No More Learning

138 (#238) ############################################

138 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
more precisely in regard to the one new educational
force by which it makes men of to-day in advance
of those of bygone centuries, or by which it would
make them in advance of their remote ancestors,
provided only they did not persist so rashly in
hurrying forward in meek response to the scourge
of the moment. Through not having allowed the
soul of music to lodge within them, they have no
notion of gymnastics in the Greek and Wagnerian
sense; and that is why their creative artists are
condemned to despair, as long as they wish to dis-
pense with music as a guide in a new world of
visible phenomena. Talent may develop as much
as may be desired: it either comes too late or too
soon, and at all events out of season; for it is in
the main superfluous and abortive, just as even the
most perfect and the highest products of earlier
times which serve modern artists as models are
superfluous and abortive, and add not a stone to
the edifice already begun. If their innermost con-
sciousness can perceive no new forms, but only the
old ones belonging to the past, they may certainly
achieve something for history, but not for life; for
they are already dead before having expired. He,
however, who feels genuine and fruitful life in him,
which at present can only be described by the one
term " Music," could he allow himself to be deceived
for one moment into nursing solid hopes by this
something which exhausts all its energy in pro-
ducing figures, forms, and styles? He stands above
all such vanities, and as little expects to meet
with artistic wonders outside his ideal world of
sound as with great writers bred on our effete and


## p. 139 (#239) ############################################

RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 139
discoloured language. Rather than lend an ear
to illusive consolations, he prefers to turn his
unsatisfied gaze stoically upon our modern world,
and if his heart be not warm enough to feel pity,
let it at least feel bitterness and hate! It were
better for him to show anger and scorn than to
take cover in spurious contentment or steadily to
drug himself, as our " friends of art" are wont to do.
But if he can do more than condemn and despise,
if he is capable of loving, sympathising, and assist-
ing in the general work of construction, he must
still condemn, notwithstanding, in order to prepare
the road for his willing soul. In order that music
may one day exhort many men to greater piety
and make them privy to her highest aims, an end
must first be made to the whole of the pleasure-
seeking relations which men now enjoy with such
a sacred art. Behind all our artistic pastimes—
theatres, museums, concerts, and the like—that afore-
mentioned "friend of art" is to be found, and he it
is who must be suppressed: the favour he now
finds at the hands of the State must be changed
into oppression; public opinion, which lays such
particular stress upon the training of this love of
art, must be routed by better judgment. Mean-
while we must reckon the declared enemy of art as
our best and most useful ally; for the object of
his animosity is precisely art as understood by the
"friend of art,"—he knows of no other kind! Let
him be allowed to call our " friend of art" to account
for the nonsensical waste of money occasioned by
the building of his theatres and public monuments,
the engagement of his celebrated singers and actors,


## p. 140 (#240) ############################################

140 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
and the support of his utterly useless schools of art
and picture-galleries—to say nothing of all the
energy, time, and money which every family
squanders in pretended "artistic interests. " Neither
hunger nor satiety is to be noticed here, but a dead-
and-alive game is played—with the semblance of
each, a game invented by the idle desire to produce
an effect and to deceive others. Or, worse still, art
is taken more or less seriously, and then it is itself
expected to provoke a kind of hunger and craving,
and to fulfil its mission in this artificially induced
excitement. It is as if people were afraid of
sinking beneath the weight of their loathing and
dulness, and invoked every conceivable evil spirit
to scare them and drive them about like wild cattle.
Men hanker after pain, anger, hate, the flush of
passion, sudden flight, and breathless suspense, and
they appeal to the artist as the conjurer of this
demoniacal host. In the spiritual economy of our
cultured classes art has become a spurious or igno-
minious andundignified need—a nonentity or asome-
thing evil. The superior and more uncommon artist
must be in the throes of a bewildering nightmare
in order to be blind to all this, and like a ghost,
diffidently and in a quavering voice, he goes on
repeating beautiful words which he declares descend
to him from higher spheres, but whose sound he
can hear only very indistinctly. The artist who
happens to be moulded according to the modern
pattern, however, regards the dreamy gropings and
hesitating speech of his nobler colleague with con-
tempt, and leads forth the whole brawling mob of
assembled passions on a leash in order to let them
■


## p. 141 (#241) ############################################

RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 141
loose upon modern men as he may think fit. For
these modern creatures wish rather to be hunted
down, wounded, and torn to shreds, than to live
alone with themselves in solitary calm. Alone with
oneself! —this thought terrifies the modern soul;
it is his one anxiety, his one ghastly fear.
When I watch the throngs that move and linger
about the streets of a very populous town, and
notice no other expression in their faces than one
of hunted stupor, I can never help commenting to
myself upon the misery of their "condition. For
them all, art exists only that they may be still
more wretched, torpid, insensible, or even more
flurried and covetous. For incorrect feeling governs
and drills them unremittingly. and does not even give
them time to become aware of their misery. Should
they wish to speak, convention whispers their cue
to them, and this makes them forget what they
originally intended to say; should they desire to
understand one another, their comprehension is
maimed as though by a spell: they declare that to
be their joy which in reality is but their doom,
and they proceed to collaborate in wilfully bring-
ing about their own damnation. Thus they have
become transformed into perfectly and absolutely
different creatures, and reduced to the state of
abject slaves of incorrect feeling.


## p. 142 (#242) ############################################

142 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
VI.
I shall only give two instances showing how
utterly the sentiment of our time has been per-
verted, and how completely unconscious the present
age is of this perversion. Formerly financiers were
looked down upon with honest scorn, even though
they were recognised as needful; for it was gene-
rally admitted that every society must have its
viscera. Now, however, they are the ruling power
in the soul of modern humanity, for they constitute
the most covetous portion thereof. In former times
people were warned especially against taking the
day or the moment too seriously: the nil ad-
mirari was recommended and the care of things
eternal. Now there is but one kind of seriousness
left in the modern mind, and it is limited to the
news brought by the newspaper and the telegraph.
Improve each shining hour, turn it to some account
and judge it as quickly as possible! —one would
think modern men had but one virtue left—presence
of mind. Unfortunately, it much more closely
resembles the omnipresence of disgusting and
insatiable cupidity, and spying inquisitiveness
become universal. For the question is whether
mind is present at all to-day;—but we shall leave
this problem for future judges to solve; they, at
least, are bound to pass modern men through a
sieve. But that this age is vulgar, even we can
see now, and it is so because it reveres precisely
what nobler ages contemned. If, therefore, it loots
all the treasures of bygone wit and wisdom, and


## p. 143 (#243) ############################################

RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. I43
struts about in this richest of rich garments, it only
proves its sinister consciousness of its own vulgarity
in so doing; for it does not don this garb for
warmth, but merely in order to mystify its sur-
roundings. The desire to dissemble and to con-
ceal himself seems stronger than the need of
protection from the cold in modern man. Thus
scholars and philosophers of the age do not have
recourse to Indian and Greek wisdom in order to
become wise and peaceful: the only purpose of
their work seems to be to earn them a fictitious
reputation for learning in their own time. The
naturalists endeavour to classify the animal out-
breaks of violence, ruse and revenge, in the present
relations between nations and individual men,
as immutable laws of nature. Historians are
anxiously engaged in proving that every age has
its own particular right and special conditions,—
with the view of preparing the groundwork of an
apology for the day that is to come, when our gene-
ration will be called to judgment. The science of
government, of race, of commerce, and of juris-
prudence, all have that preparatorily apologetic
character now; yea, it even seems as though the
small amount of intellect which still remains
active to-day, and is not used up by the great
mechanism of gain and power, has as its sole task
the defending and excusing of the present.
Against what accusers? one asks, surprised.
Against its own bad conscience.
And at this point we plainly discern the task
assigned to modern art—that of stupefying or
intoxicating, of lulling to sleep or bewildering.


