Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Part 2

Once, at a picnic, Wagner climbed a tree and cawed like a crow; then hooted like an owl; he ate tarts out of a tin dish with a knife; a little later he stood on his head and yelled like a Congo chief. When Nietzsche tearfully interposed, Wagner told him to go and get married--marry the first woman who was fool enough to have him--she would relieve him of some of his silliness.

Shortly after this, the great Wagner festival came on, and Bayreuth was filled with visitors who had read Nietzsche's book, and bought excursion-tickets to Bayreuth.

Wagner was over his ears in work--an orchestra of three hundred players to manage, new music to arrange, besides the humdrum, but necessary, work of feeding and housing and caring for the throng. Of course he did not do all the work, but the responsibility was his.

In this rush of work, Nietzsche was dropped out of sight--there was no time now for long conferences on the Over-Soul and Music of the Future.

Nietzsche was snubbed. He went off to his garret and wrote a scathing criticism on the work of Richard Wagner. This divine music was not for the intellectual few at all--it was getting popular and it was getting bad. Wagner was insincere--commercial--a charlatan.

Nietzsche was no longer interested in Wagner--he was interested only in Nietzsche.

Literary men do not quarrel more than other men--it only seems as if they did. This is because your writer uses his kazoo in getting even with his supposed enemy--he flings the rhetorical stinkpot with precision, and his grievances come into a prominence all out of keeping with their importance.

In Eighteen Hundred Eighty-eight, Nietzsche issued his little book, "The Fall of Wagner."

After a person has greatly praised another, and wishes to say something particularly unkind about him, one horn of the dilemma must be taken. If you admit you were wrong in the first conclusion, you lay yourself open to the suspicion that you are also wrong in the second--that you are one who makes snap judgments. The safer way then is to cling close to the presumption of your own infallibility, without, of course, actually stating it, and claim that your idol has changed, backslidden--fallen.

This then lends an aura of virtue to your action, as it shows a wholesome desire on your part not to a.s.sociate with the base person, and also an altruistic wish to warn the world so it shall not be undone by him.

Of all the bitter, unkind and malicious things ever uttered against Wagner, none contains more free alkali than the booklet by Nietzsche.

Nietzsche, not being satisfied with an attack on Wagner's art, also made a few flings at his pedigree, and declared that the Master's real name was not Wagner: this was his mother's name, he being a natural son of Ludwig Geyer, the poet--the Jew. What this has to do with Tannhauser, Tristan and Isolde, the Ring, Lohengrin, and Parsifal, Nietzsche does not explain. In any event, the information about Wagner's birth comes with very bad grace from an avowed enemy, who practically admits that he got the facts, in confidence, from Wagner himself. Neither does Nietzsche, the freethinking radical, recognize that good men have long ceased taunting other men concerning their parentage, or boasting of their own.

A man is what he is; and the word "illegitimate" is not in G.o.d's vocabulary, since He smiles on love-children as on none other. If you know history, you know this: that into their keeping G.o.d has largely given the beauty, talent, energy, strength, skill and power, as well as that divinity which confuses its possessor with Deity Incarnate.

Wagner might have replied to Nietzsche in kind, and pointed him out as the product of "tired sheets," to use the phrase of Shakespeare. Wagner might have said, "Yes, I am a member of that elect cla.s.s to which belong William the Conqueror, Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus, the Empress Josephine, Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln!" But he didn't--he did better--he said nothing. Wagner had the pride that scorned a defense--he realized his priceless birthright, and knew that his mother and father had dowered him with a divine genius. Let those talk who could do nothing else: silence was his only answer.

In a year later, Nietzsche was taken to an asylum, dead at the top. He lingered on until Nineteen Hundred, when his body, too, died, died there at Weimar, the home of Goethe and the home of Franz Liszt--another of life's little ironies. It is an obvious thing to say that Friedrich Nietzsche was insane all the time. The fact is, he was not. He was a great, sincere and honest soul, intent on living the ideal life. He wrote thoughts that have pa.s.sed into the current coin of all the thinking world. When he praised Wagner to the skies and afterwards d.a.m.ned him to the lowest depths of perdition, he was sane, and did the thing that has been done since Cain slew his brother Abel. Take it home to yourself--haven't the best things and the worst that have ever been said about you, been expressed by the same person?

The opinion of any one person concerning any man of genius, or any product of art, is absolutely valueless. Whim, prejudice, personal bias, and physical condition color our view and tint our opinions, and when we cease to love a man personally, to condemn his art is an easy and natural step. What was before pleasing is now preposterous.

Of course, it is all a point of view--a matter of perspective, and most of us are a trifle out of focus. When we change our opinions we change our friends.

As a prescription for preserving a just and proper view, and living a sane life, I would say, climb a tree occasionally, and hoot like an owl and caw like a crow; stand on your head and yell at times like a Comanche.

Robert Louis Stevenson says, "A man who has not had the courage to make a fool of himself has not lived."

The man who does not relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.

The madhouse yawns for the person who always does the proper thing.

Impropriety, in right proportion, relieves congestion, and thus are the unities preserved. And so here the great Law of Compensation, invented by Ralph Waldo Emerson, comes in: The sane, healthy man, who occasionally strips off his dignity and hoots like an owl, or rolls naked in the snow, will surely be called insane by the self-nominated elect, but his personal compensation lies in the fact that he knows he is not.

And now look upon the face of this man! Even so, and upon every face is written the record of the life the man has led: the loves that were his, the thoughts, the prayers, the aspirations, the disappointments, all he hoped to be and was not--all are written there--nothing is hidden, nor can it be. Here was one born in poverty, nurtured in adversity, and yet uplifted and sustained by homely friendships and rugged companions who dumbly guessed the latent greatness of their charge.

