGNER AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY.

It is beyond the scope of this work to give anything like a connected biography of Wagner, even though it would conduce largely to a better understanding of our researches. I must therefore refer the reader to the copious literature which exists on the subject of Wagner’s life, and especially to his own statements, in his Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. I shall confine myself here simply to calling attention to those points in his life which are requisite for an explanation of the psychical processes to which his artistic creations owe their origin. My treatment of the latter will not aim at anything like an artistic critical study, but will proceed wholly from a psychological point of view in so far as may be requisite for the formation of a psychological analysis.

Wagner was born at Leipsic on May 22, 1813. His father is described as a clever and intelligent man, by occupation a clerk of police, who died as early as November, 1813—that is to say, half a year after the birth of his son. Shortly afterward the child’s mother married a friend of her late husband, Louis Geyer, an actor, painter, and poet, who died when Wagner was only seven years of age. The latter’s education, consequently, was chiefly directed by his mother, who devoted herself to this duty with all love and conscientiousness. He attended the Dresden school of art and later the Nicolai school in Leipsic.

Wagner was no infant prodigy. Yet even at an early age he gave evidence of a lively fantasy, indulging in manifold poetical attempts; but it was not until the period of his youth that he first displayed any decided talent for music. It was at the Gewandhaus concerts in Leipsic that he first came to know Beethoven’s compositions, which made a strong impression on his youthful mind. With ardent zeal he buried himself in the study of Beethoven, and Dorn thus expresses himself with regard to him: “I doubt whether there has ever been a young composer who was more conversant with Beethoven’s works than Wagner was at the age of eighteen.”

Even in the years of his youth that impulse made itself felt in Wagner which we have learned to recognise as a characteristic of great men—the creative impulse. He himself was perfectly aware of it, and put it in a poetical form when he said that a fairy had stood beside his cradle and granted him a gift that is frequently disdained—“The spirit that is ne’er content, which always thinks of something new.” This impulse to create was manifested during the period of Wagner’s artistic development in two different ways. Two opposing elements struggled in him for the mastery; sometimes the one gained the upper hand, sometimes the other, until, tried by this struggle, he followed his true artistic nature and remained true to it to the end. These two elements were the impulse to give expression to his artistic sensations and feelings, which impulse we have found to have been the guiding principle of all the creations of Goethe, and the objectively formed craving to create, which was excited from without.

After a number of minor attempts in the way of writing poetry and composing, Wagner put together a libretto called the Fairies, the idea of which was borrowed from one of Gozzi’s tales. He says, to be true: “What I constructed was certainly nothing else than just what I wanted—namely, a libretto; and I set it to music in accordance with the impressions that Beethoven, Weber, and Marschner had made upon me.”⁠[142] But he adds: “And yet, not the suitability for a libretto which I had discovered in Gozzi’s tale alone drew me toward it, but the subject itself touched me to the quick.” In the poetical subject of the fairy who gave up her immortality that she might possess the man she loved, Wagner had unconsciously given artistic expression to the mood within him.

At the same time an impulse had made itself felt in his case which perfectly harmonized with his age and the external influences working upon him—an impulse toward a brilliant artistic career, an ardent longing for fame and honour. “An impulse grew within me, amounting in intensity to a consuming yearning, to rise above the littleness and wretchedness of the circumstances that controlled me. This impulse, however, had only a secondary influence on my actual life itself; primarily, it aimed at a brilliant career as an artist.”⁠[143]⁠

While in this state of mind Wagner wrote a second opera—Forbidden Love, or the Novice of Palermo—for which he had adapted the plot of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. In the summer of 1834 he had accepted the post of musical director at the theatre of Magdeburg. With reference to this he says: “My remarkable converse with singers behind the scenes and before the footlights entirely corresponded with my inclination toward diverse forms of amusement.”⁠[144] During this period he completed the composition of Forbidden Love. His sole purpose was to please, to win fame and approbation. “For a holiday performance on New Year’s day, 1835, I hastily prepared some music which generally pleased. Easily-won successes like this confirmed me very strongly in the view that, in order to please, one ought certainly not to consider too scrupulously the means at one’s command. And it was upon this principle that I proceeded with the composition of my Forbidden Love.”

We perceive an essential difference between the origin of the Fairies and that of Forbidden Love. Wagner himself recognised this, and says on the subject: “If this subject is compared with that of the Fairies, it will be noticed that the possibility was open to me to develop myself according to either of two fundamentally different tendencies; to the sacred earnestness of my original sentiment there opposed itself a bold tendency, nourished by the impressions of my life, toward wild, sensuous impetuosity, toward a saucy joyousness, which seemed to contradict the former most emphatically.”⁠[145] Farther on he says: “Whoever chooses to compare this composition with the Fairies will hardly be able to comprehend how so marked a conversion of tendencies could be brought about in so short a time. My path led me in the first instance to utter frivolity in my opinions about art; this was the case during the first period of my entry upon the practical career of musical director at the theatre. The rehearsing and direction of those very pliant fashionable French operas, the piquant and daring elements in their orchestral effects, gave me many a childish joy when I could send them out into the audience from my director’s desk.”⁠[146]⁠

In the autumn of 1837 Wagner went to Riga to take the post of first musical director of the theatre there. Here he found excellent material for his opera, and applied himself “with much love to using it.” He composed for the singers several interpolations for various operas, and also made up the text for a two-act comic opera, the Happy Bear Family, the subject of which he had borrowed from a narrative in the Thousand and One Nights. He had already composed one part of this when he became filled with disgust at the work and turned away from it with aversion. He now determined “to do something really great—to write an opera, for the production of which only the most important forces should be appropriate,” so that he might not be tempted to bring it before the public in the limited circumstances in which he happened to be. It should be to him an incentive to exert himself to the utmost to get out of the conditions that were so loathsome to him.

In this state of mind he sketched out the plan of a great tragic opera in five acts—Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes—the material for which he had borrowed from Bulwer Lytton’s story. He strove in this to create something great and brilliant, which would satisfy his artistic ambition. “Even here, in the composition of the text, there was in my mind really nothing else than to write an effective libretto. The Grand Opera, with all its scenic and musical splendour, its effectful, passionate musical fulness, loomed up before me; and it became the desire of my artistic ambition not merely to seek to imitate it, but to surpass all it had offered hitherto with unbounded lavishness.”

One portion of this opera had already been completed when Wagner resolved to break with his present life. Without means, without preparation, without any prospects, he straightway betook himself from Riga to Paris. During the sea voyage, which lasted four weeks and in the course of which he visited the coast of Norway, there recurred to him the legend of the Flying Dutchman, with which at an earlier period he had become familiar. This legendary figure now made a deep impression upon his mind. “He gained spiritual power from my own peculiar situation; from the storms, the billows, the rocky northern shore and the activity of the sailors, he got physiognomy and colour.”

When Wagner reached Paris and became dazzled by the brilliancy of its musical world, the figure of the Flying Dutchman was at first blotted out again, and his efforts seemed once more wholly directed toward the opera that should make an impression. “When I was present at the brilliant performances of the Grand Opera, an event, by the way, which did not happen frequently, a voluptuous, wheedling warmth mounted up in me, and gave me the wish, the hope—nay, the certainty—that I would yet be able to triumph here. This magnificence of accessories, applied with enthusiastic artistic purpose, seemed to me to be the zenith of art, and I felt myself not in the least incapable of attaining this zenith. Moreover, I recollect that I was quite willing to find inspiration in all phases of that artistic world which appeared to bear in any way upon my aim; what was meretricious and unsubstantial was concealed from my sight by a brilliancy of sensuous externals such as I had never seen before.”⁠[147]⁠

This mood, this striving after fame and splendour, was not, however, destined to dominate the soul of the artist for any length of time, but soon became transformed into a most profound contempt for this artistic tendency. There arose in him an unspeakable yearning which he was himself frequently unable to judge correctly. To this were added the unfortunate material circumstances in which Wagner happened to be at that time, which constrained him to grasp at the humblest means to gain his livelihood. In order to be introduced by singers into the salons of Paris, he composed several French romances, declared himself ready to compose the music for a vulgar vaudeville for one of the theatres of the boulevards, and finally had to occupy himself with the arrangement of arias from “favourite operas” for the cornet-à-piston. In these circumstances, the yearning in him assumed a more and more definite shape; the artistic world with its brilliancy and glitter, as he now saw it, and the great Parisian opera filled him with disgust and aversion, and from this moment he longed to leave it all for a dimly perceived ideal of intelligent affection. While in this state of mind, the Flying Dutchman again occurred to him. In this mythical character’s unspeakable longing for unselfish love, Wagner saw the reflected image of his inmost soul. The “woman” after whom the Dutchman hankered, and who unselfishly sacrificed herself for him, represented that ideal human love of which the artist himself stood in need. “It was this Flying Dutchman who so repeatedly and with such irresistible power of attraction sprang up within me out of the quagmires and billows of my life; it was the first national poem which made any deep impression on my heart and urged me, as artist, to interpret and mould it into a work of art.”⁠[148]⁠

It was in this mood that the poem and music of the Flying Dutchman were brought into being. Wagner compares the legend with that of Odysseus longing for his domestic hearth, and of the Wandering Jew. But in the case of the Dutchman, the woman he desired was no longer the actually existing woman at home, but an ideal which did not yet exist but only was perceived—the ideal of that human love which sought no recompense. “The yearning of Odysseus for his home, hearth, and wife had, after having been nurtured by the sufferings of the Wandering Jew into a desire for death, been strengthened into the craving after something new, unknown, not yet visibly present, but already felt.”