## p. 144 (#244) ############################################

144 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
By hook or by crook to make conscience un-
conscious! To assist the modern soul over the
sensation of guilt, not to lead it back to innocence!
And this for the space of moments only! To
defend men against themselves, that their inmost
heart may be silenced, that they may turn a deaf
ear to its voice! The souls of those few who
really feel the utter ignominy of this mission and
its terrible humiliation of art, must be filled to the
brim with sorrow and pity, but also with a new
and overpowering yearning. He who would fain
emancipate art, and reinstall its sanctity, now
desecrated, must first have freed himself from all
contact with modern souls; only as an innocent
being himself can he hope to discover the innocence
of art, for he must be ready to perform the stupend-
ous tasks of self-purification and self-consecration.
If he succeeded, if he were ever able to address
men from out his enfranchised soul and by means of
his emancipated art, he would then find himself
exposed to the greatest of dangers and involved
in the most appalling of struggles. Man would
prefer to tear him and his art to pieces, rather than
acknowledge that he must die of shame in presence
of them. It is just possible that the emancipation
of art is the only ray of hope illuminating the
future, an event intended only for a few isolated
souls, while the many remain satisfied to gaze into
the flickering and smoking flame of their art and
can endure to do so. For they do not want to be
enlightened, but dazzled. They rather hate light
—more particularly when it is thrown on them-
selves.


## p. 145 (#245) ############################################

RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 145
That is why they evade the new messenger of
light; but he follows them—the love which gave
him birth compels him to follow them and to
reduce them to submission. "Ye must go through
my mysteries," he cries to them; "ye need to be
purified and shaken by them. Dare to submit
to this for your own salvation, and abandon the
gloomily lighted corner of life and nature which
alone seems familiar to you. I lead you into a
kingdom which is also real, and when I lead
you out of my cell into your daylight, ye will
be able to judge which life is more real, which, in
fact, is day and which night. Nature is much
richer, more powerful, more blessed and more
terrible below the surface; ye cannot divine this
from the way in which ye live. O that ye your-
selves could learn to become natural again, and
then suffer yourselves to be transformed through
mature, and into her, by the charm of my ardour
and love! "
It is the voice of Wagner's art which thus ap-
peals to men. And that we, the children of a
wretched age, should be the first to hear it, shows
how deserving of pity this age must be: it shows,
moreover, that real music is of a piece with fate and
primitive law; for it is quite impossible to attribute
its presence amongst us precisely at the present
time to empty and meaningless chance. Had
Wagner been an accident, he would certainly have
been crushed by the superior strength of the other
elements in the midst of which he was placed.
But in the coming of Wagner there seems to have
been a necessity which both justifies it and makes
K


## p. 146 (#246) ############################################

I46 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
it glorious. Observed from its earliest beginnings,
the development of his art constitutes a most
magnificent spectacle, and—even though it was
attended with great suffering—reason, law, and
intention mark its course throughout. Under the
charm of such a spectacle the observer will be led
to take pleasure even in this painful development
itself, and will regard it as fortunate. He will see
how everything necessarily contributes to the wel-
fare and benefit of talent and a nature foreordained,
however severe the trials may be through which
it may have to pass. He will realise how every
danger gives it more heart, and every triumph
more prudence; how it partakes of poison and
sorrow and thrives upon them. The mockery
and perversity of the surrounding world only goad
and spur it on the more. Should it happen to go
astray, it but returns from its wanderings and
exile loaded with the most precious spoil; should
it chance to slumber, "it does but recoup its
strength. " It tempers the body itself and makes
it tougher; it does not consume life, however long
it lives; it rules over man like a pinioned passion,
and allows him to fly just in the nick of time, when
his foot has grown weary in the sand or has been
lacerated by the stones on his way. It can do
nought else but impart; every one must share in
its work, and it is no stinted giver. When it is
repulsed it is but more prodigal in its gifts; ill used
by those it favours, it does but reward them with
the richest treasures it possesses,—and, according
to the oldest and most recent experience, its
favoured ones have never been quite worthy of its


## p. 147 (#247) ############################################

RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. I47
gifts. That is why the nature foreordained'
through which music expresses itself to this world
of appearance, is one of the most mysterious things
under the sun—an abyss in which strength and
goodness lie united, a bridge between self and
non-self. Who would undertake to name the
object of its existence with any certainty? —even
supposing the sort of purpose which it would be
likely to have could be divined at all. But a most
blessed foreboding leads one to ask whether it is
possible for the grandest things to exist for the
purpose of the meanest, the greatest talent for
the benefit of the smallest, the loftiest virtue andi
holiness for the sake of the defective and faulty?
Should real music make itself heard, because
mankind of all creatures least deserves to hear it,
though it perhaps need it most? If one ponder over
the transcendental and wonderful character of this
possibility, and turn from these considerations to
look back on life, a light will then be seen to
ascend, however dark and misty it may have
seemed a moment before.
VII.
It is quite impossible otherwise: the observer
who is confronted with a nature such as Wagner's
must, willy-nilly, turn his eyes from time to time
upon himself, upon his insignificance and frailty,
and ask himself, What concern is this of thine?
Why, pray, art thou there at all? Maybe he will
find no answer to these questions, in which case he


## p. 148 (#248) ############################################

148 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
will remain estranged and confounded, face to
face with his own personality. Let it then suffice
him that he has experienced this feeling; let the
fact that he has felt strange and embarrassed in the
presence of his own soul be the answer to his question.
For it is precisely by virtue of this feeling that he
shows the most powerful manifestation of life in
1 Wagner—the very kernel of his strength—that
demoniacal magnetism and gift of imparting one-
self to others, which is peculiar to his nature, and
by which it not only conveys itself to other beings,
but also absorbs other beings into itself; thus
attaining to its greatness by giving and by taking.
As the observer is apparently subject to Wagner's
exuberant and prodigally generous nature, he
partakes of its strength, and thereby becomes
formidable through him and to him. And every one
who critically examines himself knows that a
certain mysterious antagonism is necessary to the
process of mutual study. Should his art lead us
to- experience all that falls to the lot of a soul
engaged upon a journey, i. e. feeling sympathy with
others and sharing their fate, and seeing the world
through hundreds of different eyes, we are then
able, from such a distance, and under such strange
influences, to contemplate him, once we have lived
his life. We then feel with the utmost certainty
that in Wagner the whole visible world desires to
be spiritualised, absorbed, and lost in the world of
sounds. In Wagner, too, the world of sounds seeks
to manifest itself as a phenomenon for the sight;
it seeks, as it were, to incarnate itself. His art
always leads him into two distinct directions, from


