Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Part 1

Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great.

by Elbert Hubbard.

RICHARD WAGNER

Was ever work like mine created for no purpose? Am I a miserable egotist, possessed of stupid vanity? It matters not, but of this I feel positive; yes, as positive as that I live, and this is, my "Tristan and Isolde," with which I am now consumed, does not find its equal in the world's library of music. Oh, how I yearn to hear it; I am feverish; I am worn. Perhaps that causes me to be agitated and anxious, but my "Tristan" has been finished now these three years and has not been heard. When I think of this I wonder whether it will be with this as with "Lohengrin," which now is thirteen years old, and is still dead to me. But the clouds seem breaking, they are breaking--I am going to Vienna soon. There they are going to give me a surprise. It is supposed to be kept a secret from me, but a friend has informed me that they are going to bring out "Lohengrin."

--_Wagner in a Letter to Praeger_

RICHARD WAGNER

Absurd and silly people make jokes about mothers-in-law, stepmothers and stepfathers--we will none of this. My heart warms to the melancholy Jacques, who dedicated his book to his mother-in-law, "my best friend, who always came when she was needed and never left so long as there was work to do." Richard Wagner's stepfather was his patient, loving and loyal friend.

The father of Wagner died when the child was six months old. The mother, scarcely turned thirty, had a brood of seven, no money and many debts.

There is trouble for you--ye silken, perfumed throng, who nibble cheese-straws, test the hyson when it is red, and discuss the heartrending aspects of the servant-girl problem to the lascivious pleasings of a lute!

But the widow Wagner was not cast down to earth--she resolved on keeping her family together, caring for them all as best she could. The suggestion from certain kinsmen that the children should be given out for adoption was quickly vetoed. The fine spirit of the woman won the admiration of a worthy actor, in slightly reduced circ.u.mstances, who had lodgings in the house of the widow. This actor, Ludwig Geyer by name, loved the widow and all of the brood, and he proposed that they pool their poverty.

And so before Mrs. Wagner had been a widow a twelvemonth they were married.

In this marriage Geyer seemed to be moved to a degree by the sentiment of friendship for his friend, the deceased husband. Geyer was a man of many virtues--amiable, hopeful, kind. He had the artistic temperament without its faults. To writers of novels, in search of a very choice central character, Ludwig Geyer affords great possibilities. He was as hopeful as Triplett and a deal more versatile. The histrionic art afforded him his income of eleven dollars a week; but painting was his forte--if he only had time to devote to the technique! Yet all the arts being one he had written a play; he also modeled in clay and sang tenor parts as understudy to the great Schudenfeldt. Hope, good-cheer and a devotion to art were the distinguishing features of Mein Herr Geyer.

All this was in the city of Leipzig; but Herr Geyer becoming a member of the Court Theater, the family moved to Dresden, where at this time lived one Weber, a composer, who used to walk by the Geyer home and occasionally stop in for a little rest. At such times one of the children would be sent out with a pitcher, and the great composer and Herr Geyer would in fancy roam the realm of art, and Herr Geyer would impart to Herr Weber valuable ideas that had never been used. The little boy, Richard, used to cherish these visits of Weber, and would sit and watch for hours for the coming of the queer old man in the long gray cloak.

The stork, one fine day, brought Richard a little sister. He was scarce two years older than she. These two sort of grew up together, and were ever the special pets of Herr Geyer, who used to take them to the theater and seat them on a bench in the wings where they could watch him lead the a.s.sault in "The Pirate's Revenge."

Richard regarded his stepfather with all the affection that ever a child had for its own parent; and until he was twenty-one was known to the world as Richard Wilhelm Geyer.

The comparison of Ludwig Geyer with Triplett is hardly fair, for Geyer's fine effervescence and hopeful, rainbow-chasing qualities were confined to early life.

As the years pa.s.sed Geyer settled down to earnest work and achieved a considerable success both as an actor and as a painter. The unselfish quality of the man is shown in that his income was freely used to educate the Wagner children. He was sure that Richard had the germ of literary ability in his mental make-up, and his ambition was that the boy should become a writer. But alas! Geyer did not live long enough to know the true greatness of this child he had fostered and befriended.