Wagner fancied that he would be able to find the satisfaction of his yearning in Germany rather than in Paris, and while he was busy with the composition of the Flying Dutchman, the object for which he longed assumed the shape of home—not the home, of course, that he had left, but an ideal home, one still to be expected. “A delicate, longing patriotism took possession of me, of whose existence I had hitherto not had the slightest suspicion. This patriotism was free from all political colouring, for even at that time I was well aware that political Germany, as opposed in any way to political France, did not possess for me the least power of attraction. It was the feeling of homelessness in Paris that awakened in me the yearning for my German home; this yearning, however, did not have a reference to anything that I had known of old, which could be gained back, but to something felt and desired, new and unknown, which I was to win for the first time, and about which I only knew that I would certainly not find it here in Paris. It was the yearning of my Flying Dutchman for the woman—not, as I have said, Odysseus’s housewife, but the woman who brought salvation, whose features did not occur to me in any definite shape, but who merely hovered before my eyes as the incarnation of the female element. And this element assumed the appearance of home—that is, of closest companionship.”

In the Flying Dutchman that artistic tendency had triumphed in Wagner which corresponded with his true nature, and from this time forward he remained true to it to the last. No longer were splendour and fame the aims of his artistic creation; art became to him solely a means of expression, a means of communicating his inmost feelings and moods, and his only wish was to be understood—that is to say, to awaken by his art in others the same sensations to which it owed its origin. It was no longer his aim to gain admiration and create astonishment. “One thing kept me up—my art, which was for me a means not for the acquisition of fame and money, but for the communication of my views to sensitive hearts.”⁠[149] All his artistic creations were henceforth, as it were, the mirror of his soul; his art was the proclaimer of his inmost sensations.

Just as we perceived in the case of the objective poet, Shakespeare, two easily distinguishable factors in the artist and his work, so we saw in every line of the subjective Goethe the poet himself in his most intimate personality. As I have already said in another place, we could not for this reason love Goethe’s poems without also esteeming in them the personality of the poet, for poet and artistic work are there blended into one indissoluble whole. From this point of view alone was Goethe able to comprehend art, and he therefore said: “One must be something in order to make something. It is the personal character of the writer which makes him important in the eyes of the public, and not the products of his talent.”

Wagner had the same experience in this regard as Goethe; he also is a subjective artist who can not be separated from his art; every one of his artistic creations also forms “a fragment of a great confession.” His art forms a portion of his personality, and is therefore no more separable from him than speech is from man. He could therefore hope to be understood only where people felt and experienced with him, not merely where they were ready to consider a work of art in an objective manner. They must be able to penetrate with fullest sympathy into his personal sensations and moods. Wagner therefore says: “As such [that is to say, as his friends, by whom alone he could hope to be understood] I can not, however, regard those who pretend to love me as an artist and yet think it right to deny me their sympathy as a man. If the separation of the artist from the man is something just as unthinkable as the divorce of the soul from the body, and if it is established that an artist can never be loved, that his art can never be comprehended unless he be also (at all events, unconsciously and involuntarily) loved as a man, and unless his life also be understood along with his art, so much the less, as things are at the present day, and considering the despicably bad condition of our public artistic conditions, can an artist of my tendency be loved, and his art consequently be under, stood, unless this understanding and that possible love be founded before everything upon sympathy—that is to say, upon compassion and fellow-feeling with the most human part of his life.”⁠[150] Wagner was perfectly right in this, though only with reference to “an artist of his tendency,” and he agrees in this opinion with Goethe; but we have seen that there is also an objective art to which this opinion would not apply. Wagner, however, from his point of view, could not come to any other judgment; he felt that he could only be understood in those cases in which people felt and experienced with him. His art appealed not to the intellect, but to the feelings. “The artist appeals to the feelings and not to the intellect; if an answer is given him from the side of the intellect, it may be said that he has not been understood, and the criticism amounts in truth to nothing else than the confession of a lack of understanding of the work of art, which can only be understood with the feelings.”⁠[151]⁠

Wagner saw, as Goethe expressed it, “the general in the particular,” and it was in this that his artistic gifts lay. In giving artistic expression to his own aspirations he unconsciously touched the feelings of humanity. He felt that he could only be understood by those who could feel artistically with him, “who happened to be in a more or less similar position with the artist, developed under similar conditions of life, and who could sympathize with him from the bottom of their nature and heart, so that they were, under certain circumstances, in a position to assume his view as their own, and were able to take the required intense interest in the effort to give them expression.”

With a view to giving artistic expression to his feelings, Wagner felt himself drawn toward a form of art which permitted him to appeal in the most unlimited manner possible to the receptive sensations, and this form of art was the musical drama. Of course this form of art had to be very different from the opera which had existed up to this time, so as to be in conformity with the difference between their respective aims. The aim of the opera of that day was the satisfaction of the prevailing artistic taste of an unintelligent mob, the satisfaction of a longing for diversion and amusement. The opera had to do justice to all these requirements. The dominating factor of the opera was the music, to which everything else was subordinate. To create “fine melodies” was the duty of the composer; the libretto was a secondary consideration, and sound and word had no intimate connection with each other. There was no desire for anything like “sense” in a libretto; the words were always merely the handmaids of the music, to suit which they were put together. Just in the same way as the poet was, so to speak, the train-bearer of the musician, the musician became the slave of the interpreter. Airs and duets were composed in order to give the singers the opportunity of displaying their artistic skill; composers had no hesitation in writing for particular singers, and in letting them prescribe the nature of their work, in order to attain as “powerful an effect” as possible.

Between productions of this kind and a form of art whose single aim it was to give expression to the emotions and feelings of the artist, there must naturally be a fundamental distinction. In Wagner’s eyes music was nothing further than a means of expression which in a co-ordinate manner stood opposed to the other factors of the work as a whole, of the drama. The meaning of the music begins at the point where that of the words no longer suffices. Temperaments and passions may be described in every case by the spoken words, but they can not be immediately brought to expression. Music, on the other hand, is the immediate proclaimer of the sensations; the words appeal to the intellect, the music appeals to the feelings.

Wagner felt very well that he had begun his true artistic career with the Flying Dutchman. “At that point my career as a poet begins where I left that of a composer of librettos.” His works of art originated thereafter no longer in reflection, but in the impulse to communicate moods that were present in him. “My treatment was new; it was suggested to me out of my inmost mood, and forced upon me by the impulse to communicate this mood. In order to deliver myself of what was in me—that is to say, in order to obey the inward pressure to communicate with persons feeling like me—I had as an artist to enter upon a path that had certainly not been suggested to me by outward experience, and that which impels a man hereto is necessity, a deeply felt, constraining necessity, though one not known to the practical mind.”

The Flying Dutchman was finished. The indefinite yearning of the artist assumed a more and more tangible form in the longing for home:

It was in this state of mind that Wagner left Paris in the spring of 1842. Meanwhile his Rienzi had been accepted for the court theatre at Dresden; the Flying Dutchman was to be produced at Berlin; the future smiled upon the artist with rosy serenity, and with happy, joyous heart he set out for home. “For the first time I saw the Rhine, and with bright tears in my eyes I, poor artist that I was, swore eternal fidelity to my German Fatherland.”⁠[153] In due course he reached Dresden, where he was received with love and sympathy. Rienzi was produced and proved a brilliant triumph. “After a long struggle amid paltry circumstances,” so Wagner writes, “after hard-fought battles, sufferings, and condemnation amid the loveless Parisian artistic and social life, I quickly found myself in surroundings that acknowledged me, helped me, and frequently met me in the most affectionate spirit.”