## p. 149 (#249) ############################################

RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 149
the world of the play of sound to the mysterious
and yet related world of visible things, and vice
versd. He is continually forced—and the observer
with him—to re-translate the visible into spiritual
and primeval life, and likewise to perceive the
most hidden interstices of the soul as something
concrete and to lend it a visible body. This con-
stitutes the nature of the dithyrambic dramatist,
if the meaning given to the term includes also
the actor, the poet, and the musician; a concep-
tion necessarily borrowed from ^Eschylus and
the contemporary Greek artists—the only perfect
examples of the dithyrambic dramatist before
Wagner. If attempts have been made to trace
the most wonderful developments to inner obstacles
or deficiencies, if, for instance, in Goethe's case,
poetry was merely the refuge of a foiled talent
for painting; if one may speak of Schiller's
dramas as of vulgar eloquence directed into un-
common channels; if Wagner himself tries to
account for the development of music among the
Germans by showing that, inasmuch as they are
devoid of the entrancing stimulus of a natural
gift for singing, they were compelled to take up
instrumental music with the same profound serious-
ness as that with which their reformers took up
Christianity, — if, on the same principle, it were
sought to associate Wagner's development with an
inner barrier of the same kind, it would then be
necessary to recognise in him a primitive dramatic
talent, which had to renounce all possibility of
satisfying its needs by the quickest and most
trivial methods, and which found its salvation and


## p. 150 (#250) ############################################

ISO THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
its means of expression in drawing all arts to it for
one great dramatic display. But then one would
also have to assume that the most powerful
musician, owing to his despair at having to appeal
to people who were either only semi-musical or not
musical at all, violently opened a road for himself
to the other arts, in order to acquire that capacity
for diversely communicating himself to others, by
which he compelled them to understand him, by
which he compelled the masses to understand him.
However the development of the born dramatist
may be pictured, in his ultimate expression he is a
being free from all inner barriers and voids: the
real, emancipated artist cannot help himself, he
must think in the spirit of all the arts at once, as
the mediator and intercessor between apparently
separated spheres, the one who reinstalls the unity
and wholeness of the artistic faculty, which cannot
be divined or reasoned out, but can only be revealed
by deeds themselves. But he in whose presence
this deed is performed will be overcome by its
gruesome and seductive charm: in a flash he will
be confronted with a power which cancels both
resistance and reason, and makes every detail
of life appear irrational and incomprehensible.
Carried away from himself, he seems to be sus-
pended in a mysterious fiery element; he ceases to
understand himself, the standard of everything has
fallen from his hands; everything stereotyped and
fixed begins to totter; every object seems to acquire
a strange colour and to tell us its tale by means of
new symbols;—one would need to be a Plato in
order to discover, amid this confusion of delight


## p. 151 (#251) ############################################

RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 151
and fear, how he accomplishes the feat, and to say
to the dramatist: "Should a man come into our
midst who possessed sufficient knowledge to simu-
late or imitate anything, we would honour him as
something wonderful and holy; we would even
anoint him and adorn his brow with a sacred
diadem; but we would urge him to leave our
circle for another, notwithstanding. " It may be
that a member of the Platonic community would
have been able to chasten himself to such conduct:
we, however, who live in a very different community,
long for, and earnestly desire, the charmer to come
to us, although we may fear him already,—and we
only desire his presence in order that our society
and the mischievous reason and might of which it
is the incarnation may be confuted. A state of
human civilisation, of human society, morality,
order, and general organisation which would be
able to dispense with the services of an imitative
artist or mimic, is not perhaps so utterly incon-
ceivable; but this Perhaps is probably the most
daring that has ever been posited, and is equivalent
to the gravest expression of doubt. The only man
who ought to be at liberty to speak of such a
possibility is he who could beget, and have the
presentiment of, the highest phase of all that is to
come, and who then, like Faust, would either be
obliged to turn blind, or be permitted to become
so. For we have no right to this blindness; whereas
Plato, after he had cast that one glance into the
ideal Hellenic, had the right to be blind to all
Hellenism. For this reason, we others are in much
greater need of art; because it was in the presence


## p. 151 (#252) ############################################

150
THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
its means of expression in drawing all arts to it for
one great dramatic display. But then one would
also have to assume that the most powerful
musician, owing to his despair at having to appeal
to people who were either only semi-musical or not
musical at all, violently opened a road for himself
to the other arts, in order to acquire that capacity
for diversely communicating himself to others, by
which he compelled them to understand him, by
which he compelled the masses to understand him.
However the development of the born dramatist
may be pictured, in his ultimate expression he is a
being free from all inner barriers and voids: the
real, emancipated artist cannot help himself, he
must think in the spirit of all the arts at once, as
the mediator and intercessor between apparently
separated spheres, the one who reinstalls the unity
and wholeness of the artistic faculty, which cannot
be divined or reasoned out, but can only be revealed
by deeds themselves. But he in whose presence
this deed is performed will be overcome by its
gruesome and seductive charm : in a flash he will
be confronted with a power which cancels both
resistance and reason, and makes every detail
of life appear irrational and incomprehensible.
Carried away from himself, he seems to be sus-
pended in a mysterious fiery element; he ceases to
understand himself, the standard of everything has
fallen from his hands; everything stereotyped and
fixed begins to totter; every object seems to acquire
a strange colour and to tell us its tale by means of
new symbols ;-one would need to be a Plato in
order to discover, amid this confusion of delight


## p. 151 (#253) ############################################

RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH.
155
and h.
lem; b. and ach
and fear, how he accomplishes the feat, and to say
to the dramatist: “Should a man come into our
midst who possessed sufficient knowledge to simu-
late or imitate anything, we would honour him as
something wonderful and holy; we would even
anoint him and adorn his brow with a sacred
diadem; but we would urge him to leave our
circle for another, notwithstanding. " It may be
that a member of the Platonic community would
have been able to chasten himself to such conduct:
we, however, who live in a very different community,
long for, and earnestly desire, the charmer to come
to us, although we may fear him already,--and we
only desire his presence in order that our society
and the mischievous reason and might of which it
is the incarnation may be confuted. A state of
human civilisation, of human society, morality,
order, and general organisation which would be
able to dispense with the services of an imitative
artist or mimic, is not perhaps so utterly incon-
ceivable; but this Perhaps is probably the most
daring that has ever been posited, and is equivalent
to the gravest expression of doubt. The only man
who ought to be at liberty to speak of such a
possibility is he who could beget, and have the
presentiment of, the highest phase of all that is to
come, and who then, like Faust, would either be
obliged to turn blind, or be permitted to become
so. For we have no right to this blindness; whereas
Plato, after he had cast that one glance into the
ideal Hellenic, had the right to be blind to all
Hellenism. For this reason, we others are in much
greater need of art; because it was in the presence


## p. 151 (#254) ############################################

150
THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
its means of expression in drawing all arts to it for
one great dramatic display. But then one would
also have to assume that the most powerful
musician, owing to his despair at having to appeal
to people who were either only semi-musical or not
musical at all, violently opened a road for himself
to the other arts, in order to acquire that capacity
for diversely communicating himself to others, by
which he compelled them to understand him, by
which he compelled the masses to understand him.
However the development of the born dramatist
may be pictured, in his ultimate expression he is a
being free from all inner barriers and voids: the
real, emancipated artist cannot help himself, he
must think in the spirit of all the arts at once, as
the mediator and intercessor between apparently
separated spheres, the one who reinstalls the unity
and wholeness of the artistic faculty, which cannot
be divined or reasoned out, but can only be revealed
by deeds themselves. But he in whose presence
this deed is performed will be overcome by its
gruesome and seductive charm: in a flash he will
be confronted with a power which cancels both
resistance and reason, and makes every detail
of life appear irrational and incomprehensible.
Carried away from himself, he seems to be sus-
pended in a mysterious fiery element; he ceases to
understand himself, the standard of everything has
fallen from his hands; everything stereotyped and
fixed begins to totter; every object seems to acquire
a strange colour and to tell us its tale by means of
new symbols ;-one would need to be a Plato in
order to discover, amid this confusion of delight


