CHAPTER II.

RICHARD WAGNER

Surely, one would say, if love were ever to be the woof of any life, it must interweave the life of this man Wagner; for he gave to every whim and fervour of the passion an expression so nearly absolute that we are driven almost to say:  Old as music is, and ancient as love songs are, music never truly gave full voice to desire in all its throbs until Richard Wagner created a new orchestra, a new libretto, a new music, a new harmony, and a new fabric of melody.

“Tristan and Isolde” seems to be so nearly the last word in dramatised love that it seems also to be nearly the first word.  From the Vorspiel’s opening measures, gaunt and hungry with despair and longing, to the last measures of the Liebestod, sublime with resignation and divinely sad with the apotheosis of adoration, this opera sounds every note of the emotion of man for woman, and woman for man.

Surely, you would say, the creator of this masterwork must have had a heart thrilled with mighty passion for womankind; surely he must have lived a life of strange devotion.

But how often, how often we must warn ourselves against judging the creator from his creations, the artist from his art.  In his letter to Liszt, announcing his intention to write this very opera, Wagner said: 

“As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of my dreams, in which, from beginning to end that love shall be thoroughly satiated.  I have in my head ‘Tristan and Isolde,’ the simplest, but fullest, musical conception.  With ‘the black flag,’ which waves at the end, I shall then cover myself—­to die.”

The truth was that Wagner, as so many another creative genius, spent his love chiefly upon the beings that he begot within his own heart.  Every genius is more or less a Pygmalion, and his own imagination is the Aphrodite that gives life to the Galateas that he carves.  I have shown by this time that certain musicians have been most excellent lovers, and there would be documents enough to prove Wagner another, but we know it for a fact that his one great passion was for his art.  There is not recorded anywhere, I think, another such idolater of ideals as Richard Wagner.  To his theory of the perfect marriage of music and poetry, he sacrificed everything,—­his heart’s blood, his sensitiveness to criticisms, his extraordinary fondness for luxuries, his sense of pride, and to these he added human sacrifice,—­his wife, his friends, and any one who stood in his way.  He made himself a pauper, and begged and borrowed every penny he could scrape from every friend who could be hypnotised into supporting his creeds.  As a result, after years of humiliation such as few men ever did, or ever cared to, endure, after a battle against the highest and the lowest intellects, he attained a point of glory which hardly another artist in the world’s history ever reached.  He reached such a pinnacle that critics were not lacking who said that he often threatened to give Art a more important place in the State than Religion.