Wagner had already been for some time acquainted with the legend of Tannhäuser through an old book of folk-tales. On the journey from Paris to Dresden he visited the Wartburg for the first time, and it was in this way that this legend, which in the book in question was loosely connected with the singers’ war, came once more clearly before his eyes. But in Dresden, where he again took part in the outward pomp of modern artistic life, this impression gradually faded away. The extraordinary success of his Rienzi, the veneration and admiration which fell to his lot, deceived him once again with respect to the condition of art as it really existed, and caused him to regard it in an idealistic light. The post of director of the royal opera at Dresden having at this time been offered to him, it became perfectly clear to him that the public life of art did not imply any true art such as he had learned to know it, but only a “self-interest which adorned itself with an artistic appearance.” But the brilliancy of such a post in the eyes of others blinded him also, and he became director of the royal opera.

The production of the Flying Dutchman at Berlin had come to naught; but, in consequence of the great success which had attended Rienzi, the director of the court theatre of Dresden decided to have the Flying Dutchman also produced. The opera was quickly rehearsed under Wagner’s own direction, but fell entirely flat. The public had expected something like Rienzi, but this “new tendency” left it perfectly cold and unsympathetic. His Rienzi was repeated with so much the more enthusiasm, and it must have been clear to Wagner which path he ought to tread if he wished to make sure of fame and fortune. Once more the temptation came to him to be untrue to his real artistic nature. “The sensuous, luxurious mood,” so he writes, “which had come upon me by virtue of the complete change in my external circumstances, and in consequence of the first enjoyment of an assured position, but especially also of a certain amount of affection and admiration on the part of the public, became intensified into a pleasurable self-content, and soon led me more and more deeply into a misunderstanding and misuse of my true nature as it had hitherto developed itself, with its necessary consequences.”⁠[154]⁠

Once again the impulse came to Wagner to write a great, brilliant opera in the style of Rienzi, and he therefore took up a scheme which had already been sketched out at an earlier period, an historical opera in five acts—The Saracens—of which Manfred, son of the Emperor Frederick II, was the hero. But this artistic tendency, which was merely calculated for splendour and effect and was repugnant to his whole nature, was bound very soon to fill him with aversion and disgust. He himself describes this internal struggle: “An impulse, such as in every person impels toward the immediate present, now determined me, in my special circumstances as an artist, to a tendency which was bound again very soon and violently to disgust me. This impulse would only have been appeased in life if I had also sought as an artist to aspire to brilliancy and profit by a perfect subordination of my true nature to the demands of the public taste. I would have had to sacrifice myself to fashion and to playing upon the public’s taste, and here, at this point, it was clear to my feeling that in actually entering upon this tendency I would have to come to naught from sheer disgust.”

In this state of mind Tannhäuser again presented himself to Wagner’s soul, in his longing henceforth to get out of the world of sensuality and pleasure:

He turned from this artistic tendency with aversion, and became filled with a mighty yearning after satisfaction in a higher, nobler element, which, in antithesis to the sensual world of enjoyment that was about him and that strove for fame and splendour, must appear to him like a “pure, chaste, maidenly, unapproachable and intangible loving being.” “How,” thus proceeds Wagner, “could this yearning for love, the noblest sensation which, taking into consideration my nature, I could feel, be anything but the craving after emancipation from the earthly present, after rebirth into an element of infinite love, such as is not to be found on earth, but seemed only attainable by death?”

In this internal struggle his true artist nature had once again come off victorious. Wagner had on many occasions called music his “good angel”; now he was freed by it through the irresistible impulse to truer, more unselfish devotion, from the sensuous striving after external splendour and fame. A sublime, unattainable ideal of the most unselfish sacrifice, only tangible in death, hovered before him in the form of a pure, chaste maiden, and within him sounded the words of redemption:

This was the state of mind to which Tannhäuser owed its origin. How painfully must it have affected Wagner to be so entirely misunderstood in his intentions and efforts! He himself says: “How silly must those critics appear to me who have become ingenious under the influence of modern loose living, when they try to impute to my Tannhäuser a specifically Christian, impotently heavenward tendency!”⁠[157]⁠

The figure of Tannhäuser had sprung from his inmost soul; in it his true feelings and sensations found artistic incorporation. He now found himself again on the path of the only art which was capable of satisfying him, yet felt that here he must always deny himself fame and splendour. But he shunned neither struggle nor conflict; the freedom of his artistic creation was of more value to him than the sensual pleasures which had surrounded him.

Well did he know what a thorny path he would henceforth have to traverse, for he says: “In writing this work I signed my own death warrant. No longer could I now hope for aught from the modern world of art.” Fully did he feel the curse of Venus:

Nevertheless, bravely and unhesitatingly he went forward upon the only path that was possible for him.

He felt that on this path he would alienate the public and many friends who had hitherto honoured him; he knew that he would not be able to offer an adequate substitute for the amusing and pleasure-giving popular opera of the day; he recognised that his works were entirely unfitted for the artistic stage as it then was. Thus he says: “A piece that is likely to draw good houses, that is likely to be produced before the public for a lengthy period, or perhaps always, alternated with other pieces like it, ought not to be derived from any mood, nor to require for its understanding any particular mood. For this purpose productions must be taken that are either based on no mood in particular, or even on no mood at all, and therefore do not aim to appeal to a particular mood in the public. They should furnish, by the splendour of representation, and through the sympathy felt for the performers, a light form of entertainment.”

The directory of the court theatre at Dresden decided upon a production of Tannhäuser, which by this time had been finished. The opera was lavishly mounted, and—met with the same fate as the Flying Dutchman. The public was once more disappointed in its expectations, and did not hesitate to make known its extreme dissatisfaction.

Wagner was overpowered by a feeling of utter isolation. He had, indeed, found the means of giving artistic form and expression to his feelings; he now possessed, indeed, a language by which he could communicate his sensations, but there was no one who understood this language, who shared his sensations, who felt and experienced with him. “I had now become conscious of my perfect isolation as an artistic person to such an extent that it was only from this very feeling of isolation that I could draw the impulse and strength to endeavor to speak to those around me.”⁠[160]⁠

While in this state of mind there occurred to his fantasy a legend which he had already studied in connection with the Tannhäuser saga—that of Lohengrin. In Tannhäuser, Wagner had swung himself free from a world of sensuality, of outward brilliancy and vain aspiration; he had succeeded in soaring aloft to the desired height of purity and chastity. He had escaped from the world of weak indulgence to the lonely height of noblest renunciation. But on this height an inexpressible yearning filled him to get away from this sunlike brilliancy of chastest purity to the refreshing warmth of life, to the complete surrender of unselfish love. He yearned, not to get back to the life which he had left, but to be in a new ideal life which he had not yet known. “From this height my longing looks perceived—woman, the woman for whom the Flying Dutchman yearned from the ocean depth of his misery; the woman who like a star of heaven directed Tannhäuser from the dens of sensuality of the Venusberg to the way upward, and who now drew Lohengrin down from sunny heights to the cherishing bosom of the earth.”

Lohengrin did not wish to be looked up to and admired by the woman whom he went to seek, for whose deliverance he had been sent; he wished to be loved by her. This love was not to consist of a trembling adoration of a higher being, but was to be experienced in the inmost heart; it was to rest upon a truer, more intelligent devotion. For this it was necessary that Lohengrin should conceal his higher origin. For himself alone was Elsa to love him; nor must she ask who he was or whence he came:

“Thus he desired the woman—thus the human heart.” Upon Elsa’s cry for help, which echoed up from the midst of humanity to his dreary isolation, he came to her aid, and saw in her the woman for whom he craved. Confidingly she gave herself up to her brave hero:

But soon jealousy and envy set to work, and awaken doubt and suspicion in the soul of the beloved woman. He perceives that she adores but does not understand him. The confession of his origin is forced from him, and he is compelled to return, crushed in spirit, to the dreariness of his isolation.

