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Page 27
"THE FLYING DUTCHMAN"
Wagner took "The Flying Dutchman", "Tannh�user," and "Lohengrin," in
three long running steps; from "Lohengrin" he made a flying leap into
the air, and, after spending some five or six years up there, he
landed safely on "The Nibelung's Ring." The leap was a prodigious one,
and you may search history in vain for its like; and still more
astounding was it if you reckon from the point where the run was
commenced. "The Flying Dutchman" was avowedly that point. "Die Feen"
is boyish folly, and "Rienzi" an attempt to out-Meyer Meyerbeer. But
in the "Dutchman" Wagner sought seriously to realise himself, to find
the mode of best expressing the best that was in him. That mode he
found in "The Rheingold" and mastered in "The Valkyrie," with its
continuous development and transmogrification of themes. And (to
discard utterly my former metaphor) after steeping oneself for several
nights in that last great river of melody, wide and deep and clear, it
is interesting to be led suddenly to its source, and see it bubbling
up with infinite energy, a good deal of frothing, and some brown mud.
Compared with "The Valkyrie," "The Flying Dutchman" is ill-contrived
and stagy. It is flecked here and there with vulgarity. It has far
less of pure beauty; it has only its moments, whereas "The Valkyrie"
gives hours of unbroken delight. "The Valkyrie" appeals to the primary
instincts of our nature--instincts and desires that will remain in us
so long as our nature is human; while for a large part of its effect
the "Dutchman" trusts to a feeling which is elusive at all times and
has no permanent hold upon us. Horror of the supernatural is not very
deeply rooted in us, after all. Modern training tends to eliminate it
altogether. In later life Goethe could not call up a single delightful
shiver. There are probably not half a dozen stories in the world from
which we can get it a second time. The unexpected plays a part in
producing it, and the same means does not produce it twice with
anything approaching the same intensity. Hence the Dutchman's phantom
ship must be more ghost-like at each representation, its blood-red
sails a bloodier red; and in the long-run, do what the stage
carpenters will, we coldly sit and compare their work with previous
ships. True, the music which accompanies its entry is always
impressively ghastly; yet, while we know this, we are acutely
conscious that our feeling is more or less a laudable make-believe--a
make-believe that requires some little effort. Then Heine's notion,
which seemed so brilliant at first, that the Dutchman could be
redeemed by the unshakable love of a woman, has now all the
disagreeable staleness of a decrepit and obvious untruth. It has no
essential verity to give it validity, it is no symbol of a fact which
is immediately and deeply felt to be a fact. The condition of
redemption is entirely arbitrary: it might as reasonably be that the
Dutchman should find a woman who would not shrink from eating his
weather-stained hat. What was it to the Dutchman's damned soul if all
the women in the world swore to love him eternally, so long as he was
unable to love one of them? The true Wandering Jew is not the unloved
man, but the man who cannot love, who is destitute of creative emotion
and cannot build up for himself a world in which to dwell, but must
needs live in hell--a world that others make, a world where he has no
place. Wagner knew this, and makes the Dutchman fall in love with
Senta; and that only leaves the drama more than ever in a muddle. One
wants a reason for his suddenly being able to love. It cannot be
because Senta promises to love him till death; for he has had hundreds
of fruitless love-affairs before, and knows that all women promise
that, and some of them mean it. Besides, the highest moment of the
drama ought either to arrive when he feels love dawning in his
loveless heart, or when he renounces his chance of salvation and sails
away to eternal torment, believing that Senta made her promise in a
passing fit of enthusiasm; and at one or other of those moments we
ought to have some sign that he is redeemed. There is no such sign.
The phantom ship falls to pieces, and the Dutchman is freed from his
curse when Senta casts herself into the waves; and the highest moment
of the whole drama is that in which the dreamy monomaniac, the modern
Jeanne d'Arc, the real heroine of the opera, wins her own salvation,
masters the world and makes it her heaven, by taking her fate in both
hands and setting out to do the thing she feels most strongly impelled
to do. If the Dutchman's salvation depends on himself, it is evidently
unnecessary for Senta to be drowned; if it depends upon her, it only
shows that Wagner, writing fifty years ago, and dazzled by the
brilliance of a new idea, could not see so clearly as can be seen
to-day that Senta was her own and not the Dutchman's saviour; and if
(as it apparently does) it depends upon both Dutchman and Senta, then,
at a performance at least, one can merely feel that something in the
drama is very much askew, without knowing precisely what.
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