## p. 151 (#255) ############################################

RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH.
151
and fear, how he accomplishes the feat, and to say
to the dramatist: “Should a man come into our
midst who possessed sufficient knowledge to simu-
late or imitate anything, we would honour him as
something wonderful and holy; we would even
anoint him and adorn his brow with a sacred
diadem; but we would urge him to leave our
circle for another, notwithstanding. " It may be
that a member of the Platonic community would
have been able to chasten himself to such conduct:
we, however, who live in a very different community,
long for, and earnestly desire, the charmer to come
to us, although we may fear him already,—and we
only desire his presence in order that our society
and the mischievous reason and might of which it
is the incarnation may be confuted. A state of
human civilisation, of human society, morality,
order, and general organisation which would be
able to dispense with the services of an imitative
artist or mimic, is not perhaps so utterly incon-
ceivable ; but this Perhaps is probably the most
daring that has ever been posited, and is equivalent
to the gravest expression of doubt. The only man
who ought to be at liberty to speak of such a
possibility is he who could beget, and have the
presentiment of, the highest phase of all that is to
come, and who then, like Faust, would either be
obliged to turn blind, or be permitted to become
so. For we have no right to this blindness; whereas
Plato, after he had cast that one glance into the
ideal Hellenic, had the right to be blind to all
Hellenism. For this reason, we others are in much
greater need of art; because it was in the presence


## p. 152 (#256) ############################################

152 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
of the realistic that our eyes began to see, and we
require the complete dramatist in order that he
may relieve us, if only for an hour or so, of the
t insufferable tension arising from our knowledge
of the chasm which lies between our capabilities
and the duties we have to perform. With him we
ascend to the highest pinnacle of feeling, and only
then do we fancy we have returned to nature's
unbounded freedom, to the actual realm of liberty.
From this point of vantage we can see ourselves
and our fellows emerge as something sublime from
an immense mirage, and we see the deep meaning
in our struggles, in our victories and defeats; we
begin to find pleasure in the rhythm of passion and
in its victim in the hero's every footfall we
distinguish the hollow echo of death, and in its
proximity we realise the greatest charm of life:
thus transformed into tragic men, we return again
to life with comfort in our souls. We are conscious
of a new feeling of security, as if we had found
a road leading out of the greatest dangers, excesses,
and ecstasies, back to the limited and the familiar:
there where our relations with our fellows seem to
partake of a superior benevolence, and are at all
events more noble than they were. For here,
everything seemingly serious and needful, which
appears to lead to a definite goal, resembles only
detached fragments when compared with the path
we ourselves have trodden, even in our dreams,—
detached fragments of that complete and grand
experience whereof we cannot even think without
a thrill. Yes, we shall even fall into danger and
be tempted to take life too easily, simply because


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 153
in art we were in such deadly earnest concern-
ing it, as Wagner says somewhere anent certain
incidents in his own life. For if we who are but
the spectators and not the creators of this display
of dithyrambic dramatic art, can almost imagine
a dream to be more real than the actual experiences
of our wakeful hours, how much more keenly
must the creator realise this contrast! There he
stands amid all the clamorous appeals and impor-
tunities of the day, and of the necessities of life;
in the midst of Society and State—and as what does
he stand there? Maybe he is the only wakeful
one, the only being really and truly conscious,
among a host of confused and tormented sleepers,
among a multitude of deluded and suffering people.
He may even feel like a victim of chronic insomnia,
and fancy himself obliged to bring his clear,
sleepless, and conscious life into touch with som-
nambulists and ghostly well-intentioned creatures.
Thus everything that others regard as common-
place strikes him as weird, and he is tempted to
meet the whole phenomenon with haughty mockery.
But how peculiarly this feeling is crossed, when
another force happens to join his quivering pride,
the craving of the heights for the depths, the
affectionate yearning for earth, for happiness and
for fellowship—then, when he thinks of all he
misses as a hermit-creator, he feels as though he
ought to descend to the earth like a god, and bear
all that is weak, human, and lost," in fiery arms up
to heaven," so as to obtain love and no longer
worship only, and to be able to lose himself
Completely in his love. But it is just this contra-


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154 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
diction which is the miraculous fact in the soul of
the dithyrambic dramatist, and if his nature can
be understood at all, surely it must be here. For
his creative moments in art occur when the
antagonism between his feelings is at its height,
and when his proud astonishment and wonder at
the world combine with the ardent desire to
approach that same world as a lover. The glances
he then bends towards the earth are always rays
of sunlight which " draw up water," form mist, and
gather storm-clouds. Clear-sighted and prudent,
loving and unselfish at the same time, his glance is
projected downwards; and all things that are
illumined by this double ray of light, nature con-
jures to discharge their strength, to reveal their
most hidden secret, and this through bashfulness.
It is more than a mere figure of speech to say that
he surprised Nature with that glance, that he caught
her naked; that is why she would conceal her
shame by seeming precisely the reverse. What has
hitherto been invisible, the inner life, seeks its
salvation in the region of the visible; what has
hitherto been only visible, repairs to the dark
ocean of sound: thus Nature, in trying to conceal
herself, unveils the character of her contradictions.
In a dance, wild, rhythmic and gliding, and with
ecstatic movements, the born dramatist makes
known something of what is going on within him,
of what is taking place in nature: the dithyrambic
quality of his movements speaks just as eloquently
of quivering comprehension and of powerful pene-
tration as of the approach of love and self-renun-
ciation. Intoxicated speech follows the course of


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 155
this rhythm ; melody resounds coupled with speech,
and in its turn melody projects its sparks into the
realm of images and ideas. A dream-apparition,
like and unlike the image of Nature and her wooer,
hovers forward; it condenses into more human
shapes; it spreads out in response to its heroically
triumphant will, and to a most delicious collapse
and cessation of will:—thus tragedy is born; thus
life is presented with its grandest knowledge—
that of tragic thought; thus, at last, the greatest
charmer and benefactor among mortals—the
dithyrambic dramatist—is evolved.
VIII.
Wagner's actual life—that is to say, the gradual
evolution of the dithyrambic dramatist in him—
was at the same time an uninterrupted struggle
with himself, a struggle which never ceased until
his evolution was complete. His fight with the
opposing world was grim and ghastly, only
because it was this same world—this alluring
enemy—which he heard speaking out of his
own heart, and because he nourished a violent
demon in his breast—the demon of resistance.
When the ruling idea of his life gained ascendancy
over his mind—the idea that drama is, of all arts,
the one that can exercise the greatest amount of
influence over the world — it aroused the most
active emotions in his whole being. It gave him
no very clear or luminous decision, at first, as to
what was to be done and desired in the future;


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156 (#260) ############################################

156 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
for the idea then appeared merely as a form of
temptation—that is to say, as the expression of his
gloomy, selfish, and insatiable will, eager for power
and glory. Influence—the greatest amount of
influence—how? over whom? —these were hence-
forward the questions and problems which did not
cease to engage his head and his heart. He
wished to conquer and triumph as no other artist
had ever done before, and, if possible, to reach that
height of tyrannical omnipotence at one stroke
for which all his instincts secretly craved. With a
jealous and cautious eye, he took stock of every-
thing successful, and examined with special care
all that upon which this influence might be brought
to bear. With the magic sight of the dramatist,
which scans souls as easily as the most familiar
book, he scrutinised the nature of the spectator and
the listener, and although he was often perturbed
by the discoveries he made, he very quickly found
means wherewith he could enthral them. These
means were ever within his reach: everything that
moved him deeply he desired and could also
produce; at every stage in his career he under-
stood just as much of his predecessors as he
himself was able to create, and he never doubted
that he would be able to do what they had done.
In this respect his nature is perhaps more
presumptuous even than Goethe's, despite the
fact that the latter said of himself: "I always
thought I had mastered everything; and even had
I been crowned king, I should have regarded the
honour as thoroughly deserved. " Wagner's ability,
his taste and his aspirations—all of which have


