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Page 34
In short, "The Dusk of the Gods" seems to me perfectly clear, and in
no more need of explanation than "The Valkyrie" or "Siegfried." Of
course there are a thousand loose ends in the "Ring," as there are in
life itself; but to count them and find out what they all mean would
occupy one for an eternity. To throw away "The Dusk of the Gods"
because one cannot understand the loose ends, is ridiculous; instead
of wishing there were fewer of them, I wish Wagner had been more
careless, less German, and left more. It was through his endeavours to
get unity, to show the close relation of each incident to every other
incident, that he nearly came to utter grief. The drama was so
gigantic, to secure sympathy for Wotan it was so necessary to secure
sympathy for the minor characters whose story helps to make up Wotan's
story, that Wagner seemed perpetually afraid that the real, main
drama would be forgotten. And it is true that the story of Siegmund
and Sieglinde, or of Siegfried and Br�nnhilde, absorbs one for a time
so completely that one forgets all about Wotan and his woes. So Wagner
came near to spoiling one of the most tremendous achievements of the
human mind, by shoving old Wotan on to the stage again and again to
recapitulate his troubles. But of these interruptions "The Dusk of the
Gods" has none. The story proceeds swiftly, inevitably to the end;
from the first bar to the last, the music is as splendid as any Wagner
ever wrote. It is the fitting conclusion to the vision of life
presented in the "Ring": it is a funeral chant, mournful, sombre, but
triumphant. The seed has been sown, the crop has grown and ripened and
been harvested, and now the thing is over: a chill wind pipes over the
empty stubble-land where late the yellow corn stood and the labourers
laboured: there is nothing more: "ripeness is all" that life offers or
means.
"PARSIFAL"
"Parsifal" is an immoral work. One cannot for a moment suppose that
Wagner, who had written "Tristan" and "Siegfried," meant to preach
downright immorality, or that he meant "Parsifal" to stand as anything
more than the expression of a momentary mood, the mood of the
exhausted, the effete man, the mood which follows the mood of
"Tristan" as certainly as night follows day. Nevertheless, in so far
as "Parsifal" says anything to us, in so far as it brings, in
Nonconformist cant, "a message," it is immoral and vicious, just as in
so far as "Siegfried" carries a message it is entirely moral,
healthful, and sane. It is useless to quibble about this, seeking to
explain away plain things: the truth remains that "Siegfried" is a
glorification of one view of life, "Parsifal" of its direct opposite
and flat contradiction; and anyone who accepts the one view must needs
loathe the other as sinful. To me the "Siegfried" view of life
commends itself; and I unhesitatingly assert the sinfulness of the
"Parsifal" view. The two operas invite comparison; for at the outset
their heroes seem to be the same man. Siegfried and Parsifal are both
untaught fools; each has his understanding partly enlightened by
hearing of his mother's sufferings and death (compare Wordsworth's "A
deep distress hath humanised my soul"); each has his education
completed by a woman's kiss. All this may seem very profound to the
German mind; but to me it is crude, a somewhat too obvious allegory,
partly superficial, partly untrue, a survival of windy sentimental
mid-century German metaphysics, like the Wagner-Heine form of "The
Flying Dutchman" story, and the Wagner form of the "Tannh�user" story.
However, I am willing to believe that Siegfried, when he kisses
Br�nnhilde on Hinde Fell, and Parsifal, when Kundry kisses him in
Klingsor's magic garden, has each his full faculties set in action for
the first time. And then? And then Siegfried, with his fund of health
and vitality, sees that the world is glorious, and joyfully presses
forward more vigorously than ever on the road that lies before him,
never hesitating for a moment to live out his life to the full; while
Parsifal, lacking health and vitality--probably his father suffered
from rickets--sees that the grief and suffering of the world outweigh
and outnumber its joys, and not only renounces life, but is so
overcome with pity for all sufferers as to regard it as his mission to
heal and console them. And having healed and consoled one, he
deliberately turns from the green world, with its trees and flowers,
its dawn and sunset, its winds and waters, and shuts himself in a
monkery which has a back garden, a pond and some ducks. There is only
one deadly sin--to deny life, as Nietzsche says: carefully to pull up
all the weeds in one's garden, but to plant there neither flower nor
tree--and this is what "Parsifal" glorifies and advocates.