With soul athirst he sought for truth, and stubbornly groped his way alone. Immediate precedent stood to him for little, and his sincerity and honesty made him the b.u.t.t of mob and rabble. His ambition to be himself, to live his life, the desire to express his honest thought, led straight to deprivation of bread and shelter. He had too much sympathy, his honesty was not tempered by the graces of a diplomat--a price was placed upon his head. By the help of that one n.o.ble friend, whose love upheld him to the last, he escaped to a country where freedom of speech is not a byword. But misunderstanding followed close upon his footsteps, even his wife doubted his sanity, mistaking his genius for folly, and died undeceived. Calumny, hate, brutal criticism, the contempt of the so-called learned cla.s.s--and all the train of woe that want and debt can bring to bear were his lot and portion.

Still he struggled on, refusing to compromise or parley--he would live his life, expressing the divinity within, and if fate decreed it so, die the death, misunderstood, reviled, and be forgotten.

And so he lived, working, praying, hoping, toiling, travailing--but with days, now and then, when rifts broke the clouds and the sun shone through, his Other Self giving approbation by saying, "Well done! the work will live."

More than half a century had pa.s.sed over his head, and the frost of years had whitened his locks; his form was bowed from the many burdens it had borne; the fine face furrowed with lines of care; his eyes grown dim from weeping--when gradually the critics grew less severe.

Advocates were coming to the front, demanding that brutal hands should no longer mangle this man: grudgingly pardon came for offenses never committed, and he was permitted to return to his native land. Strong men and women placed themselves on his side. They declared their faith, and said his work was sublime; and they boldly stated the patent fact that those who had done most to cry Wagner down, had themselves done nothing, nor added an iota to the wealth or the harmony of the world. People began to listen, to investigate, and they said, "Why, yes, the music of Wagner has a distinct style--it has individuality."

Individuality is a departure from a complete type, and so is never perfect, any more than man is perfect. But Wagner's music is honest and genuine emotion set to sweet sounds, with words in keeping. It mirrors the hopes, the disappointments, the aspirations and the love of a great soul.

As men and women grew to cultivate the hospitable mind and receptive heart, tears filled their eyes and as they listened they came to understand. Honesty and genuineness in souls are too rare to flout--when found men really uncover before them. The people saw at last that they had been deceived by the savants, blinded by the dust of paid and prejudiced critics, fooled by those who led the way for a consideration.

They flocked to see the great composer and listen to his matchless music, and they gave the man and his work their approval. Such sums were paid to him as he had only read of in books. Adulation, approbation and crowning fame were his at last.

Then love came that way and gentle, trusting affection, and sweet, spiritual comradeship, such as he had never known except in dreams--all these were his. His fame increased, and lavish offers from across the sea came, proffering him such wealth and honor as were not for any other living artist.

A theater was built for the presentation of his productions alone; the lovers of music from every nation made Bayreuth a place of pilgrimage.

When the man died--pa.s.sed peacefully away, supported by the arms of the one woman he had loved--the daughter of Liszt--the art-loving world paid his genius all the tribute that men can offer to the worth of other men.

And now the pa.s.sing years have brought a confirmation in belief of the statement made by Franz Liszt, "Richard Wagner is the one true musical genius of his age."

Wagner's admirers should, for him, plead guilty to the worst that can be said: he is everything that his most bitter critics say, but he is so much more that his faults and follies sink into ashes before the divine fire of his genius, and we still have the gold. Inconsistent, paradoxical, preposterous--why, yes, of course! Still he is the greatest poet of pa.s.sion the world has ever seen--don't cavil--pa.s.sion's consistency consists in being inconsistent.

"Every sentence must have a man behind it," and so we might say, "Every bar of music must have a man behind it." That harmony only can live which once had its dwelling-place in a great and tender heart.

The province of art is to impart a sublime emotion, and that which affects to be an emotion, no matter how subtly launched, can never live as cla.s.sic art. Honesty here, as elsewhere, must have its reward. Be yourself, though all the world laugh.

I will not say that Wagner was--he is. The man himself in life was often worn to the quick by the deprivations he had to endure, or the stupid misunderstandings he encountered, so at times he was impatient, erratic, possibly perverse. But all that is gone--his mistakes have been washed in the blood of Time--only the good survives. The best that this great and G.o.dlike man ever thought, or felt, or knew, is ours--he lives immortal in his Art.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PAGANINI]

PAGANINI

For lo! creation's self is one great choir, And what is Nature's order but the rhyme Whereto the worlds keep time, And all things move with all things from their prime?

Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre?

In far retreats of elemental mind Obscurely comes and goes The imperative breath of song, that as the wind Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows.

--_William Watson_

PAGANINI

Some time ago, after my lecture one night in Boston, I bethought me to call on my old friend Bliss Carman. I expected he would be sleeping the sleep of the just, but I was prepared to rout him out, for although my errand was from a fair, frail young thing, and trivial, yet I was bound to deliver the message--for that is what one should always do.

But the poet was not abed--he was pacing the room in a fine burst of poetic fervor, composing "More Songs From Vagabondia." The songs told of purling streams, hedgerows, bathers lolling on the river-bank, nodding wild flowers, chirping pewees, and other such poetic properties, which the singer conjured forth from boyhood's days, long since gone by.

This suite of rooms, where the poet worked, was in a fine house on a fashionable street, and I noticed the place bore every mark of elegant bachelor ease and convenience that good taste could dictate. The best "Songs From Vagabondia," I am told, are written in comfortable apartments, where there are a bath and a Whitely Exerciser; but patient, persistent effort and work overtime are necessary to lick the lines into shape so they will live. Good poets run their machinery in double shifts.