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 157
ever been as closely related as key to lock—grew
and attained to freedom together; but there was a
time when it was not so. What did he care about
the feeble but noble and egotistically lonely feeling
which that friend of art fosters, who, blessed with a
literary and aesthetic education, takes his stand
far from the common mob! But those violent
spiritual tempests which are created by the crowd
when under the influence of certain climactic
passages of dramatic song, that sudden bewildering
ecstasy of the emotions, thoroughly honest and
selfless—they were but echoes of his own experi-
ences and sensations, and filled him with glowing
hope for the greatest possible power and effect.
Thus he recognised grand opera as the means
whereby he might express his ruling thoughts;
towards it his passions impelled him; his eyes
turned in the direction of its home. The larger
portion of his life, his most daring wanderings, and
his plans, studies, sojourns, and acquaintances are
only to be explained by an appeal to these passions
and the opposition of the outside world, which
the poor, restless, passionately ingenuous German
artist had to face. Another artist than he knew
better how to become master of this calling, and
now that it has gradually become known by
means of what ingenious artifices of all kinds
Meyerbeer succeeded in preparing and achieving
every one of his great successes, and how
scrupulously the sequence of "effects" was taken
into account in the opera itself, people will begin
to understand how bitterly Wagner was mortified
when his eyes were opened to the tricks of the


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158 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
metier which were indispensable to a great
public success. I doubt whether there has ever
been another great artist in history who began his
career with such extraordinary illusions and who
so unsuspectingly and sincerely fell in with the
most revolting form of artistic trickery. And yet
the way in which he proceeded partook of greatness,
and was therefore extraordinarily fruitful. For
when he perceived his error, despair made him
understand the meaning of modern success, of the
modern public, and the whole prevaricating spirit
of modern art. And while becoming the critic of
"effect," indications of his own purification began
to quiver through him. It seems as if from
that time forward the spirit of music spoke to
him with an unprecedented spiritual charm. As
though he had just risen from a long illness and
had for the first time gone into the open, he
scarcely trusted his hand and his eye, and seemed
to grope along his way. Thus it was an almost
delightful surprise to him to find that he was still a
musician and an artist, and perhaps then only for
the first time.
Every subsequent stage in Wagner's develop-
ment may be distinguished thus, that the two
fundamental powers of his nature drew ever more
closely together: the aversion of the one to the
other lessened, the higher self no longer con-
descended to serve its more violent and baser
brother; it loved him and felt compelled to serve him.
The tenderest and purest thing is ultimately—that
is to say, at the highest stage of its evolution—
always associated with the mightiest; the storming


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 159
instincts pursue their course as before, but along
different roads, in the direction of the higher self;
and this in its turn descends to earth and finds its
likeness in everything earthly. If it were possible,
on this principle, to speak of the final aims and
unravelments of that evolution, and to remain
intelligible, it might also be possible to discover
the graphic terms with which to describe the long
interval preceding that last development; but I
doubt whether the first achievement is possible at
all, and do not therefore attempt the second. The
limits of the interval separating the preceding and
the subsequent ages will be described historically
in two sentences: Wagner was the revolutionist
of society; Wagner recognised the only artistic y
element that ever existed hitherto—the poetry of
the people. The ruling idea which in a new form
and mightier than it had ever been, obsessed
Wagner, after he had overcome his share of
despair and repentance, led him to both con-
clusions. Influence, the greatest possible amount
of influence to be exercised by means of the stage!
—but over whom? He shuddered when he
thought of those whom he had, until then, sought
to influence. His experience led him to realise the
utterly ignoble position which art and the artist
adorn; how a callous and hard-hearted community
that calls itself the good, but which is really the
evil, reckons art and the artist among its slavish
retinue, and keeps them both in order to minister
to its need of deception. Modern art is a luxury;
he saw this, and understood that it must stand or
fall with the luxurious society of which it forms


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l6o THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
but a part. This society had but one idea, to use
its power as hard-heartedly and as craftily as
possible in order to render the impotent — the
people—ever more and more serviceable, base and
unpopular, and to rear the modern workman out
of them. It also robbed them of the greatest and
purest things which their deepest needs led them
to create, and through which they meekly
expressed the genuine and unique art within
their soul: their myths, songs, dances, and their
discoveries in the department of language, in
order to distil therefrom a voluptuous antidote
against the fatigue and boredom of its existence—
modern art. How this society came into being,
how it learned to draw new strength for itself from
the seemingly antagonistic spheres of power, and
how, for instance, decaying Christianity allowed
itself to be used, under the cover of half measures
and subterfuges, as a shield against the masses and
as a support of this society and its possessions, and
finally how science and men of learning pliantly
consented to become its drudges—all this Wagner
traced through the ages, only to be convulsed with
loathing at the end of his researches. Through his
■ compassion for the people, he became a revolu-
tionist. From that time forward he loved them
and longed for them, as he longed for his art; for,
alas! in them alone, in this fast disappearing,
scarcely recognisable body, artificially held aloof,
he now saw the only spectators and listeners
worthy and fit for the power of his masterpieces,
as he pictured them. Thus his thoughts con-
centrated themselves upon the question, How do


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. l6l
the people come into being? How are they
resuscitated?
He always found but one answer: if a large
number of people were afflicted with the sorrow
that afflicted him, that number would constitute
the people, he said to himself. And where the
same sorrow leads to the same impulses and
desires, similar satisfaction would necessarily be
sought, and the same pleasure found in this
satisfaction. If he inquired into what it was that
most consoled him and revived his spirits in his
sorrow, what it was that succeeded best in counter-
acting his affliction, it was with joyful certainty
that he discovered this force only in music and
myth, the latter of which he had already recognised
as the people's creation and their language of
distress. It seemed to him that the origin of
music must be similar, though perhaps more
mysterious. In both of these elements he steeped
and healed his soul; they constituted his most
urgent need:—in this way he was able to ascertain
how like his sorrow was to that of the people, when
they came into being, and how they must arise
anew if many Wagners are going to appear. What
part did myth and music play in modern society,
wherever they had not been actually sacrificed to
it? They shared very much the same fate, a fact
which only tends to prove their close relationship:
myth had been sadly debased and usurped by idle
tales and stories; completely divested of its earnest
and sacred virility, it was transformed into the
plaything and pleasing bauble of children and
women of the afflicted people. Music had kept


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162 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
itself alive among the poor, the simple, and the
isolated; the German musician had not succeeded
in adapting himself to the luxurious traffic of the
arts; he himself had become a fairy tale full of
monsters and mysteries, full of the most touching
omens and auguries—a helpless questioner, some-
thing bewitched and in need of rescue. Here the
artist distinctly heard the command that concerned
him alone—to recast myth and make it virile, to
break the spell lying over music and to make
music speak: he felt his strength for drama
liberated at one stroke, and the foundation of his
sway established over the hitherto undiscovered
province lying between myth and music. His new
masterpiece, which included all the most powerful,
effective, and entrancing forces that he knew, he
now laid before men with this great and painfully
cutting question: "Where are ye all who suffer
and think as I do? Where is that number of souls
that I wish to see become a people, that ye may
share the same joys and comforts with me? In
your joy ye will reveal your misery to me. " These
were his questions in Tannhauser and Lohengrin,
in these operas he looked about him for his equals
—the anchorite yearned for the number.
But what were his feelings withal? Nobody
answered him. Nobody had understood his
question. Not that everybody remained silent:
on the contrary, answers were given to thousands
of questions which he had never put; people
gossipped about the new masterpieces as though
they had only been composed for the express
purpose of supplying subjects for conversation.


