War Letters of a Public-School Boy Part 6

Wagner's first work, _Rienci_, composed frankly in the blatant Meyerbeerian style, has no artistic significance. _The Flying Dutchman_ marks a great advance. _Tannhauser_ and _Lohengrin_ are milestones of progress, but in all these works Wagner's full ideal is, generally speaking, but little perceptible. The really great Wagner operas are his later works, _Tristan und Isolde_, _Parsifal_, _Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg_, and, above all, that gigantic tetralogy (a complete musico-dramatic rendering of the Icelandic Saga put into English verse under the t.i.tle of _Sigurd the Volsung_ by William Morris) which consists of four stupendous operas, _Das Rheingold_, _Die Walkure_, _Siegfried_, and _Gotterdammerung_. These marvellous works, the consummation of the Bayreuth master's principles, undoubtedly stand with Beethoven's symphonies as the greatest achievements in music.

For the rest, it may be mentioned that Wagner was in private life a most kindly man, albeit at times quick-tempered, a great lover of children and animals. His philosophy was a somewhat variable quant.i.ty; he fell under the influence first of Feuerbach, then of Schopenhauer, and to some extent possibly of Nietzsche. But still, throughout all his works runs the doctrine of the Free Individual, of which Siegfried and Parsifal are perhaps the most striking impersonations.

Like Browning, Wagner believed in redemption by means of sacrifice. In his richness and strength Wagner typified the abounding vitality of the new Germany. To the Fatherland he is what Shakespeare is to England. One may apply to him the n.o.ble words Milton wrote of Shakespeare:

"Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thyself a livelong monument.

And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie That kings for such a tomb would wish to die."

H. P. M. J.

I found among my son's papers a sketch in ma.n.u.script of Wagner's life and work. It begins with some observations on Romanticism and Cla.s.sicism.

Whereas in the Cla.s.sical style the spirit is held in restraint by certain forms, in the Romantic it refuses to acknowledge these forms and breaks away to give the soul entirely free play. It necessarily follows that the Romantic style makes the wider appeal, for it touches chords of the heart that the Cla.s.sical cannot. Also the Romantic is rather more definite and less purely intellectual than the Cla.s.sical, though the ideal may be equally high in the one as in the other. In short, the Romantic style is human in its appeal, while the Cla.s.sical is superhuman. The best examples of men great in these two forms of art are Shakespeare in the Romance and Milton in the Cla.s.sic.

Returning to music, he thought that Bach, "immortal though many of his works are," was fettered by his servitude to rules.

The Cla.s.sical may become too cold, may lose all connection with the warmth of humanity. Such a fate does Haydn seem to have met in many of his works. Beethoven, the mightiest cla.s.sicist, also to some extent Mozart, saw that the soul must not hold entirely aloof from humanity. Hence it is that Beethoven broke deliberately several, though not indeed very many, of Bach's more enchaining rules, while Mozart, in his operas at least, had a large amount of Romance worked into his music. On the other hand, by its very nature the Romance style is occasionally apt to slip into what is pre-eminently Cla.s.sicism.

He confutes the argument that because base things have to be expressed in the Romantic style therefore that style degrades Art, for "base things handled artistically excite pure emotions of anger or indignation."

Wagner, though he broke every rule set up by Bach, though he abolished all the ideas of Cla.s.sicism, produced with his later works (_i.e._, _The Ring_, _Die Meistersinger_, _Tristan_, and _Parsifal_) music which reveals infinitudes of art to quite as great an extent as any cla.s.sicist has done.... Wagner gives us Nature's message, Beethoven the message of the incomprehensible Empyrean, and it is for no one to say that the one message is any greater or less than the other.

Necessarily the opera must be more romantic than the symphony.

"Composers who have given the world both opera and symphony such as Beethoven, Mozart, Weber, Spohr, Berlioz, always wrote Romantically in their operas and Cla.s.sically in their symphonies." Of the development of opera he wrote:

Opera was fast degenerating into a sort of collection of ballads, with hardly any orchestration at all, when a strong man rose to check these abuses. Gluck was the forerunner of the earlier German school of opera composers, which includes such men as Beethoven, Mozart, Weber and Schubert. Gluck had studied carefully the progress of non-operatic music since Bach's time, and seeing what vast strides the art had made in this direction, tried to bring into line with the opera its improvements. He was the first composer to show the immense and inestimable necessity of properly orchestrated music in opera. Gluck's rich scoring, beautiful melodies combined with dramatic connection between action, voice and orchestra, entirely revolutionised the opera.