This is the story of Lohengrin, of which Wagner says: “In the character and the plight of this Lohengrin I now recognise unmistakably the symbol of the only tragic material, the only tragic element, in fact, of modern life.”⁠[163]⁠

He himself felt this tragedy in his inmost soul on the lonely height upon which he stood, and where he was consumed by ardent longing. “Here at last I hit the chief point of what is tragic in the situation of the true artist toward the life of the present time—the same situation, in truth, which received from me in Lohengrin its artistic shape. The most necessary and most natural craving of such an artist is, to be unreservedly accepted and understood by the feeling; and the impossibility, caused by our modern artistic life, of finding this feeling in such a state of ingenuousness and undoubting trust as he asked—to be understood; the necessity of having to communicate himself almost wholly to the critical understanding only, instead of to the feelings—this is indeed the first tragical element of his situation. As an artistic person I had to feel this, and it was destined to affect me in the course of my further development to such a degree that I finally broke out in open rebellion against the pressure of this situation.”⁠[164]⁠

Wagner describes how, during the elaboration of the material, the true nature of Elsa came more and more clearly before his mind’s eye. He saw in her not a woman filled with curiosity or jealousy, but “the longed-for complement of Lohengrin,” which blended with him into one whole, the “other part of his own nature.” “Elsa is the unconscious, involuntary element in which the conscious, voluntary nature of Lohengrin longs to dissolve itself.” The involuntary impulse, the motive force of his own efforts and creations, Wagner recognised in this Elsa, before whom “manly egoism even in its noblest shape had effaced itself totally.” “Elsa, the woman—the woman whom hitherto I had not understood, but whom now I knew—this most necessary incarnation of the purest sentient involuntariness—has converted me into a perfect revolutionist. She was the spirit of the people, the spirit in which I as an artistic person also longed for my freedom.”⁠[165]⁠

The home that had been yearned for in the Flying Dutchman, Wagner had failed to find. He felt a stranger and alone among those that did not comprehend him. His ideal sense perceived everywhere the limitations of the human mind by external circumstances, traditional usages, and convention, and nowhere did he see that free man who stood high above the trifling manœuvres of modern life, and for whom he craved with a glowing desire.

While in this state of mind he joined—I might say in an ingenuous manner—the revolution, as he hoped to see his ideal realized thereby. Thus he says: “From the degrading yoke of slavery, of general handicraftship, with its pale soul of money, we will soar up to a free artistic humanity with its bright universal soul; from wretched, burdened day-labourers, we will all become beautiful, strong men, to whom the world belongs as an eternal, inexhaustible source of highest artistic enjoyment.”⁠[166]⁠

His rebellion was not directed against a governing power but against a culture that had gone astray; his wrath was not a political but a purely human matter which had been developed by his individual artistic nature. When he had to fly in consequence of his share in the uprising, he said, therefore: “With nothing can I compare the agreeable sensation which, after I had surmounted the first grievous impressions, pervaded me when I felt myself free—free of the world’s tormenting, always unfulfilled wishes, free from the relations in which these wishes had been my only consuming nourishment! Since no consideration any longer bound me, the outlaw and fugitive, to any falsehood of any kind whatsoever; since I had thrown behind me every hope, every expectation from this now triumphant world, and could publicly and openly shout to it, with the most unconstrained candidness, that I, the artist, scorned it from the very bottom of my heart—this world so hypocritical and apprehensive of art and culture; since I could say to it that not a drop of really artistic blood flowed in any part of its vital veins, that it was incapable of pouring out a breath of human civilization, a whiff of human beauty—I felt myself for the first time in my life thoroughly and truly free, light, and happy, even though I might not know where next day I should hide myself that I might breathe the air of heaven.”⁠[167]⁠

While Wagner’s artistic creations had hitherto sprung from one single mood, one special situation in life, he was now impelled, as in the course of time all his sensations and views had assumed a more and more comprehensible form, to give to this inner life, these thoughts and feelings, artistic form in a great work of art. To the idea which chiefly filled him, the yearning after the free man who had raised himself above culture and civilization, he had given expression in his writings in the most various ways. Thus he says in Art and Revolution:⁠[168] “Nature, human nature, will lay down the law to the two sisters—culture and civilization: So far as I am comprehended in you, shall you live and bloom; so far as I am not in you, shall you die and wither!” In another passage he says: “The real man will therefore not come until his life is formed and governed according to true human nature, and not by arbitrary political laws.”⁠[169] In Art and Climate he says: “There is no higher power than that of the communistic man; there is nothing more lovable than communistic man. Only by the highest power of love do we, however, attain to true freedom, for there is no true freedom except that which is common to all men.”⁠[170]⁠

At the time of the Revolution Wagner had already plunged into the study of German mythology, by which he felt specially attracted. He says: “In the effort to give artistic form to the desires of my heart, and in the course of my earnest investigation as to what attracted me so irresistibly to the original source of the legends, I advanced step by step deeper into that antiquity where I was finally to find, to my unutterable joy, and that, too, right in the highest antiquity, the youthful, beautiful man in the strongest freshness of his power. My studies in this way led me through the poems of the Middle Ages to the very foundation of ancient German mythology; one vesture after the other, which later poetry had thrown around it to its disfigurement, I was able to sever from it so as finally to see it in its chastest beauty. What I here saw was no longer the historical conventional figure, whereof the vesture more than the real form must interest us, but the real fundamental man, in whom I was able to recognise every pulsation of the blood, every twitch of the strong muscles, in unconfined freedom—in short, the true man.”⁠[171]⁠

This “true, free man” it was who hovered before him as the ideal after which he yearned. He was filled with an internal impulse to the artistic realization of the “purely human being, free from all conventionality.” In Siegfried he had found this ideal: “Elsa had taught me to find this man; he was to me the manly incorporation of the eternal involuntariness, of the doer of real deeds, of the human being in the fulness of highest, most direct power, and most undoubted worthiness of love.”

If, in spite of Wagner’s unmistakable explanations, even his earlier works were so entirely misunderstood, in which only single moods were treated, how much more likely was his greatest work, into which he entered with all his soul, in which he incorporated artistically his view of the world, to give occasion to misunderstandings! If, therefore, I discuss this work at greater length, I can only point in excuse to the fact that, as we shall see later on, mistakes and false conceptions have given rise to the most momentous results. Let us therefore proceed to a consideration of the trilogy of the Ring of the Nibelungs.

The first scene of the Rhinegold shows us the three Daughters of the Rhine in harmless, playful sport at the bottom of the river. Alberich approaches them in a wild passion of sensual love. He tries to overpower them. When one escapes him he pursues the others. It is all the same to him which one he overtakes, and that one always appears to him to be the most beautiful whom he happens to hold in his embrace. In him we see the representative of that sensuality which forms the antithesis to ideal, unselfish love. While he is thus engaged in pursuing the Daughters of the Rhine, the gold glitters with a strong light and delights with its splendour the Daughters of the Rhine, who artlessly hail it. Alberich stands blinded in amazed embarrassment, and listens to the proclaiming words of the Daughters of the Rhine:

It is not in every one’s power, however, to accomplish this miracle:

Now, what is the meaning of this ring, which thus bestows “measureless might”—nay, the command of the world? In it we must see the sensuous rendering of that world from which Tannhäuser yearned to escape, from which he was saved by Elisabeth—the world of sensual enjoyment, the striving after outward fame and splendour, the all-constraining, world-ruling power of gold. That the love which he must renounce who longed to forge this ring, is not sexual love, is indicated by the fact that Alberich had a son, Hagen; it is, on the contrary, that ideal, unselfish impulse, that self-sacrificing love—Elisabeth.

The incarnation of sensuality, Alberich, cursed this love, stole the gold, forged the ring, and won by its means that measureless might which made him ruler of the world. Everybody had to create and work for him; his insatiable cupidity craved ever new treasures and wealth; even his own brother he held in a “degrading yoke of slavery,” and compelled him to make that wonderful piece of work, the Tarnhelm.⁠[174]⁠

After the ring and the hoard had been stolen from him, Alberich cursed the gold:

This curse weighed upon the gold from this time on, and brought death and ruin on those who possessed it.

The central figure of the whole action, in which all that is tragic in the drama is realized, is the mighty form of the all-governing god Wotan, the father of gods and men. Wagner writes in an article:⁠[176] “In my conception of the Ring of the Nibelung I had, unknown to myself, confessed the truth relative to human affairs. Everything here is thoroughly tragic, and the will which would form a world after its wish, can finally attain nothing more satisfactory than its own dignified destruction.” This will, bereft of freedom and conditioned and bound down by circumstances, is Wotan. He feels the mighty power within him, yet can not put it forth. He is bound by stipulations; he must resist his desire.

In contradistinction to him, the restless, forward-pressing will which always strives after new aims while it denies itself, stands Erda, the representative of intellectual knowledge. We meet her first in Rhinegold, when Wotan deliberates as to whether he shall deliver up the world-governing ring in order to recover the stolen Freia:

Erda, true knowledge, sleeps, and in her place watches Fricka, Wotan’s spouse. In her we have to see the representative of right based upon pure convention. She protects the right, not because of its intrinsic value, or because she has recognised it as such, but because it exists and is designated as right. She sticks to the letter, and law and custom are the motives which alone determine her. The deeper emotions of heart and feeling out of which true right proceeds are strange to her; she is personified externality, purely arbitrary formality.

The second scene of Rhinegold discloses to us Walhalla, the mighty burg of the gods, raising heavenward its shining battlements. It signifies the irresistible will power, the struggle for endless fame. Fricka is anxious and terror-stricken at sight of the burg. As representative of the law, of strict right, she first of all bethinks herself of the bargain that has been made, and of the stipulated reward:

To the restless, onward striving will the bargain suggests no cause for anxiety. Wotan rejoices at the sight of the mighty citadel; he breaks the concluded agreement by which he rules the world, but has to atone for his guilt, since his will is fettered, bound by law and custom.