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 163
The whole mania of aesthetic scribbling and small
talk overtook the Germans like a pestilence, and
with that lack of modesty which characterises both
German scholars and German journalists, people
began measuring, and generally meddling with,
these masterpieces, as well as with the person
of the artist. Wagner tried to help the compre-
hension of his question by writing about it; but
this only led to fresh confusion and more uproar,
—for a musician who writes and thinks was, at
that time, a thing unknown. The cry arose: "He
is a theorist who wishes to remould art with his
far-fetched notions — stone him! " Wagner was
stunned: his question was not understood, his
need not felt; his masterpieces seemed a message
addressed only to the deaf and blind; his people—
an hallucination. He staggered and vacillated.
The feasibility of a complete upheaval of all things
then suggested itself to him, and he no longer
shrank from the thought: possibly, beyond this
revolution and dissolution, there might be a chance
of a new hope; on the other hand, there might not.
But, in any case, would not complete annihilation
be better than the wretched existing state of affairs?
Not very long afterwards, he was a political exile
in dire distress.
And then only, with this terrible change in his
environment and in his soul, there begins that
period of the great man's life over which as a
golden reflection there is stretched the splendour
of highest mastery. Now at last the genius of
dithyrambic drama doffs its last disguise. He is
isolated; the age seems empty to him; he ceases


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164 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
to hope; and his all-embracing glance descends
once more into the deep, and finds the bottom:
there he sees suffering in the nature of things, and
henceforward, having become more impersonal, he
accepts his portion of sorrow more calmly. The
desire for great power which was but the inherit-
ance of earlier conditions is now directed wholly
into the channel of creative art; through his art he
now speaks only to himself, and no longer to a
public or to a people, and strives to lend this
intimate conversation all the distinction and other
qualities in keeping with such a mighty dialogue.
During the preceding period things had been
different with his art; then he had concerned
himself, too, albeit with refinement and subtlety,
with immediate effects: that artistic production
was also meant as a question, and it ought to have
called forth an immediate reply. And how often
did Wagner not try to make his meaning clearer
to those he questioned! In view of their inexperi-
ence in having questions put to them, he tried to
meet them half way and to conform with older
artistic notions and means of expression. When
he feared that arguments couched in his own terms
would only meet with failure, he had tried to
persuade and to put his question in a language
half strange to himself though familiar to his
listeners. Now there was nothing to induce him
to continue this indulgence: all he desired now
was to come to terms with himself, to think of
S the nature of the world in dramatic actions, and
to philosophise in music; what desires he still
possessed turned in the direction of the latest


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. l6$
philosophical views. He who is worthy of knowing
what took place in him at that time or what
questions were thrashed out in the darkest holy of
holies in his soul—and not many are worthy of
knowing all this—must hear, observe, and experi-
ence Tristan and Isolde, the real opus metaphysicum
of all art, a work upon which rests the broken look
of a dying man with his insatiable and sweet
craving for the secrets of night and death, far away
from life which throws a horribly spectral morning
light, sharply, upon all that is evil, delusive, and
sundering: moreover, a drama austere in the
severity of its form, overpowering in its simple
grandeur, and in harmony with the secret of which
it treats—lying dead in the midst of life, being one
in two. And yet there is something still more
wonderful than this work, and that is the artist
himself, the man who, shortly after he had accom-
plished it, was able to create a picture of life so
full of clashing colours as the Meistersingers of
Nurnberg, and who in both of these compositions
seems merely to have refreshed and equipped
himself for the task of completing at his ease that
gigantic edifice in four parts which he had long
ago planned and begun—the ultimate result of all
his meditations and poetical flights for over twenty
years, his Bayreuth masterpiece, the Ring of the
Nibelung! He who marvels at the rapid succes-
sion of the two operas, Tristan and the Meister-
singers, has failed to understand one important
side of the life and nature of all great Germans:
he does not know the peculiar soil out of which
that essentially German gaiety, which characterised


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166 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
Luther, Beethoven, and Wagner, can grow, the
gaiety which other nations quite fail to understand,
and which even seems to be missing in the
Germans of to-day — that clear golden and
thoroughly fermented mixture of simplicity, deeply
discriminating love, observation, and roguishness,
which Wagner has dispensed, as the most precious
of drinks, to all those who have suffered deeply
through life, but who nevertheless return to it with
the smile of convalescents. And, as he also turned
upon the world the eyes of one reconciled, he was
more filled with rage and disgust than with sorrow,
and more prone to renounce the love of power than
to shrink in awe from it. As he thus silently
furthered his greatest work and gradually laid
score upon score, something happened which
caused him to stop and listen: friends were coming,
a kind of subterranean movement of many souls
approached with a message for him—it was still
far from being the people that constituted this
movement and which wished to bear him news,
but it may have been the nucleus and first living
source of a really human community which would
reach perfection in some age still remote. For
the present they only brought him the warrant
that his great work could be entrusted to the care
and charge of faithful men, men who would watch
and be worthy to watch over this most magnificent
of all legacies to posterity. In the love of friends
his outlook began to glow with brighter colours;
his noblest care—the care that his work should be
accomplished and should find a refuge before the
evening of his life—was not his only preoccupation.


## p. 167 (#271) ############################################

RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 167
Then something occurred which he could only
understand as a symbol: it was as much as a new
comfort and a new token of happiness to him. A
great German war caused him to open his eyes,
and he observed that those very Germans whom
he considered so thoroughly degenerate and so
inferior to the high standard of real Teutonism, of
which he had formed an ideal both from self-know-
ledge and the conscientious study of other great
Germans in history; he observed that those very
Germans were, in the midst of terrible circum-
stances, exhibiting two virtues of the highest
order—simple bravery and prudence; and with
his heart bounding with delight he conceived the
hope that he might not be the last German, and
that some day a greater power would perhaps
stand by his works than that devoted yet meagre
one consisting of his little band of friends—a
power able to guard it during that long period
preceding its future glory, as the masterpiece of
this future. Perhaps it was not possible to steel
this belief permanently against doubt, more
particularly when it sought to rise to hopes of im-
mediate results: suffice it that he derived a tremend-
ous spur from his environment, which constantly
reminded him of a lofty duty ever to be fulfilled.
His work would not have been complete had he
handed it to the world only in the form of silent
manuscript. He must make known to the world
what it could not guess in regard to his productions,
what was his alone to reveal—the new style for the
execution and presentation of his works, so that he
might set that example which nobody else could


