Part 2

In the history of letters there is a writer by the name of Green, who exists simply because he reviled a contemporary poet by the name of Shakespeare. Green's name is embalmed in immortal amber with that of Richard Quiney, who wrote a letter to the author of "The Tempest" begging the favor of a loan of forty pounds.

There are several ways of winning fame. Joseph Jefferson has written in classic style of Count Johannes and James Owen O'Connor, who played "Hamlet" to large and enthusiastic audiences, behind a wire screen; then there was John Doe, who fired the Alexandrian Library, and Richard Roe, the man who struck Billy Patterson. Besides these we have the Reverend Obadiah Simmons of Nashville, Tennessee, who, in Eighteen Hundred Sixty, produced a monograph proving that negroes had no souls, the value of which work, to be sure, is slightly vitiated when we remember that the same arguments were used, in Seventeen Hundred One, by Bishop Volberg, in showing that women were in a like predicament.

And now Henry T. Finck has compiled a list of more than one hundred names of musical critics who placed themselves on record in opposition to Richard Wagner and his music. Only such men as proved themselves past masters in density and adepts in abuse are given a place in this Academy of Immortals.

No writer, musician or artist who ever lived brought down on his head an equal amount of contumely and disparagement as did Richard Wagner. Turner, Millet and Rodin have been let off lightly compared with the fate that was Wagner's; and even the shrill outcry that was raised in Boston at sight of MacMonnies' Bacchante was a passing zephyr to the storm that broke over the head of Wagner in Paris, when, after one hundred sixteen rehearsals, "Tannhauser" was produced.

The derisive laughter, catcalls, shouts, hisses and uproar that greeted the play were only the shadow of the criticisms that filled the daily press, done by writers who mistook their own anserine limitations for inanity on the part of the composer. They scorned the melody they could not appreciate, like men who deny the sounds they can not hear; or those who might revile the colors they could not distinguish. And worse than all this, the aristocratic hoodlums refused to allow any one else to enjoy, and would not tolerate the thought that that which to them was "jumbling discord, seven times confounded" might be a succession of harmonies to one whose perceptions were more fully developed.

Wagner himself only escaped personal violence by discreetly keeping out of sight. The result of the Paris experiment was that the poor man lost nearly a year's time, all of his modest savings were gone, creditors dogged his footsteps, and the unanimous tone of the critics, for a time, almost made him doubt his own sanity. What if the critics were really right?

And this, we must remember, was in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-one, when Wagner was forty-eight years of age.

That even a strong man should doubt his value when he finds a world of learned men arrayed against him is not strange. Every man who works in a creative way craves approbation. Some one must approve. After the first fever of ecstasy there comes the reaction, when the pulse beats slow and the mind is filled with doubt and melancholy. This desire for approval is not a weakness--it seems to stand as a natural need of every human soul. When the great Peg Woffington played, you remember, she begged Sir Henry Vane to stand in the wings so as to meet her when she came off the stage, take her in his arms just for an instant, kiss her on the forehead and say, "Well done!"

Shallow people may smile at such a scene as this, but those who have delved in the realm of creative art know this fervent need of a word of encouragement from One who Understands.

The one man who held the mirror up to Nature for Wagner was Franz Liszt. Were it not for the steadfast love and faith of this noble soul, Wagner must surely have fallen by the way. Wagner worked first to please himself, and having pleased himself he knew it would please Franz Liszt, and having pleased Franz Liszt he knew it would please all those as great, noble, excellent and pure in heart as Franz Liszt. To speak to an audience made up of such as Liszt, and have them approve, was the sublime dream and hope of Richard Wagner.

Some of the enemies of Wagner, having placed themselves on record against the man, have sought to make out that Wagner and Liszt often quarreled, but this canard has now all been exploded. Such another friendship between two strong men I can not recall. That of Goethe and Schiller seems a mere acquaintanceship, and the friendship of Carlyle and Emerson a literary correspondence with an eye on posterity, as compared with this bond of brotherhood that existed between Wagner and Liszt.

During the ten years of Wagner's exile in Switzerland he received barely enough from his work in music to support him, and several times he would have been in sore need were it not for the "loans" made him by Liszt. He did not even own a piano, and never heard his scores played, except when Liszt made a semi-yearly visit. At such times a piano would be borrowed, and the friends would revel in the new scores, and occasionally talk the entire night away.

When Liszt would go home after such visits, Wagner would go off on long tramps, climbing the mountains, lonely and bereft, sure that the mood for high and splendid work would never come again. Then some morning the mist would roll away, the old spirit would come back, and he would apply himself with all the intense fire and burning imagination of which his spirit was capable.

When the score was done it was sent straight to Liszt, before the ink was dry.

The "Lohengrin" manuscript was sent along in parts, and Liszt was the first man to interpret it. On one such occasion we find Liszt writing: "Your 'Walkure' has arrived--and gladly would I sing to you with a thousand voices your 'Lohengrin Chorus'--a wonder, a wonder! Dearest Richard, you are surely a divine man, and my highest joy is to follow you in your flight and be one with you in spirit!"

On this occasion, when the "Lohengrin Chorus" first found voice, the only auditor was the Princess von Wittgenstein, who added a postscript to Liszt's letter, thus: "I wept bitter tears over the scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde! This is beautiful--like heaven, like earth--like eternity!" Was ever a woman so blest in privilege--to be the near, dear friend of Franz Liszt and hear him play the music of Richard Wagner from the manuscript, and then add her precious word of appreciation for the work of the weary exile! The quotation given is only a sample of the messages that Liszt was constantly sending to his exiled friend. And we must understand that at this time Liszt had a world-wide reputation as a composer himself, and was the foremost pianist of his time. And Wagner--Wagner was only an obscure dreamer, with a penchant for erratic music!

The "Lohengrin" was produced at Weimar under the leadership of Liszt, but even his magic name could not make the people believe--the critics had their way and wrote it down.

Yet Liszt lived to see the name of Wagner proclaimed as the greatest contemporary name in music; and he was too great and good to allow jealousy to enter his great soul. Yet he knew that as a composer his own work was quite lost in the shadow of the reputation of his friend. At a banquet given in Munich in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-one in honor of Wagner, Liszt said, "I ask no remembrance for myself or my work beyond this: Franz Liszt was the loved and loving friend of Wagner, and played his scores with tear-filled eyes; and knew the Heaven-born quality of the man when all the world seemed filled with doubt."

* * * * *

Among men of worth, no man of his time was more thoroughly hated, detested and denounced than Richard Wagner. Before he became an anarch of art, he was singled out for distinction by royalty and a price was placed upon his head. He escaped, and for ten years lived in exile, his sole offense being that he lifted up his voice for liberty.

That is the only thing worth lifting up your voice, or pen, or sword for. The men who live in history are the men who have made freedom's fight--there is no other. These men fought for us, and some of them died for us--Socrates, Jesus, Savonarola, John Brown, Lincoln--saviors all--they died that we might live.

Instead of dying for us, Wagner lived for us, but he had to run away in order to do it. There, in exile--in Switzerland--he wrote many of his most sublime scores, and these he did not hear played till long years after, for although the man could compose, he could not execute. The music was in his brain and he could not get it out at his finger-tips--for him the piano was mute. So now and again Franz Liszt would come and play for him the scores he had never heard, and tears of joy would flow down his fine face; then he would stand on his head, walk on his hands and shout for pure gladness.

All this, I will admit, was not very dignified.

Ostracism, exile, hatred, and stupid misunderstanding did not suppress Wagner. In his work he is often severe, stern, tragic, but the man himself bubbled with good-cheer. He made foolish puns, and routed the serious ones of earth by turning their arguments into airy jests. If in those early days he had been caught and carried in the death-tumbrel to the Place of the Skull, he would have remarked with Mercutio, "This is a grave subject."

Finally, public opinion relaxed, and Wagner found his way back to Germany. He settled at the town of Bayreuth, and very slowly it dawned upon the thinking few that at Bayreuth there lived a Man.

Among the very first who made this discovery was one Friedrich Nietzsche, an idealist, a dreamer, a thinker, and a revolutionary. Nietzsche was an honest man of marked intellect, whose nerves were worn to the quick by the pretense of the times--the mad race for place and power--the hypocrisy and phariseeism that he saw sitting in high places. He longed to live a life of genuineness--to be, not to seem. And so he had wandered here and there, footsore, weary, searching for peace, scourged forever by the world's displeasure.

The trouble was, of course, that Nietzsche didn't have anything the world wanted. In the time of the Crusaders, the tired children would ask at night-time, when the tents were pitched, "Is this Jerusalem?"

And the only answer was: "Jerusalem is not yet! Jerusalem is not yet!"

In Wagner, Nietzsche felt that at last he had found the Moses who would lead the people out of captivity, into the Promised Land of Celestial Art.

Nietzsche came and heard the Wagnerian music and was caught as flotsam in its whirling eddies. He read everything that Wagner had written, and having come within the gracious sunshine of the great man's presence, he rushed to his garret and in white heat wrote the most appreciative criticism of Wagner and his work that has ever, even yet, been penned. This booklet, "Wagner at Bayreuth," is a masterpiece of insight and erudition, written by a man of imagination, who saw and felt, and knew how to mold his feelings into words--words that burn. It is a rhapsody of appreciation.

Art is more a matter of heart than of head.

The book had a wide circulation, helped on, they do say, by the Master himself, who confessed that in the main the work rang true.

The publication of the book sort of linked these two men, Wagner and Nietzsche. The disciple sat at the feet of the elder man, and vowed he would be in literature what Wagner was in music. He gazed on him, fed on him, quoted him, waiting in patience for the pearls of thought.

Now Wagner was a natural man--a natural son of God. He had the desires, appetites and ambitions of a man. If he voiced great thoughts and wrote great scores, he did these things in a mood--and never knew how. At times he was coarse, perverse, irritable.

The awful, serious, sober ways of Nietzsche began to pall on Wagner--he would run away when he saw him coming, for Nietzsche had begun to give advice about how Wagner should regenerate the race, and also conduct himself. Now Richard Wagner had no intention of setting the world straight--he wanted to express himself, that was all, and to make enough money so he could be free to come and go as he chose.

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 associate 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 God's vocabulary, since He smiles on love-children as on none other. If you know history, you know this: that into their keeping God 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 class 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 passed into the current coin of all the thinking world. When he praised Wagner to the skies and afterwards damned 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 butt 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 noble 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 class--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 passed 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.