Fortunately, he had a still greater contemporary to carry on his reforms. Gluck has himself explained how he set out to avoid any concession of music to the vocal abilities of the singer; how he had tried to bring music to its proper function, _i.e._, to go side by side with the poetry of the drama--a clear forecasting of Wagner's own reforms.

Whereas in Monteverde's operas the dramatic significance was kept, but only at the expense of the music, which had absolutely no signification at all, in the works of Gluck, Mozart and Scarlatti the musical part is elevated, but entirely at the expense of the dramatic idea, which is quite lost. A Mozart melody, rhythmic, square-cut, is as different as possible from a Wagner theme, for whereas the former suggests nothing the latter is very rich in suggestion. It is clear that Gluck and Mozart, though they performed an inestimable service to the musical art by the raising of the orchestra to its proper position with regard to the voice and the music, yet failed to keep in view the continuity of the drama in opera. Hence it was that Weber and Beethoven frankly abolished the recitative that joins the formal melodies of the arias and melodic pa.s.sages and composed Singspiel, having their works built up of airs and melodies joined by spoken dialogue. Such is Weber's _Der Freischutz_ and such Beethoven's _Fidelio_.

After discussing Meyerbeer, Scarlatti, and Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, my son comes to Wagner and the revolution in music he accomplished:

Wagner was a man of ripe culture, who was equally familiar with Beethoven's symphonies, Shakespeare's dramas, Kant's philosophic writings and Homer's epics. All the great works of literature and philosophy were well known to him. Thus he brought to bear on his music a mind singularly well equipped in every direction. He was, too, essentially a Teuton, with all the German ma.s.siveness of conception and depth of soul. A lesser man must have fallen before the prospect of attempting such a colossal reform. What was that reform in its essentials? It was this--to compose opera in which the idea of the drama was made the ruling conception; to attain this end by a wedding of suitable poetry to music of such a kind as should reflect by its themes what was happening on the stage or in the minds of the characters. There was to be no aria or fixed form of ballad, but continuous melody, in which the voices of the characters are regarded as extra instruments of the orchestra, with just that element of personality included....

To have succeeded entirely in this bold design he would have had to be a Shakespeare in poetry and knowledge of human nature, as well as a musician of equal ability. How could any one man fulfil both of these roles? In the matter of the music Wagner is a very Shakespeare. But if we take his own writings as evidences of what he meant to do, then his librettos must necessarily be unsatisfactory. They keep the dramatic idea in sight so much as almost entirely to lose sight of poetic beauty. Wagner was pre-eminently a musician; he was not a poet, as he wished also to be. Whatever his poetical achievements, the main fact is unaltered. The dramatic idea and the musical expression are kept so indissolubly close by Wagner as to be one for all intents and purposes.

Of Wagner's treatment of the vocalist he says:

The melody sung is modelled upon the way in which the speaking voice rises and falls in accordance with the feelings of the moment. With marvellous skill the master of Bayreuth has made the music sung reflect as clearly as any oration what are the thoughts and feelings of the character. The orchestra makes, as it were, a tide or ocean, over which the voice, in this manner, floats, now rising high on the crest of the wave, now sinking into the trough of the seas. Sometimes for added poignancy, Wagner makes the voice sing the _leitmotif_ of some idea connected with the idea of the moment. This is constantly occurring in _Die Meistersinger_.

After scornful allusions to French and Italian opera, he shows how Wagner re-fas.h.i.+oned opera on new and n.o.bler lines. Replying to those who say "You must have lightness sometimes," he wrote:

Yes, but never triviality. If we want lightness of touch and wittiness, have we not _Die Meistersinger_, the greatest comedy in the world, or a merry piece like Mozart's _Nozze di Figaro_?

Here is all the wit that one wants, yet the level is kept high throughout. It is the same in literature. We have absurd, ba.n.a.l pieces, said to be humorous, such as _The Glad Eye_, which really contain not one-millionth the humour that there is in a n.o.ble comedy like Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_, or _As You Like It_, or a Shavian play like _John Bull's Other Island_. Man is too great a thing ever to be of his nature low and ba.n.a.l. We have in life farce sometimes, comedy very often indeed, but never ba.n.a.lity.

The essay thus concludes:

If we have been flooded with rag-times and musical comedies, the fault lies in the first place with the French and Italian composers of the period 1790-1850. Pre-Wagner opera is as low a concoction as can possibly be conceived. It took all the genius of the great Bayreuth master to turn things back into their proper channel. But he has succeeded, and the old style is moribund. Anyone who glances over the list of living composers must see that they are all enormously influenced by Wagner's principle. The last of the old style was Ma.s.senet, and he is dead. We see Richard Strauss, an extreme Wagnerian, only without the master's full powers; Engelbert Humperdinck, who is a user of the _leitmotif_ and a most skilled orchestrator, though his motifs are not so powerful as Wagner's or even Strauss's; Pietro Mascagni, a Mozartean composer; Bruneau, an extreme Wagnerian; Glazounov and Mossourgsky have combined Wagner's ideas with Tschaikovsky's; Puccini at least is a very strong supporter and admirer of Wagner. It will thus be seen that, with the exception of Mascagni, Wagnerian ideas have been paid tribute to by all the leading opera composers of the day. In a word, the Man is here.

Opera, as represented by Richard Wagner's music-dramas, takes its place on a level with the absolute music of which Beethoven's work is the n.o.blest example.

Paul found keen pleasure in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, liking the witty libretto as much as the bright, tuneful melodies. For the work of Caesar Franck, a gifted Belgian musician who died on the threshold of manhood, he had profound admiration, and was of opinion that had he lived Franck would have taken rank with the great masters.

As was to be expected, my son had for Welsh music a strong natural sympathy. He held that "Men of Harlech" was one of the greatest of all battle hymns, and that "Morfa Rhuddlan," the ancient Cymric dirge, had never been surpa.s.sed as a piece of funereal music. Some of the old Welsh hymn tunes he regarded as unique in their wistfulness and devout aspiration; and as for Welsh choral singing, he thought it was matchless for richness, fire and harmony.

CHAPTER IX

LITERATURE AND ETHICS

_Without the blessing of reading the burden of life would be intolerable and the riches of life reduced to the merest penury._

GLADSTONE.

_The taste for reading stores the mind with pleasant thoughts, banishes ennui, fills up the unoccupied interstices and enforced leisures of an active life; and if it is judiciously managed it is one of the most powerful means of training character and disciplining and elevating thought. To acquire this taste in early life is one of the best fruits of education._

LECKY: "THE MAP OF LIFE."

From his childhood Paul Jones had been a voracious and an omnivorous reader. He read with amazing rapidity. The first book he enjoyed whole-heartedly was Mabel Dearmer's "Noah's Ark Geography," one of the best children's books written in the past twenty years. He read and re-read this book as a little boy and used to talk lovingly of Kit and his friends, Jum-Jum and the c.o.c.kyolly Bird. Alas! Kit (Mrs. Dearmer's son Christopher) and his gifted mother have been claimed as victims by the World War. Paul revelled in "aesop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe,"

"The Swiss Family Robinson," "Don Quixote," "Treasure Island," "The Arabian Nights," "Gulliver's Travels," and cla.s.sical legends. As he grew older he pa.s.sed on to "The Mabinogion," "The Pilgrim's Progress,"

Lamb's "Tales of Shakespeare," and writers like Henty, Manville Fenn, Clark Russell, W. H. Fitchett and P. G. Wodehouse. He followed with delight the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, whose charm never faded for him. He made a point of reading everything written by Conan Doyle. But he gave first place among living writers to George Bernard Shaw, and next place to H. G. Wells. He would never miss a Shaw play. His delight at the first performance he saw of _John Bull's Other Island_ was boisterous. He loved to read that play as well as to see it performed. The glimpses of Ireland and the portraits of Irish character enchanted him. Broadbent--typifying the self-complacency of the well-meaning but Philistine Victorian who had solved to his own satisfaction all mysteries in earth and heaven--he regarded as a masterpiece of creative art. For Kipling his admiration was qualified; but he loved "M'Andrews' Hymn," and often recited lines from the "Recessional." Of the great novelists d.i.c.kens was easily his first favourite; a long way behind came Scott, Stevenson and Jules Verne.

d.i.c.kens he knew and loved in every mood. Pickwick like Falstaff was to him a source of perennial delight. He loved and honoured d.i.c.kens for his rich and tender humanity, the pa.s.sion of pity that suffused his soul, the lively play of his comic fancy. Endowed with a keen sense of humour, he read Mark Twain and W. W. Jacobs with gusto. As a relaxation from historical studies he would sometimes devour a bluggy story, and as he read would shout with laughter at its grotesque out-topping of probabilities. He tried his own hand at sensational yarns. I recall one of them, rich in gory incidents, with a villain who is constantly leaping from a G.W.R. express to elude his pursuers.