To the giants who built the burg, Wotan had promised Freia as a reward. Fasolt and Faffner now approach to claim their reward, the building of the burg being completed. Freia is the refreshing ideal, that “artistic humanity with its bright universal soul,” that love which Alberich had cursed—the unselfish love of human being for human being. The partaking of her apples, which she proffers to the gods, gives them everlasting youthful energy. But if they are withheld from them they shall wither in joyless, fameless old age. Wotan now recognises his mistake in sacrificing Freia, and refuses the reward: “I will not sell Freia.”

While the giants persist in claiming the reward for which they had bargained, Loge approaches, the representative of cunning, stratagem, and untruth, who had advised the agreement. Very characteristic of the signification of Freia and of the Rhinegold is Loge’s account of how he sought to replace Freia and finally discovered the Rhinegold.

Loge’s narrative arouses the cupidity of the giants. They are ready to renounce Freia if the Rhinegold is given them in her stead. Very characteristic of the difference between the Rhinegold and Freia is the scene in which Fasolt and Faffner exchange her for the hoard. Even the “awkward giants,” the “rude clowns,” the representatives of the coarsest materialism, the rough-hewn opposites of delicate feeling—even they will not sever themselves from the ravishing woman.

With gold he will bury the gentlest higher emotion of the heart:

So soon as the giants have gained possession of the hoard, the Tarnhelm, and the ring, the curse of Alberich becomes fulfilled. Beset by jealousy and envy, they fall to quarreling, and Fasolt slays Faffner, his own brother. While the possession of the gold aroused in Alberich primarily lust of power, it manifests itself in Faffner’s case as the mere naked desire for possession itself. He does not know the value and the power of what he possesses; he finds delight merely in the fact that he possesses it. Through dread that some of it may be stolen from him, he drags his possession to a cavern, metamorphoses himself by means of the Tarnhelm into a mighty dragon, and there looks after his treasure in idle repose. “I lie and hold possession, let me repose,” are Faffner’s words. If we look around us in our modern world for Faffners, who seek to possess merely for the sake of possessing, it will not prove a very difficult task for us to discover a whole series of them.

The second part of the drama, the Walkyry, represents the hot struggle between Wotan, the mighty will which struggles for freedom, and Fricka, the incarnation of inflexible law, convention, and custom. Wotan recognises the bondage of his will, the impossibility of unfolding himself freely and unhampered:

Eternal knowledge, Erda, had predicted his destruction, “an ignominious end of the eternal.” He must fear Alberich. Should he ever be successful in acquiring the ring,

To defy the foe, to shield himself and Walhalla, Wotan sent out the Walkyries to bring heroes, who should fight for him. The Walkyries, Wotan’s daughters, formed a portion of his personality. They formed the wish for liberty; they were hostile to Fricka—hostile to her right. Their origin “in wild love” of itself denotes their opposition to convention and custom.

But Fricka still reigns. The Walkyries form only a part of Wotan; the agreements that bind him they are unable to break. They, too, must submit to Fricka’s will.

Wotan is aware that only a free hero, one who starts up boldly and unhampered, will be able to defy the foe. Through such a hero he had hoped to attain what he wished. He betook himself to a noble stock which itself had sprung from him—the Wälsung. He had thrust a sacred sword into the trunk of an ash tree in such a way that only the strongest hero should be able to withdraw it. Siegmund, the Wälsung, the brave hero, he himself stimulated to the deed. Siegmund felt in himself the impulse to freedom; unhampered did his defiant spirit unfold itself. Then he found Sieglinde, his own sister, in the enemy’s house, married without love, courted without affection by Hunding. The deepest love was kindled in the young pair; custom and law failed to separate them; they followed solely the true human feeling which moved the inmost recesses of their hearts.

How wrongly has this love between Siegmund and Sieglinde been interpreted! After what has been said before, it requires no further explanation that here, as in all of Wagner’s creations, love is merely the symbolical expression of certain sensations; that it was in no way Wagner’s purpose to glorify in this relationship the impulse of sensual love or the like, but that the myth was only made use of in an ingenious way to incorporate artistically that already discussed antithesis, unfettered human freedom and right based upon custom and convention.

Fricka, the inflexible law which deviates not from the path of tradition, the conventional form, the personified externality, is horrified at this unequalled delinquency. Wotan, the will that strives for freedom, can not see anything wrong, any misdeed in the act:

Then he continues:

They are antagonistic principles—the right that is formed by virtue of interest and convention, and the right that is based upon a truer, more purely human experience. The sharply antagonistic elements which are here dealt with, and are so sharply opposed, one might specially refer to the moral sphere, and call illegal morality and legal immorality.

Wotan then proceeds:

Fricka knows full well that she must regard the strong, free hero as her foe; that his triumph means her fall, her destruction, and she therefore demands of Wotan that he will deny him his countenance. She gains the day in this struggle with Wotan, and the latter is compelled to resolve upon Siegmund’s end. He has to give up his own yearning; he has to will against his wish:

Such is Wotan’s plaint to Brünhilde, his and Erda’s daughter.

In her, the daughter of Will and Knowledge, Wotan sees his own will, formed through knowledge, whose free unfolding, however, he fears.

Wotan recognises that in Siegmund he merely sees himself, his own sword, his own energy, and he therefore determines upon Siegmund’s death.

Brünhilde, the daughter of Knowledge, knows that Sieglinde bears already under her heart the greatest hero:

In her is kindled the struggle between Knowledge and Will; the latter gets worsted, and she determines to save Siegmund against the will of Wotan. The fettered will, Wotan, has to will against his own wish, he has to destroy with his own hand Siegmund, whom he loves. Against Wotan’s spear, marked with the runes of the contract, his sword breaks, and Siegmund falls.

Wotan’s wrath, however, is only greater, his passion more headstrong, his fury more savage at the disobedience of Brünhilde; for he feels only more deeply his own bondage, his own weakness and impotency.

Thus Wotan casts off his child. But his heart is softened and appeased by the prayers of the “brave, noble child.” He will not yield her up as a prize “to the most cowardly man for an easy booty”:

Brünhilde, Wotan’s glorious child, pure, unalloyed, genuine Knowledge, is sunk in a deep sleep and awaits the strong, free hero, who, uninfluenced by law and custom, free from human tradition, guided only by internal impulse to eternal perception and true beauty, shall come to awaken her.

Wotan, however, the fettered will, the denial of the will to live, resolves upon his end:

At this point the tragic element of the drama reaches its climax; “the will, which would form a world after its own wish,” finds a fitting destruction. But the world of the artist could not at the same time attain to a close. Borne on the wings of an artistic and enthusiastic fantasy, the artist soars in majestic flight to a height never foreseen. There he has seen it—the daring, free being “with the bright universal soul”; he has felt it, felt it deeply. In it Wagner saw the human ideal. It is the free, uninfluenced human being who acts according to the circumstances of this world without being influenced or impelled from without, whose actions are not conditioned by custom and convention, but who strives after what is highest and noblest from free inward stimulus. He only acts according to the dictates of his pure discernment, his true knowledge, and his stronger will is able to triumph over all the obstructions of the world.

Wotan had longed for this hero when he said to Brünhilde:

Siegfried was the brave, happy hero, “the real original, human being in whom every pulsation of the blood, every twitch of the energetic muscles, was to be recognised in unconfined, fresh action”—the true, free human being. The myth, which makes him one of twins, is here symbolically and poetically turned to account; even his origin points to absolute freedom from custom and convention. Siegfried instinctively recognises in Mime the enemy, the traitor. In the latter we see incorporated the lowest human passions—envy, jealousy, and crudest egoism.

For Siegfried, the strong youth, no glaive was destined, as had been the father’s case. By his own strength he must form it, weld together the strong pieces of the divine glaive. The free man who is independent of conventional morality can, of course, know no fear. He alone has the courage and strength and activity to mount to the most beautiful ideal, to true human freedom. The forging of the sword is accomplished by Siegfried after a fashion quite counter to custom and in violation of every ancient rule of the craft, and his success greatly amazes Mime. The character traits with whose representatives, Mime and Faffner, we have made acquaintance, must disappear with the appearance of the ideal free man. Hence, in the drama, both are destroyed by Siegfried. With Nothung, the wonderful glaive, he slays the evil dragon before the grudge hole (Neidhöhle). The hoard of the Niebelung, and with it the Tarnhelm and the ring, now belong to Siegfried. He regards them, however, as useless toys, and does not trouble himself about the properties of that which he possesses:

The beautiful, strong, free man, who is artistically embodied in Siegfried, seeks in his inner worth alone happiness and contentment, not in the heaping up of external riches and goods.