Unlike so many musicians Richard was not precocious. He was slow, thoughtful and philosophic; and music did not attract him so much as letters. Incidentally he took lessons in music with his other studies, and his first teacher, Gottlieb Muller, has left on record the statement that the boy was "self-willed and eccentric, and not fluid enough in spirit to succeed in music."

The mother of Wagner seems to have been a woman of marked mentality--not especially musical or poetic, but possessing a fine appreciation of all good things, and best of all, she had commonsense. She very early came to regard Richard as her most promising child, and before he was ten years of age, said to a friend, "Richard will be able to succeed at anything he concentrates his mind upon."

The truth of the remark has often been reiterated. The youth was superb in his mental equipment--strong, capable, independent. Had he turned his attention to any other profession, or any branch of art or science, he could have probed the problem to its depths, and made his mark upon the age in which he lived.

In height Wagner was a little under size, but his deep chest, well-set neck, and large, shapely head gave him a commanding look. In physique he resembled the "big little men" like Columbus, Napoleon, Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton and John Bright--men born to command, with ability to do the thinking for a nation.

It's magnificent to be a great musician, and many musicians are nothing else, but it is better to be a man than a musician. Richard Wagner was a man. Environment forced literature upon his attention: he desired to be a great poet. He wrote essays, stories, quatrains, epics. Chance sent the work of Beethoven within his radius, and he became filled with the melody of the master. Young men of this type, full of the pride of youth, overflowing with energy, search for a something on which to try their steel. Wagner could write poetry, that was sure, and more, he could prepare the score and set his words to music. He fell upon the work like one possessed--and he was. To his amazement the difficulties of music all faded away, and that which before seemed like a hopeless task, now became luminous before the heat of his spirit.

Nothing is difficult when you put your heart in it.

The obstacles to be overcome in setting words to sounds were like a game of chess--a pleasing diversion. In a month he knew as much of the science of music as many men did who had grubbed at the work a lifetime.

"The finances! Get your principles right and then 'tis a mere matter of detail, requiring only concentration--I will arrange it," said Napoleon.

Wagner focused on music, yet here seems a good place to say that he never learned either to play the piano or to sing. He had to trust the "details" to others. Yet at twenty he led an orchestra. Soon after he became conductor of the opera at Magdeburg.

In some months more he drifted to Konigsberg, and there acted as conductor at the Royal Theater. In the company of this theater was a young woman by the name of Wilhelmina Planer. Wagner got acquainted with her across the footlights. She was young, comely and all that--they became engaged. Shortly afterwards, one fine moonlight night, in response to her merry challenge, they rang up the "Dom" and were married. They got better acquainted afterward.

It is a fact that Wagner's imprudent marriage at the age of twenty-three has been much regretted and oft lamented. "What," say the Impressionable Ones, "Oh, what could he not have accomplished with a proper mate!"

It is very true that Minna Planer had no comprehension of the genius of her husband; that her two feet were always flatly planted on earth, and her head never reached the clouds; and true it is that she was a weary weight to him for the twenty-five years they lived together. Still men grow strong by carrying burdens; and we must remember that Wagner was what he was on account of what he endured and suffered.

Wagner expressed himself in his art, and all great art is simply the honest, spontaneous, individual expression of soul-emotion. Had Wagner's emotions been different he would have produced a totally different sort of art. That is to say, if Wagner in his youth had loved and wedded a woman who was capable of giving his soul peace, we would have had no Wagner; we would have had some one else, and therefore a totally different expression, or no expression at all. Probably the man would have been quite content to be a village Kapellmeister. His life being reasonably complete, his spirit would not have roamed the Universe crying for rest. The ideals of his wife were so low and commonplace that she influenced his career by ant.i.thesis. His soul was ahungered for the bread of life, and stones were given him in way of the dull, the ugly, the affected, the smug, the ridiculous. Wagner's life was a revolt from the ossified commonplace, a struggle for right adjustment--a heart tragedy. And all this reaching out of the spirit, all the prayers, hopes, fears and travail of his soul, are told and told again in his poetry and in his music.