Now, far be it from me to go hunting a moral tendency in a work of
art, and to praise or blame the art as I chance to like or dislike the
tendency. I am in a state of perfect preparedness to see beauty in a
picture, even if the subject is to me repulsive. But in the case of a
picture it is possible to say, "Yes, very pretty," and pass on. In the
case of a story, a play, or a music-drama, you cannot. You are tied to
your seat for one or two or three mortal hours; and however perfect
may be the art with which music-drama or play or story is set before
you, if the subject revolts or bores you, you soon sicken of the whole
business. And in the highest kind of story, play, or music-drama,
subject and treatment merge inseparably one in the other, substance
and form are one; for the idea is all in all, and the complete idea
cannot be perceived apart from the dress which makes it visible.
Besides, in the Wagnerian music-drama, it is intended that beauty of
idea and of arrangement of ideas shall be as of great importance as
beauty of ornament. Wagner certainly intended "Parsifal" to be such a
music-drama; and indeed the idea is only too clearly visible. The main
idea of the "Ring" is so much obscured by the subsidiary ideas twined
about it that very few people know that the real hero is Wotan, and
the central drama Wotan's tragedy, that Siegmund and Sieglinde,
Siegfried and Br�nnhilde, and their loves--all the romance and
loveliness that enchant us--are merely accessory. But in "Parsifal"
there is nothing superfluous, no rich and lovely embroidery on the
dress of the idea to divert us from the idea itself--the idea is as
nearly nude as our limited senses and our modern respectability
permit. And the idea being what it is, it follows that the play, after
the drama once commences, is not only immoral, but also dispiriting
and boring, and, to my thinking, inconsequential and pointless. The
first act, the exposition, is from beginning to end magnificent: never
were the lines on which a drama was to develop more gorgeously, or in
more masterly fashion, set forth. Had Wagner seen that Amfortas was
merely a hypochondriac, a stage Schopenhauer, imagining all manner of
wounds and evils where no evils or wounds existed, had he made
Parsifal a Siegfried, and sent him out into the world to learn this,
and brought him back to break up the monastery, to set Amfortas and
the knights to some useful labour, and to tell them that the sacred
spear, like Wotan's spear, had power only to hurt those who feared it,
then we might have had an adequate working-out of so noble a
beginning. Instead of this, Kundry kisses Parsifal, Parsifal squeals,
and we see him in a moment to be only an Amfortas who has had the luck
not to stumble; and he, the poor fool who is filled with so vast a
pity because he sees (what are called) good and evil in entirely wrong
proportion--as, in fact, a hypochondriac sees them--he, Parsifal,
this thin-blooded inheritor of rickets and an exhausted physical
frame, is called the Redeemer, and becomes head of the Brotherhood of
the Grail. Beside this inconsequence, all other inconsequences seem as
nothing. One might ask, for instance, how, seeing that no man can save
his brother's soul, Parsifal saves the soul of Amfortas? This is a
fallacy that held Wagner all his life. We find it in "The Flying
Dutchman"; it is avoided in "Tannh�user"--for, thank the gods,
Tannh�user is _not_ saved by that uninteresting young person
Elizabeth; it plays a large part in the "Ring"; it is the culmination
of the drama of "Parsifal." Had Wagner thought more of Goethe and less
of the Frankfort creature who formulated his hypo-chondriacal
nightmares, and called the result a philosophy, he might have learnt
that no mentally sick man ever yet was cured save by the welling-up of
a flood of emotional energy in his own soul. He might also have seen
that Parsifal is as much the spirit that denies as Mephistopheles. But
these points, and many others, may go as, comparatively, nothings. The
first act of "Parsifal" is unsurpassable, the second is an
anti-climax, and the third, excepting the repentance of Kundry, which
is pathetic, and strikes one as true, a more saddening anti-climax.
There is one last thing to say before passing to the music, and this
is that "Parsifal" is commonly treated with respect as a Christian
drama--a superior "Sign of the Cross." I happen, oddly enough, to
know the four Gospels exceedingly well; and I find nothing of
"Parsifal" in them. It is much nearer to Buddhism in spirit, in
colour: it is a kind of Germanised metaphysical Buddhism.
Schopenhauer, not Christ, is the hero; and Schopenhauer was only a
decrepit Mephistopheles bereft of his humour and inverted creative
energy.
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