Siegfried now strides away to the mount that no craven can approach without being consumed by the blazing fire. His actions are determined solely by his own will, which strives continually after what is noble. The restraint of compacts is foreign to him. He does not, therefore, bow to the spear of Wotan marked with runes of compact, which is held in his way, and against which the glaive of the father was shattered. Wotan is not able to withstand his might; he shivers the holy spear with Nothung, his glaive welded by his own strength. All hindrances, even the ocean of fire, must yield to his power and his will. So the hero, who “fears not the point of the spear,” advances, strides through the fire, his strength quenching the flaming glow, and approaches Brünhilde to awaken her from her long, inactive sleep. The beautiful, strong, free man, whom the artist sees in radiant light, awakens the world from long sleep. True knowledge, pure cognition awakens humanity to holy bliss. In self-forgetting and self-surrendering love Brünhilde demands of her lover that he leave her, and that he go out into the wide world to perform new and lordly deeds.

We now see the strong, free man in connection with the bad world, surrounded by plots and jealousy, envy and malice. In Hagen we recognise the representative of those properties for which Mime and Alberich previously stood. He is the antithesis of Siegfried, and his nature is shown by his descent. While Siegfried is the issue of a fiery liaison of love contrary to conventional law, Hagen, the son of Alberich, owes his existence to a love bought with gold. Hagen says of himself:

Siegfried, in his intercourse with the bad world, acts solely in conformity with his inner feelings. He believes everybody with whom he comes into contact open and true like himself. Hence all distrust is foreign to him, and he acts as the moment suggests. This is the signification of the drink of forgetfulness. Such a naïve, trustful behaviour must in the wicked world lead to ruin and destruction. Reflection, cunning calculation, and accurate recognition of the wickedness of others are the weapons necessary to self-assertion in the world. Thus Siegfried falls a sacrifice to hate, cupidity, and envy. He, to whom the slightest false motion of the heart is an impossibility, and whose soul is of divine peerage and noblest purity, becomes in the eyes of the world a criminal. He is accused of perjury, adultery, fraud, and treason, and intrigue is able to prove its charges and to require punishment therefor. But the true knowledge—the knowledge which, standing without the world, is conditioned by nothing—Brünhilde recognises the eternal and celestial faithfulness of him she loves.

The ring, laden with the curse of the Nibelung, is restored by Brünhilde to the daughters of the Rhine. The Walhalla, with the old world of gods, collapses; but Brünhilde, in radiant accoutrement, bears Siegfried on high upon Grane, the courageous steed. The strife for outward glitter and display, for riches and possessions, ceases. The world, which had been governed by a will bound down to conventional ideas, collapses; and in its stead the true, free will, bound to nothing, but associated with pure knowledge and true recognition, is lord over all.

No more than Wagner intended in his Tannhäuser to teach “a specifically Christian, impotently heaven-expecting moral,” did he in Parsifal, his last artistic creation, have specifically religious ideas in view. Parsifal has rightly been called a continuation of the Nibelungen trilogy. That free hero, who in the trilogy must be overthrown in combating the wicked world, but whose final victory is there only intimated, becomes in Parsifal the real saviour of humanity.

The wardens of the Holy Grail—the sensuous emblem of the highest, holiest good of humanity, the human ideal, the renunciation of the sensual life, greedy for wealth, fame, and pleasure—were the knights of the Grail, who in the holy grove in the Gralsburg, or Grail castle, far from the ignoble impulses of the world, were dedicated to the service of the Holy Grail. A pure cup of crystal containing the blood of Christ was intrusted to the care of Amfortas, the king of the Grail knights. Klingsor, the representative of the element hostile to the ideal—that is, of selfishness and lust of power—himself aspired to the possession of the Holy Grail, not on account of its ideal graciousness, but from self-interest and cupidity. But it was granted to the pure alone to find the path to the relic:

Klingsor, conscious of his incapacity to become the master of sinful temptations, mutilated himself and so sought to obtain the Grail:

Repulsed by Amfortas, Klingsor built a mighty enchanted palace in the neighbourhood of the Holy Grail castle, whither he knew how to decoy the knights of the Grail, and they fell sacrifices to the seductions of sensuality.

It left Amfortas no peace. He himself sallied forth to fight the wicked enemy and to free the knights from the danger, whereupon he himself fell a victim to the seductions of the crafty one:

That holy spear, with which Amfortas might have conquered the enchanter without trouble, had once shed the blood of Christ. The spear and that holy vessel, the most precious possession of all, had been conveyed by angels to Amfortas’s father, the pious Titurel. They were to be guarded in the holy castle as the holiest of holies—the highest ideals of humanity. Now Klingsor had succeeded in purloining the holy spear, and with it had inflicted upon Amfortas a bad wound, which was never to be healed:

Klingsor, being in possession of the mighty and holy weapon, hoped to exterminate the entire race of knights, and to get the Holy Grail as well. Sinful humanity, which found poetic shape in Kundry, is without will power in the hands of the mighty Klingsor, in the grasp of unconquerable passions. Kundry must do evil against her wish, against her will. She certainly felt within her an impulse to unselfish conduct, and sought in constant self-sacrifice to throw off the burden of her selfish propensities; but, driven as by demoniac power, she is not mistress of her will. When, struggling with herself, she cries out, “I will not!” Klingsor answers:

The sight of the Holy Grail gives rejuvenated life and renewed strength to all that are noble and pure; but that which refreshes and quickens others fills him who is condemned to guard it with ineffable agony. The pains of the frightful wound are by the holy lustre exacerbated to insufferable torments; the conscience laden with guilt can not bear the contemplation of the highest ideal. In vain Amfortas seeks means for the alleviation of his pain, for relief from his torments. There came to him one comforting prophecy of the Grail:

The promised, long-desired redeeming hero, Parsifal, approached, “by pity knowing, the pure fool.” Solitary, unskilled in arms, he was attracted to the far desert. As Siegfried had made his glaive, so had Parsifal himself made his bow. From his mother he went out into the world, and fighting made his way. Parsifal naively asks: “They threatened me; were they bad? Who is good?” He has not acquired the knowledge of good and evil, he can only experience them in the depths of his human soul, whence they can also resound pure and true, without being changed by the prejudice of a conventional right. His knowledge is neither erudite nor recondite, but results from the delicacy and candour of sense and of sentiment. He approaches the castle and is present when Amfortas uncovers the Holy Grail. He is deeply seized by all the pains and torments of the king; except that of the torment of guilt, which causes those sufferings, he as yet knows nothing. For that reason Gurnemanz indignantly pushes the “fool” out of the door, whereupon the latter wends his way to the enchanted palace of Klingsor. He strikes back with strong arm the knights who oppose him; and the enticements of the lovely maidens in the odorous flower garden fail to captivate him. Kundry approaches in the magical beauty wherewith she once seduced Amfortas himself, and tries under the ban of Klingsor all her arts upon the lad. She tells him of his mother, how she has died from love and care for him. Then occurs to him what he has undertaken with his life thus far. In overpowering pain he sinks at the feet of the seductive woman:

Kundry essays in this way to force an entry to his heart:

But he starts up in horror, pressing his hand strongly against his heart:

Unspeakable sympathy with the torments of the king seizes him; he feels the pains as though they were his own. By them he knows and recognises the danger of seduction, which he stoutly withstands. The holy spear which Klingsor seizes as a last recourse and hurls at him remains hovering stationary over his head. Parsifal snatches it, and before the sign of the cross Klingsor’s magical magnificence decays into nothing. “By pity lightened, the guileless fool” approaches with the holy spear to bring welfare and redemption. In the baptism of Kundry he purifies the world, which lies in the bondage of sensual pleasure, and in closing with the holy spear the wound of Amfortas, he frees the world from the torment of conscious guilt. The ideal of humanity, the Holy Grail, which was for a long time secluded, is unveiled anew, with its radiant lustre reburnished, its glowing light imparting new life and strength to its reanimated knights.

In contrast to the “understanding that is due to fellow-feeling” stands the schematic, conventional knowledge based on tradition, sprung from no penetrating warm sympathy for humanity, but from the frigid letter and egoistic calculation that strives after an endless accumulation of stores of knowledge, losing sight of the end of wisdom, which is the welfare of mankind. In Wagner, the assistant of Faust, Goethe has scourged this aimless, egotistic, self-admiring knowledge, which pursues no common human good:

Faust, on the other hand, has come to see that true, serviceable knowledge must owe its origin to sympathy with mankind. He says:

With the exception of two, we have now briefly considered all of Wagner’s music dramas. The two excepted are Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Tristan und Isolde. In the former he has humorously painted his own position in relation to modern art. The first idea of the latter occurred to him during the musical composition of the Nibelungen-Trilogy. It impelled him to paint in a drama of his own the ideal unselfish love that he had studied in Siegfried and Brünhilde.