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168 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
set, and thus establish a tradition of style, not on
paper, not by means of signs, but through impres-
sions made upon the very souls of men. This duty
had become all the more pressing with him, seeing
that precisely in regard to the style of their execu-
tion his other works had meanwhile succumbed to
the most insufferable and absurd of fates: they
were famous and admired, yet noone manifested the
slightest sign of indignation when they were mis-
handled. For, strange to say, whereas he renounced
ever more and more the hope of success among his
contemporaries, owing to his all too thorough know-
ledge of them, and disclaimed all desire for power,
both "success" and "power" came to him, or at
least everybody told him so. It was in vain that
he made repeated attempts to expose, with the
utmost clearness, how worthless and humiliating
such successes were to him: people were so unused
to seeing an artist able to differentiate at all
between the effects of his works that even his
most solemn protests were never entirely trusted.
Once he had perceived the relationship existing
between our system of theatres and their success,
and the men of his time, his soul ceased to be
attracted by the stage at all. He had no further
concern with aesthetic ecstasies and the exultation
of excited crowds, and he must even have felt
angry to see his art being gulped down indis-
criminately by the yawning abyss of boredom and
the insatiable love of distraction. How flat and
pointless every effect proved under these circum-
stances—more especially as it was much more a
case of having to minister to one quite insatiable


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 169
than of cloying the hunger of a starving man—
Wagner began to perceive from the following
repeated experience: everybody, even the per-
formers and promoters, regarded his art as nothing
more nor less than any other kind of stage-music,
and quite in keeping with the repulsive style of
traditional opera; thanks to the efforts of culti-
vated conductors, his works were even cut and
hacked about, until, after they had been bereft of
all their spirit, they were held to be nearer the
professional singer's plane. But when people tried
to follow Wagner's instructions to the letter, they
proceeded so clumsily and timidly that they were
not incapable of representing the midnight riot in
the second act of the Meistersingers by a group of
ballet-dancers. They seemed to do all this, how-
ever, in perfectly good faith—without the smallest
evil intention. Wagner's devoted efforts to show,
by means of his own example, the correct and
complete way of performing his works, and his
attempts at training individual singers in the new
style, were foiled time after time, owing only to the
thoughtlessness and iron tradition that ruled all
around him. Moreover, he was always induced to
concern himself with that class of theatricals which
he most thoroughly loathed. Had not even Goethe,
in his time, once grown tired of attending the
rehearsals of his Iphigenia? "I suffer unspeak-
ably," he explained, "when I have to tumble about
with these spectres, which never seem to act as
they should. " Meanwhile Wagner's "success" in
the kind of drama which he most disliked steadily
increased; so much so, indeed, that the largest


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170 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
theatres began to subsist almost entirely upon
the receipts which Wagner's art, in the guise of
operas, brought into them. This growing passion
on the part of the theatre-going public bewildered
even some of Wagner's friends; but this man,
who had endured so much, had still to endure
the bitterest pain of all—he had to see his
friends intoxicated with his "successes" and
"triumphs" everywhere where his highest ideal
was openly belied and shattered. It seemed
almost as though a people otherwise earnest and
reflecting had decided to maintain an attitude of
systematic levity only towards its most serious
artist, and to make him the privileged recipient of
all the vulgarity, thoughtlessness, clumsiness, and
malice of which the German nature is capable.
When, therefore, during the German War, a current
of greater magnanimity and freedom seemed to
run through every one, Wagner remembered the
duty to which he had pledged himself, namely, to
rescue his greatest work from those successes and
affronts which were so largely due to misunder-
standings, and to present it in his most personal
rhythm as an example for all times. Thus he
conceived the idea of Bayreuth. In the wake of
that current of better feeling already referred to,
he expected to notice an enhanced sense of duty
even among those with whom he wished to entrust
his most precious possession. Out of this two-
fold duty, that event took shape which, like a glow
of strange sunlight, will illumine the few years that
lie behind and before us, and was designed to bless
that distant and problematic future which to


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 171
our time and to the men of our time can be little
more than a riddle or a horror, but which to the
few who are allowed to assist in its realisation is
a foretaste of coming joy, a foretaste of love in a
higher sphere, through which they know themselves
to be blessed, blessing and fruitful, far beyond their
span of years; and which to Wagner himself is
but a cloud of distress, care, meditation, and grief, a
fresh passionate outbreak of antagonistic elements,
but all bathed in the starlight of selfless fidelity,
and changed by this light into indescribable joy.
It scarcely need be said that it is the breath of
tragedy that fills the lungs of the world. And
every one whose innermost soul has a presentiment
of this, every one unto whom the yoke of tragic
deception concerning the aim of life, the distortion
and shattering of intentions, renunciation and
purification through love, are not unknown things,
must be conscious of a vague reminiscence of
Wagner's own heroic life, in the masterpieces
with which the great man now presents us. We
shall feel as though Siegfried from some place far
away were relating his deeds to us: the most blissful
of touching recollections are always draped in the
deep mourning of waning summer, when all nature
lies still in the sable twilight


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172 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
IX.
All those to whom the thought of Wagner's
development as a man may have caused pain
will find it both restful and healing to reflect upon
what he was as an artist, and to observe how his
ability and daring attained to such a high degree
of independence. If art mean only the faculty
of communicating to others what one has oneself
experienced, and if every work of art confutes itself
which does not succeed in making itself under-
stood, then Wagner's greatness as an artist would
certainly lie in the almost demoniacal power of his
nature to communicate with others, to express
itself in all languages at once, and to make known
its most intimate and personal experience with
the greatest amount of distinctness possible. His
appearance in the history of art resembles nothing
so much as a volcanic eruption of the united artistic
faculties of Nature herself, after mankind had
grown to regard the practice of a special art as a
necessary rule. It is therefore a somewhat moot
point whether he ought to be classified as a poet,
a painter, or a musician, even using each these
words in its widest sense, or whether a new word
ought not to be invented in order to describe him.
Wagner's poetic ability is shown by his thinking
in visible and actual facts, and not in ideas; that
is to say, he thinks mythically, as the people have
always done. No particular thought lies at the
bottom of a myth, as the children of an artificial


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 173
culture would have us believe; but it is in itself a
thought: it conveys an idea of the world, but
through the medium of a chain of events, actions,
and pains. The Ring of the Nihelung is a huge
system of thought without the usual abstractness
of the latter. It were perhaps possible for a
philosopher to present us with its exact equivalent
in pure thought, and to purge it of all pictures
drawn from life, and of all living actions, in which
case we should be in possession of the same thing
portrayed in two completely different forms—the
one for the people, and the other for the very
reverse of the people; that is to say, men of
theory. But Wagner makes no appeal to this last
class, for the man of theory can know as little
of poetry or myth as the deaf man can know
of music; both of them being conscious only of
movements which seem meaningless to them. It
is impossible to appreciate either one of these
completely different forms from the standpoint of
the other: as long as the poet's spell is upon one,
one thinks with him just as though one were
merely a feeling, seeing, and hearing creature; the
conclusions thus reached are merely the result of
the association of the phenomena one sees, and
are therefore not logical but actual causalities.
If, therefore, the heroes and gods of mythical
dramas, as understood by Wagner, were to express
themselves plainly in words, there would be a
danger (inasmuch as the language of words might
tend to awaken the theoretical side in us) of our
finding ourselves transported from the world of
myth to the world of ideas, and the result would