All art is autobiography.

Minna Planer was amiable and kind, but the frantic effort she made at times, in public, to be profound or chic must have touched the great man on the raw. He sought, however, to protect her, and at public gatherings used to keep very near to her in order that she should not fall into the clutches of some sharp-witted enemy and be lead on into unseemliness of speech. The scoffs of critics and the ready-made gibes and jeers of the mob were to her gospel truth; her husband's genius was a vagary to be stoutly endured. So for many years she was inclined to pose as one to be pitied--and so she was. That she suffered at times can not be denied, yet G.o.d is good, and so has put short limit on the sensibilities of the vain.

But Wagner would never tolerate an unkind word spoken of Minna in his presence, and once rebuked a friend who sought to console him by saying, "Never mind, Minna lives her life the best she can, and expresses the thoughts that come to her--what more do you and I do?"

And in his later years, when calm philosophy was his, he realized that Minna Planer had supplied him a stinging discontent, a continued unrest that formed the sounding-board on which his sorrow and his hope and his faith in the Ideal were echoed forth.

Love is the recurring motif in all of Wagner's plays. A man and a woman, joined by G.o.d, but separated by unkind condition, play their parts, and our hearts are made by the Master to vibrate in sympathy with the central idea. Only a broken-hearted man could have conjured forth from his soul such couples as these: Senta and the Dutchman, Elizabeth and Tannhauser, Elsa and Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Siegmund and Sieglinde, Walter and Eva, Siegfried and Brunhilde.

Wagner's unhappy marriage forms the keynote of his art. Every opera he wrote depicts a soul in bonds. From "The Flying Dutchman" to "Parsifal"

we are shown the struggle of a strong man with cruel Fate; a reaching out for liberty and light; the halting between duty and inclination; and the endless search for a woman who shall give deliverance through her abiding love and faith.

All art seems controlled by fad and fashion. No fashion endures, else 'twere not fashion, and in its character the fad is essentially transient. Still we need not rail at fashion; it is a form of periodicity, and periodicity exists through all Nature. There are day and night, winter and summer, equinox and solstice, work and rest, years of plenty and years of famine. Comets return, and all fashions come back. Keep your old raiment long enough and it will be in style.

All things move in an orbit, even theories and religions. Certain forms of fanaticism come with the centuries--every new heresy is old. All extremes cure themselves, for when matters get pushed to a point where the balance of things is in danger of being disturbed, a Reformer appears and utters his stentorian protest. This man is always ridiculed, hooted, reviled, mobbed, and very happy indeed is his fate if he is hanged, crucified or made to drink of the deadly hemlock; for then his place in the affection of men is made secure, sealed with blood, and we proclaim him liberator or savior. The Piazza Signora is sacred soil because there it was that Savonarola died; John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on; J. Wilkes Booth linked his own name with that of Judas Iscariot and made his victim known to the Ages as the Emanc.i.p.ator of Men.

These strong men, sent at the pivotal points in history, are born out of a sore need--they are sent from G.o.d. Yet strong men always exist, but it is the needs of the hour that develop and bring them to our attention. Not always have the Reformers been fortunate in their takings off--many have lingered out lengthening, living deaths in walled-up cells. The Bastile, Chillon, London Tower, that prison joined to a palace by the Bridge of Sighs, and all other such plague-spots of blood are haunted by the ghosts of infamy. Before the memory of all those who wrote immortal books behind grated bars we stand uncovered.

Exile has been the lot of many who tried to live for sanity, justice and truth when mad riot raged. Dante, Victor Hugo, Prince Kropotkin and Wagner are types to which we turn. Then there is an attenuated form of persecution known as ostracism, which consists in being exiled at home, but of this it is not worth while to speak.

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

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

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

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

Whitman's book was well looked after by the local Antonius Ash-Box inspector of the day, its publication forbidden, and the author incidentally deprived of his clerkship at Washington; Millet did service as the b.u.t.t for jokes of artistic Paris, and was dubbed "The Wild Man"; Wagner's play was hooted off the stage.

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