Thus Wagner’s poems form a coherent chain, and each of them may well be termed “a fragment of a great confession.” His moods and sentiments, vehemently pressing toward artistic embodiment, formed the spring from which his art productions sprang. Wagner repeatedly and expressly declares that his art is merely the mirror of his feelings, and must therefore be all but exclusively interpreted by heart and sentiment. Hence we find in Wagner that refinement and elaboration of the heart-life, those moods often inclining toward gloom, with which we have been familiarized by the study of the subjective poets, and in particular of Goethe. “Heaven-high exulting, to death cast down,” was the temperament of Wagner likewise. How often he yearned after death, and believed his only rescue was to be found in it! Wagner reminds us of those tears that Goethe shed in reading Hermann und Dorothea, when he tells us how often “in hot tears” he lamented the unavoidable severance of Lohengrin from Elsa.⁠[202] Art for Wagner was simply a means of expression. It was his tongue, in which he endeavoured to impart himself. Like Goethe, he laughed at the idea of being considered the founder of a “new school,” or a “new departure,” or a “new aim.” More than once he poked sarcastic fun at the new “tendency” that was ascribed to him. In an essay on Opera-poetry, and in Particular on Opera-composition,⁠[203] he says: “Not so much the study of my works as their success seems to have led many to follow my ‘tendency.’ What this consists of has remained a mystery to me. Perhaps of a long-continued preference for mediæval material. The Edda and the rude North, in general, were regarded as mines of ‘good texts.’ But the choice and character of the opera texts seem to be not the only important items of the alleged ‘new departure’; much else enters into it, especially ‘Durch Komponieren,’ and above all the uninterrupted interposition of the orchestra in the concerns of the singers, a practice which has been followed the more liberally as a good deal of ‘departure’ has arisen of late in the instrumentation, harmonization, and modulation of orchestral compositions.” Interesting is Wagner’s own description⁠[204] of how music gradually became a mother tongue to him; of how, in composing, it could not at all be his purpose to invent beautiful and original melodies or harmonies, but how he simply expressed in this tongue what he had to say in the only way in which it could be expressed. The reader will recollect that, in the discussion of the psychology of genius, I adduced a saying of Goethe in which he gives us to understand how indispensable the gift of verse was to him, since he was governed by such manifold feelings and moods and could only find repose and satisfaction in giving them artistic shape. This impulse to give artistic shape to his sentiments was felt by Wagner in the same measure, but neither the nature of his art nor outward circumstances enabled him so easily to see his artistic creations embodied as those of the simple poet. A poem, even though its form be dramatic, is a completed artistic work as soon as it is on paper; but a piece of music, especially a musical drama, receives life and existence only when it comes to be performed. Let an artist look upon his art not as a means of gaining money and fame, but merely as a means of expressing his sentiments, and if the means of imparting them be taken from him, as was Wagner’s case, owing to every imaginable obstacle being put in the way of the performance of his works, or, worse yet, and still more discouraging, if his works are arbitrarily altered and cut, and, owing to a defective understanding of them, performed quite disfigured, so that what was originally intended and felt is quite lost, then it will be quite psychologically conceivable that he should feel a just resentment and aversion toward those who, partly from want of understanding and partly from envy and ill will, deprive him of what to ordinary men is one of the highest of possessions—human speech.

In spite of all the obstacles placed in his path, Wagner did not let himself be subjugated by pain, because art held him erect. When he created his greatest work, the Ring of the Nibelungen, he did not himself believe that he should ever live to see it performed. It was not his purpose to gain fame and glory by it, but it afforded him satisfaction to unburden himself, as it were, by the artistic incorporation of his ideas, and at any rate to impart them to some friends, or even only to one. In such mood he wrote to Liszt: “What I am now creating shall never, or only under quite suitable circumstances, enter into life. Upon that I will henceforth unite all my force, and all my pride, and all my resignation. If I die before these works have been performed, I bequeath them to you, and if you die without their having attained a worthy performance, burn them. That is settled.”

The impulse to communicate, in some way or other, with wider circles, as well as material need and cares, drove Wagner repeatedly into the literary career. Here it is, from a psychological point of view, of great interest for us to see how the artist fatigues himself in vain in debating, from a purely theoretical standpoint, the ideas that filled him, and how vainly he labours to make himself understood in a language which is wholly incapable of expressing his meaning; for the only language of artistic sentiment is art. Would Beethoven ever have been able to express the sentiments of the heroic symphony in words?

Whoever knows the writings of Wagner, especially his larger works on Opera and Drama, The Art of the Future, etc., will be acquainted with his inflated and often unintelligible style; will have been offended by the many repetitions and apparent contradictions; and will, perhaps, have had the feeling that what the writer wished to communicate has actually been left unsaid. He did not consider himself by any means a writer, but wrote with great reluctance, driven by necessity; and he himself perfectly recognised the cause of his shortcomings. He knew that what he had to say could be expressed in one language only—the language of art. Wagner says: “Here again, and again and again, I have only been able to express myself through the channel of writing. What trouble this method of communication gives to me I need not assure those who know me as an artist. They can see themselves by the style of the literary works in which I torture myself to express what I could so tersely, easily, and gracefully render in art, so soon as its proper sensuous appearance stood as nearly in my power as its technical notation with pen on paper. But so odious to me is the whole literary business, and the necessity which has forced writing upon me, that I would that with this communication I might appear for the last time as a littérateur before my friends.”⁠[205]⁠

It is not my task here to inquire what the value of Wagner’s art may be, nor what rank he is destined to take in the history of art. For us, however, it is important to ascertain to what psychical processes his works owe their origin, and what psychical processes they produce.

The former question finds its solution in the foregoing considerations. The latter is an affair of observation and experience. This observation is, however, not always easy; it is sometimes decidedly difficult. The success of a work of art, the applause or disapprobation of the public, establishes but a very limited conclusion in regard to the mood called forth by it. Too many deceptive factors enter into the phenomenon, to permit us to trust to unconfirmed appearances. Experience teaches that only posterity, which allows the work of art to produce its effect unprejudiced and uninfluenced by personal considerations, is able to decide the question of the psychical effect. Along with this question posterity is judge of artistic value. Not theoretical reasons, not rules and statutes secure to a work of art enduring life, but solely its psychical effect. If the artist succeeds in exciting with his work in posterity the intended mood, its value is fixed. If we wish to-day to account to ourselves for the beauty of Beethoven’s music, we find nothing more to say than that it is beautiful because we find it so. We do not ask the why and wherefore, but surrender ourselves, as Lohengrin desired Elsa to do, to love and pleasure, without inquiring for reasons.

We are to-day the beginning of Wagner’s posterity. Now that the zealous flame of fanatical Wagnerianism has died out, and—at any rate in the younger generation—prejudices, personal motives, envy, and malice have passed away, the moods and sentiments that Wagner’s music is able to excite come out more clearly, and it is these alone which are to give definitive judgment upon the value of this art.

Wagner himself tells us how he gradually learned to handle his art as his vernacular language, so as to communicate his sentiments without impediment. The public, too, has gradually to learn the language of the artist, and this it must do, not with the intellect, but with the heart and sentiment. This circumstance explains many things which will not escape the close external observer. Most persons who come to this art unprejudiced declare that the first impression of a given work is neutral or even repellent; but after frequent repetition the sentiment becomes greatly augmented, reaching, it may be, to high enthusiasm. But older persons, especially those who have grown up in another definite art departure, can not readily habituate themselves to the “new departure.” They are in the same situation in reference to it as they would be toward a new language, as compared with young persons and children.

Wagner, in his earlier works, was, so far as outward form goes, especially in a musical respect, very much under the influence of the art impressions under which he had grown up. Gradually and unconsciously his own temper gained greater and greater relative emphasis, until at last he was altogether free from external influence, and stood quite upon his own feet. But the further he departed from the land of tradition, the harder it necessarily became for the public to follow him and to learn the new language. Hence his earlier works, in spite of the antagonisms and difficulties which even they had to overcome, always had a better reception from the public, and were more understood, than his later compositions. Down to Lohengrin he was at all events followed; but his later works excited a veritable storm of indignation and opposition.

It is human nature to condemn whatever is not understood; and it is only at a late hour, and very often not at all, that the question occurs, Might not the cause of the want of understanding be our own incapacity? Had Wagner lived five hundred years earlier, he might very likely have been walled up alive or burned as bewitched. But in the nineteenth century, such proceedings being no longer matters of regular routine, the modern prescription for making everything clear that is not understood was applied, and Wagner was declared to be insane. The rubric was, “Tannhäuser and Lohengrin are very beautiful; but the later operas are crazy.” Such was the language of the seventies.

