Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians — A Reader’s Guide

Wagner was a strong, honest man who simply desired to express his better self. The elements of caution and expediency were singularly lacking in his character. These qualities of independence and self-reliance brought him into speedy collision with those who stood in the front rank of the artistic world of his day, and he became a marked man. His offense was that he expressed his honest self.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-three, when he appeared upon the scene in Dresden as Hofkapellmeister of the Royal Theater, matters musical were just about where the stage now is in America. In this Year of Grace, Nineteen Hundred One, the great Shakespeare has been elbowed from the stage by the author of "A Texas Steer"; and where once the haughty Richard trod the boards, the skirt-dance assumes the center of the stage and looms lurid like the spirit of the Brocken. Recently a vaudeville "turn" of Hamlet has been presented, where the gravediggers do their gruesome tasks to ragtime; and on every hand we behold the Lyceum giving way to the McClure Continuous, Lim.

Wagner abhorred the mere tune for the sake of tune. "You can not produce art and leave man out," he said. All art must suggest something. Mere verbal description is not literature: it is only words, words, words; a picture must be charged with soul, otherwise a photograph would outrank "The Angelus." Music must be more than jingling tunes and mincing sounds. And thus we find Wagner at thirty years of age boldly putting forth "The Flying Dutchman," with music not written for the text, nor text written for the music, but words and music created at the same time--the melody mirroring forth the soul of the words.

In this play Wagner for the first time sacrificed every precedent of musical construction and all thought of symmetrical form, in order to make the music tell the tale. "The Flying Dutchman" is to opera what Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is to poetry, or Millet's "Sower" is to painting. There is strength, heroic strength, in each of these masterpieces I have named, but the "Dutchman" needs a listener, "Leaves of Grass" requires a reader who has experienced, and the "Sower" demands one who has eyes to see, before its lesson of love and patience and the pathetic truth of endless toil are bodied forth.

Whitman's book was well looked after by the local Antonius Ash-Box inspector of the day, its publication forbidden, and the author incidentally deprived of his clerkship at Washington; Millet did service as the butt for jokes of artistic Paris, and was dubbed "The Wild Man"; Wagner's play was hooted off the stage.

Every man is but a type representing his class. Of course the class may be small and one man may even be its sole living representative: but Wagner had his double in William Morris. These men were brothers in temperament, physique, habit of thought and occupation.

Wagner wrote largely on the subjects of Art and Sociology, and made his appeal for the toiler in that the man should be allowed to share the joys of Art by producing it. His argument is identical with that of William Morris; and yet the essays of Wagner were not translated into English until after Morris had written his "Dream of John Ball," and Morris did not read German.

Both men hark back to a time when Man and Nature were on friendly terms; when the thought, best exemplified by the early Greeks, of the sacredness of the human body was recognized; when the old medieval feeling of helpful brotherhood yet lingered; and the restless misery of competition and all the train of woe, squalor and ugliness that "civilization" has brought were unknown.

Wagner's music is made up of the sounds of Nature conventionalized. You hear the sighing of the breeze, the song of the birds, the cries of animals, the rush of the storm. Wagner's essay, entitled, "Art and Revolution," is the twin to the lecture, "Art and Socialism," by Morris; and in the "Art-Work of the Future," Wagner works out at length the favorite recurring theme of Morris: work is for the worker, and art is the expression of man's joy in his work.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-four, when Morris was ten years of age, Wagner wrote:

"I compose for myself; it is just a question between me and my Maker. I grow as I exercise my faculties, and expression is a necessary form of spiritual exercise. How shall I live? Express what I think or feel, or what you feel?