Among his papers I found the ma.n.u.script of a detective story, vivaciously written after the Sherlock Holmes and Watson manner.

At one time Paul liked to read Homer and Thucydides, Virgil and Tacitus; but as soon as he was at home in the wide realm of English literature he thrust the old cla.s.sics from him, and subsequently his hard historical reading gave him no opportunity, even if he had felt the desire, to revert to Greek and Latin writers. But he was fully conscious of the world's debt in culture to Greece and in law and government to Rome. He wrote: "The influence of Greek thought, Greek form, Greek art, is universal and eternal."

Of all names in literature he reverenced most that of Shakespeare, in whom he saw "the spirit of the Renaissance personified," and whom he described "as romantic, philosophic, realistic, and as varied and impersonal as Nature." He was never weary of reading the tragedies and historical plays. He resented any word in disparagement of Shakespeare, and could not understand the inability of a supreme artist like Tolstoy to appreciate his greatness. Though he has written a n.o.ble sonnet in homage to Shakespeare's genius, Matthew Arnold once permitted himself to say that "Homer leaves Shakespeare as far behind as perfection leaves imperfection." Paul wrote in a marginal note, "Bos.h.!.+ to put it bluntly." He would say with Goethe, "The first page of Shakespeare made me his for life, and when I had perused an entire play I stood like one born blind, to whom sight by some miraculous power had been restored in a moment." Paul and I often exchanged ideas on Shakespeare. He was lost in wonder at Shakespeare's creative power, his inexhaustible fertility, the universality of his range, the perfection of his portraiture, his mastery over all moods, his cunning artistry in the use of words, his exuberant imagery and effortless ease. He made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon to see with his own eyes the spots and scenes amid which Shakespeare's youth and declining years were spent. The smiling beauty of Stratford and the rich rural charm of its surroundings left on his mind a delightful impression that was never erased.

Next to Shakespeare his admiration flowed out to Milton. When he went into the battle-line he took with him only two books--his Shakespeare and his Milton. With Milton's character he had some marked affinities--the virginal purity of Milton's youth, his love of learning, his hatred of all tyrannies, secular and spiritual, making a strong appeal to the sympathies of my son. "Milton," he wrote, "is perhaps the very grandest figure in English history." "In Milton the spirit of Puritanism is combined with a purely h.e.l.lenic love of beauty." "'Paradise Lost' may be regarded (1) as a reflection of the Puritan point of view; (2) as a poem pure and simple; (3) as an epic of the cla.s.sical school."

Profound as was his admiration for "Paradise Lost," he could not forbear smiling at Taine's quip that the Miltonic Adam is "your true Paterfamilias, a member of the Opposition, a Whig, a Puritan, who entered Paradise via England."

Paul extolled Pope's ingenuity and metrical felicity--he has thoroughly annotated the "Essay on Man"--but was acutely conscious of aridity and the absence of rapture and vision in Pope as in Dryden. He singled out as "the finest pa.s.sage in the 'Essay on Man'" the eight lines in which Pope contrasts the majesty of the Universe with the insignificance of man, beginning:

Let earth unbalanced from her orbit fly, Planets and suns run lawless through the sky.

He had not much respect for Pope's philosophy, and, commenting on one pa.s.sage in the same poem, writes: "Pope, like many other unsound reasoners, when his position becomes dangerous, seeks to vindicate himself by insults."

Above all nineteenth-century poets he loved Wordsworth, the revelation of whose richness and glory only came to him after he was seventeen.

There were no bounds to his admiration for the Wordsworth sonnets.

Many a time since the War he would recite the glorious sonnet which proclaims that

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung Of Earth's first blood, have t.i.tles manifest.