Of course, such a diagnosis of insanity, based solely upon the fact that the subject had created works of art which were unintelligible to the public, was not a professional one. Nevertheless, the universal cry, “Wagner is insane!” was destined to penetrate professional assemblies, until at last a “specialist in psychiatry” was found who from a scientific standpoint sought to demonstrate Wagner’s insanity according to all the rules of the art. This “specialist in psychiatry,” to use the designation which he expressly assumed, was Dr. Theodor Puschmann, who in the year 1873 published a work with this design.⁠[206] He says: “This pamphlet is not intended to lead up to any preconceived doctrine. We are not allied to any party, and are not ranged either among the adherents or the opponents of Richard Wagner. We have never held any political or artistic relations with him whatever, and consider ourselves therefore able to preserve the perfect objectivity of our judgment, which is a prerequisite to all scientific investigation.” This general proposition is quite unexceptionable; but is it a fact that Puschmann displays such objectivity of judgment? Has he limited himself to making out the psychical processes of Wagner’s mind? Not at all. On the contrary, he judges of Wagner’s works in a thoroughly subjective manner, as if he were the final court of appeal; and then, because Wagner’s art finds no grace in his eyes, he concludes that Wagner is insane. In short, his procedure differs in but a single respect from that of a layman—namely, that he styles himself a “specialist in psychiatry.” Thus he says: “Apart from some reminiscences of an earlier period, his later works bear the stamp of mental mediocrity, hurried imperfection, and a wild raggedness. The Meistersinger, Tristan und Isolde, Rheingold, etc., do not in the least attain that mental elevation, that inward nobility, which was effused upon his earlier works. In both matter and form, in words and music, they are unbeautiful, disjointed, and careless. The world has judged them with a correct instinct. While Lohengrin and Tannhäuser have won a place in the hearts of the people, his later works are already buried before they have come to life.” Is this what Dr. Puschmann calls “objectivity”? Is it the business of a “specialist in psychiatry” to render such a judgment as this upon a work of art?

In another place he says: “We have already mentioned above what poverty of ideas, what increasing mental desolation, Wagner has shown of late years. All that is beautiful and great in what he has ever accomplished was devised and completed before he reached the age of fifty. Since this time an impotent unproductivity has seized upon him. His genius is extinct, and has given place to a lamentable emptiness of mind. His wings are crippled; the heaven-storming genius has fallen from his shining pinnacle, and, like a poor, sick, pitiful bird, chattering senseless stuff not to be understood, picks up the dusty corns that he and others once rejected.... The long-forgotten ideas of his youth, fugitive sketches such as a gifted man often produces and as quickly tosses into the waste-basket as useless, are now raked out and set forth with a quantity of baroque peculiarities in words and music which snatch at originality. To these are added a brain-shattering instrumentation and the most horrible dissonances; so that, as a connoisseur says, ear nerves must be thick as cables to go through such noise undamaged and sound. Along with this is the most unheard-of prodigality of decoration and machinery, such as only the extravagant fancy of a madman rioting in transcendentalism could imagine. And all this Wagner, in his morbid delusion, declares to be such a work of art as never was, and exacts of the world that it consider this unnaturalness as genuine art, and insanity as genius.” I will not “exact” of the respected reader to hear more of Puschmann’s criticisms. I can only ask again, Is this the needful “objectivity” of the “specialist in psychiatry”? Every layman must see that the diagnosis of the mental condition of an artist has nothing to do with deciding whether his works are “good” or “bad,” and that the sole business of the psychiatrist is to ascertain the psychical processes by which those works have been produced. Supposing that Dr. Puschmann really were the court of last appeal in reference to the artistic value of Wagner’s art, and the world had to submit to his judgment that the Meistersinger and Tristan und Isolde contain nothing but “brain-shattering noise” and “frightful dissonances,” would this be a reason for a real psychiatrist to diagnose insanity?

Puschmann says: “In Tristan und Isolde we find so many reminiscences of Offenbach’s Belle Hélène that we might presume an affinity of soul between the two authors.” Had Herr Puschmann been a “specialist in psychiatry” in fact, and not merely upon the title-page of his pamphlet, he would have had no difficulty in conceiving the distinction between these two states of mind and soul. While we seek in vain in Puschmann’s mode of passing judgment upon Wagner’s artistic creations for his boasted “objectivity,” we find that quality still more distinctly wanting in his mode of quoting Wagner’s writings and his use of such quotations to support his assertions. Although he puts the passages between quotation marks, implying that they are given verbatim et literatim and that their genuineness is guaranteed, yet he alters both matter and form to suit himself. What is the name of such a proceeding in plain English? And what becomes of the “objectivity” of this “specialist in psychiatry”? Without going into details here, I refer the reader upon this point to a publication which gives the real and pretended passages from Wagner’s writings in deadly parallels.⁠[207]⁠

I do not unearth Puschmann’s pamphlet for the sake of refuting it, for refuted it has been to satiety for twenty years. Besides, it refutes itself by its contradictions and mendacities. But in considering the question of how far a diagnosis of insanity can properly be based upon a work of art, it lay in my way to show into what errors one might thus be betrayed, and to give an example of how a psychiatrist should not proceed. Puschmann collects a list of morbid symptoms which Wagner is said to have suddenly manifested, such as delusion of grandeur, delusion of persecution, moral insanity, and erotomania. There really is no disease in which such an abundance of symptoms is suddenly exhibited. But independently of that, the data upon which Puschmann rests his “symptoms” are based upon falsehood and error. A few examples may be given. Referring to the friendship between King Ludwig and Wagner, Puschmann says: “The man who was so admired did not use the power which a piece of good luck had afforded him to help his fellow-men to do any good, or to produce anything great. He did not justify the confidence of his royal patron, nor did he fulfil the hopes which the world of art had built upon his gifted youth. Sunk in the soft velvet of a palace fauteuil, he gave himself up to the enjoyment of a torpid repose. He basked comfortably in the adulation which the fame of his past procured for him, but created nothing more; at least, nothing of importance after Lohengrin was worthy of a great master.” This assertion needs no commentary. Whoever is tolerably familiar with Wagner’s life and works must see its utter falsity.

Wagner’s “delusion of grandeur” is described by Puschmann in the following words: “Herr Wagner suffers from a self-conceit beyond all bounds and measure, a vanity and self-boasting truly morbid, which blind him to the merits of others, and allow him to regard himself as the sole embodied ideal of the loftiest wisdom and ability. The greatest masters of his art fade to nullity in his eyes; the illustrious musicians Mozart, Gluck, and others have no importance, nor title to mention in the history of culture, except in so far as they may have served as his forerunners; and even the immortal Beethoven is, at best, nothing more than an easel upon which can be displayed the full-length portraiture of ‘the greatest master of all the ages,’ Richard Wagner.” Whoever has even cast a glance into Wagner’s writings must recognise the total falsity of this assertion. The masters mentioned—Beethoven, Mozart, and Gluck—had no more glowing and enthusiastic worshipper than Wagner. His candid veneration for them found such oft-repeated expression in his writings that one is amazed to find the very contrary opinion thus substituted for his. In Opera und Drama we read as follows: “And here I indicate to you again the masterly musician, in whom music was quite that which it is able to be in man, when quite in the fulness of its essentiality it is music and nothing else than music. Look at Mozart!” This is only one among numberless examples.

In another place Puschmann says: “But all this was not enough for his insatiable ambition. The world must kneel suppliant at his feet, and give him incense like a god.” These are empty phrases with no basis of truth. This “specialist in psychiatry” rather incongruously interchanges “ambition” and “delusion of grandeur.” But that is no excuse for ascribing to Wagner motives from which he was unusually exempt. Wagner did not wish to be “supplicated” or honoured as a higher being; he only desired to be understood. For that his soul thirsted—for understanding and sympathy. It would have sufficed to be understood by some few friends; to the world at large he was entirely indifferent. He wrote to Liszt: “I feel myself more than completely recompensed for all my endeavours, for my operas, and for my art wars, when I see what impression I have made by them upon you. To be thus completely understood was my sole desire. To be understood is the blissful satisfaction of my desire!” This longing to be understood is so natural, and agrees so well with the psychological cadre of the artist, that the “specialist,” who should know how to enter into the psychical processes of the artist, should certainly not take offence thereat. Equally justifiable and psychologically motived are the rancour and hatred of the artist for those who, partly from want of intelligence and partly from personal resentment, envy, and ill will, work to prevent his being understood.