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174 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
be not only that we should fail to understand with
greater ease, but that we should probably not
understand at all. Wagner thus forced language
back to a more primeval stage in its development,
a stage at which it was almost free of the abstract
element, and was still poetry, imagery, and feeling;
the fearlessness with which Wagner undertook this
formidable mission shows how imperatively he
was led by the spirit of poetry, as one who must
follow whithersoever his phantom leader may direc
him. Every word in these dramas ought to allow
of being sung, and gods and heroes should make
them their own—that was the task which Wagner
set his literary faculty. Any other person in like
circumstances would have given up all hope; for
our language seems almost too old and decrepit
to allow of one's exacting what Wagner exacted
from it; and yet, when he smote the rock, he
brought forth an abundant flow. Precisely owing
to the fact that he loved his language and exacted
a great deal from it, Wagner suffered more than
any other German through its decay and enfeeble-
ment, from its manifold losses and mutilations of
form, from its unwieldy particles and clumsy con-
struction, and from its unmusical auxiliary verbs.
All these are things which have entered the
language through sin and depravity. On the
other hand, he was exceedingly proud to record
the number of primitive and vigorous factors still
extant in the current speech; and in the tonic
strength of its roots he recognised quite a
wonderful affinity and relation to real music, a
quality which distinguished it from the highly


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 175
evolved and artificially rhetorical Latin languages.
Wagner's poetry is eloquent of his affection for
the German language, and there is a heartiness
and candour in his treatment of it which are
scarcely to be met with in any other German
writer, save perhaps Goethe. Forcibleness of
diction, daring brevity, power and variety in
rhythm, a remarkable wealth of strong and
striking words, simplicity in construction, an
almost unique inventive faculty in regard to fluctu-
ations of feeling and presentiment, and there-
withal a perfectly pure and overflowing stream of
colloquialisms—these are the qualities that have
to be enumerated, and even then the greatest and
most wonderful of all is omitted. Whoever reads
two such poems as Tristan and the Meistersingers
consecutively will be just as astonished and
doubtful in regard to the language as to the
music; for he will wonder how it could have been
possible for a creative spirit to dominate so
perfectly two worlds as different in form, colour,
and arrangement, as in soul. This is the most
wonderful achievement of Wagner's talent; for
the ability to give every work its own linguistic
stamp and to find a fresh body and a new sound
for every thought is a task which only the great
master can successfully accomplish. Where this
rarest of all powers manifests itself, adverse
criticism can be but petty and fruitless which con-
fines itself to attacks upon certain excesses and
eccentricities in the treatment, or upon the more
frequent obscurities of expression and ambiguity
of thought. Moreover, what seemed to electrify


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176 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
and scandalise those who were most bitter in their
criticism was not so much the language as the
spirit of the Wagnerian operas—that is to say, his
whole manner of feeling and suffering. It were
well to wait until these very critics have acquired
another spirit themselves; they will then also speak
a different tongue, and, by that time, it seems to
me things will go better with the German language
than they do at present.
In the first place, however, no one who studies
Wagner the poet and word-painter should forget
that none of his dramas were meant to be read, and
that it would therefore be unjust to judge them
from the same standpoint as the spoken drama.
The latter plays upon the feelings by means of
words and ideas, and in this respect it is under the
dominion of the laws of rhetoric. But in real life
passion is seldom eloquent: in spoken drama it
perforce must be, in order to be able to express
itself at all. When, however, the language of a
people is already in a state of decay and deteriora-
tion, the word-dramatist is tempted to impart an
undue proportion of new colour and form both to
his medium and to his thoughts; he would elevate
the language in order to make it a vehicle capable
of conveying lofty feelings, and by so doing he
runs the risk of becoming abstruse. By means of
sublime phrases and conceits he likewise tries to
invest passion with some nobility, and thereby runs
yet another risk, that of appearing false and arti-
ficial. For in real life passions do not speak in
sentences, and the poetical element often draws
suspicion upon their genuineness when it departs


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. I77
too palpably from reality. Now Wagner, who was
the first to detect the essential feeling in spoken
drama, presents every dramatic action threefold:
in a word, in a gesture, and in a sound. For, as a
matter of fact, music succeeds in conveying the
deepest emotions of the dramatic performers direct
to the spectators, and while these see the evidence
of the actors' states of soul in their bearing and
movements, a third though more feeble confirma-
tion of these states, translated into conscious will,
quickly follows in the form of the spoken word.
All these effects fulfil their purpose simultaneously,
without disturbing one another in the least, and
urge the spectator to a completely new understand-
ing and sympathy, just as if his senses had suddenly
grown more spiritual and his spirit more sensual,
and as if everything which seeks an outlet in him,
and which makes him thirst for knowledge, were
free and joyful in exultant perception. Because
every essential factor in a Wagnerian drama is
conveyed to the spectator with the utmost clear-
ness, illumined and permeated throughout by music
as by an internal flame, their author can dispense
with the expedients usually employed by the
writer of the spoken play in order to lend light
and warmth to the action. The whole of the
dramatist's stock in trade could be more simple,
and the architect's sense of rhythm could once
more dare to manifest itself in the general propor-
tions of the edifice; for there was no more need of
the deliberate confusion and involved variety of
styles, whereby the ordinary playwright strove in
the interests of his work to produce that feeling of
M


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I78 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.
wonder and thrilling suspense which he ultimately
enhanced to one of delighted amazement. The
impression of ideal distance and height was no
more to be induced by means of tricks and arti-
fices. Language withdrew itself from the length
and breadth of rhetoric into the strong confines
of the speech of the feelings, and although the
actor spoke much less about all he did and felt
in the performance, his innermost sentiments, which
the ordinary playwright had hitherto ignored for
fear of being undramatic, was now able to drive the
spectators to passionate sympathy, while the ac-
companying language of gestures could be restricted
to the most delicate modulations. Now, when pas-
sions are rendered in song, they require rather more
time than when conveyed by speech; music pro-
longs, so to speak, the duration of the feeling, from
which it follows, as a rule, that the actor who is
also a singer must overcome the extremely un-
plastic animation from which spoken drama suffers.
He feels himself incited all the more to a certain
nobility of bearing, because music envelopes his
feelings in a purer atmosphere, and thus brings
them closer to beauty.
The extraordinary tasks which Wagner set his
actors and singers will provoke rivalry between
them for ages to come, in the personification of
each of his heroes with the greatest possible amount
of clearness, perfection, and fidelity, according to
that perfect incorporation already typified by the
music of drama. Following this leader, the eye
of the plastic artist will ultimately behold the
marvels of another visible world, which, previous


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RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. 179
to him, was seen for the first time only by the
creator of such works as the Ring of the Nibelung
—that creator of highest rank, who, like ^Eschylus,
points the way to a coming art. Must not jealousy
awaken the greatest talent, if the plastic artist ever
compares the effect of his productions with that of
Wagnerian music, in which there is so much pure
and sunny happiness that he who hears it feels as
though all previous music had been but an alien,
faltering, and constrained language; as though in
the past it had been but a thing to sport with in
the presence of those who were not deserving of
serious treatment, or a thing with which to train and
instruct those who were not even deserving of play?
In the case of this earlier kind of music, the joy
we always experience while listening to Wagner's
compositions is ours only for a short space of time,
and it would then seem as though it were over-
taken by certain rare moments of forgetfulness,
during which it appears to be communing with its
inner self and directing its eyes upwards, like
Raphael's Cecilia, away from the listeners and
from all those who demand distraction, happiness,
or instruction from it
.
In general it may be said of Wagner the
Musician, that he endowed everything in nature
which hitherto had had no wish to speak with the
power of speech: he refuses to admit that anything
must be dumb, and, resorting to the dawn, the
forest, the mist, the cliffs, the hills, the thrill of
night and the moonlight, he observes a desire
common to them all — they too wish to sing
their own melody. If the philosopher says it


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180 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON.