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I shall lay down a type of theological orthodoxy to which all the divine legends in our city must conform.

Plato, Republic (Grote's abstract)

"Parsifal" is the supreme test of the outcome of Wagner's theory that the modern theatre ought to bear the same relation to the life of the people as the theatre of the Greeks did. All students of the master's writings know that he preached this especially in those years when his system had attained definite and detailed form in his mind. In the Greek theatre he saw an art influence far-reaching and mighty,—an influence which dominated because it dramatized the artistic and religious ideals of a people. That he failed to discern the identity of religion and art in the symbolical embodiments named gods by the imaginative Greeks is another story.

Furthermore, he objected strenuously and rightly to any criticism of his philosophic and artistic system based on the study of his early works, which were written before his system was fully developed. In the "Communication to My Friends" he says:—

"Certain critics who pretend to judge my art doings as a connected whole have set about their task with this same uncritical heedlessness and lack of feeling. Views on the nature of art that I have proclaimed from a standpoint which it took me years of evolution step by step to gain, they seize on for the standard of their verdict, and point them back upon those very compositions from which I started on the natural path of evolution that led me to this standpoint.

"When for instance—not from the standpoint of abstract æsthetics, but from that of practical artistic experience—I denote the Christian principle as hostile to or incapable of art, these critics point me out the contradiction in which I stand toward my earlier dramatic works, which undoubtedly are filled with a certain tincture of this principle so inextricably blended with our modern evolution."

Excellent. The italics are not Wagner's. Let us, then, avoid falling into the error of chaining Wagner to the beautiful Christianity idealized by dramatic art, which he, unwise youth that he was, poured into his "Tannhäuser," and confine ourselves to the full-fledged "Parsifal," in which we are not, as he tells us, to regard the Christianity as a vital art principle, but as one opposed to true art. What does the man mean?

One thing is clear. Wagner did endeavor to theatricalize religions and to parody in his feeble modern manner the theatre of the Greeks. But if he failed (and who can doubt that he did after studying the bloodless philosophy of the last product of his genius?), it was because he was trying to do with calculating forethought what the Greek did spontaneously, and because his religion supplied him plentifully and unconsciously with the Schopenhauerian materials of art; namely, Eternal Ideas represented by means of prototypes.

How came Wagner to fail in his puerile attempt to make a drama out of a supposed incident in the life of Christ? Misled by the similarity of his conception of the Saviour of mankind as a pure human being resisting the seductions of a temptress in the person of Mary Magdalen to his Tannhäuser battling with carnal passion typified by Venus, or his Parsifal, remaining innocent through sheer guilelessness, he set out to thrust into the glare of the footlights the personality of Jesus. And then he found that the personality was not merely human, nor the poetic embodiment of an idea, even an Eternal Idea, but an everlasting miracle and mystery, a divinity beyond the reach of his trap-doors, purple lights, and tenor tubas.

The story of Christ is tremendously dramatic, but it has eluded every attempt at theatrical treatment. The thing done at Oberammergau is not drama, but an old-fashioned mystery play. It is a moving panorama. Pinero, Belasco, or even Ibsen would shrink from an attempt to dramatize for the ordinary theatre the story of the Saviour. But Wagner, blinded by his own ambition to make a show of all things, to seize upon every suggestion of religion as material for music, thought for a time that he could turn the Son of Man into a mime.

What a different art work was that of the Greek dramatist! How much more direct and thornless was the path by which he reached the theatrical representation of his gods and goddesses and the dramatic relation of the fables in which they were the actors! With his stylus in hand he sat at gaze upon a world of personated ideas, of symbols in action. All was poetic and imaginative. All was the creation of the human mind speculating upon the operation of unseen forces and subtle passions. There was no almighty revelation to baffle him. The infinite did not come and stand before him in an incomprehensible mortalization of itself. What he had of the world beyond the skies was the dreaming of his own kind.

What were Zeus and Hermes, Aphrodite and Hera, Artemis and Apollo, Pallas and Poseidon, but personifications of ideas, those eternal types which even the nugatory speculation of Schopenhauer postulated as the materials of true art? When the Greek tragic dramatist was not utilizing the gods, he employed the people of the mythologic tales. When Phrynicus, in 511 B. C., wrote a tragedy on the capture of Miletus, melting an audience to tears with the pathos of a well-known contemporary event, he was fined a thousand drachmæ for his ill-chosen subject.

When Wagner delved in the pagan mythology of the Northmen, he fell upon metal like that of the Greeks. Nearly every personage in the burg of Wallhal has a companion on Olympus. In the Eddas Wagner found eternal types created by the human imagination by the same processes as those of the Greeks. Hence the splendid humanity of his Wotan, his Brünnhilde, his Fricka.

What had the Greek? The entire Grecian religion grew out of the worship of the powers of nature. It recognized one power as the head of all, Zeus, the god of heaven and light. "And God said, Let there be light, and there was light." The Greek's notion of the beginning of all things was the same as the Hebrew's. With Zeus abode in the clear expanse of ether Hera, representing the eternal feminine element in the divinity. The other gods were partly representatives of the attributes of Zeus himself,—as Athene, knowledge, sprung from his head; Apollo, beauty and purity; Hermes, who brings up the treasures of fruitfulness from the depths of the earth; and Cora, the child, now lost and now recovered by Hera, typifying the winter and the summer. Poseidon and Hephæstus represented the elements, water and fire. But why go farther with this catalogue? It is known to every school-boy.

Together with these symbols the Greek dramatist had Hercules and Prometheus, Paris and Orestes, Jason and Medea, and other earth-born mythologic personages, the Siegfrieds and Gunthers and Sieglindes of their mythologic world, demigods and heroes all, acting in fables of wondrous poetic power, built on imaginative developments of ideals. The Greek world knew these tales. The dramatist of the Æschylean age was situated as Weber was when he put "Der Freischütz" before Germany. He utilized the fairy tales of the people, and offering them in a novel form made them eloquent with a new glory.

Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were the masters of the Greek tragedy; and their plays all deal with either mythologic or legendary stories and personages. The ideas preached in the ethics of their dramas were those of Greek morality. The gods and goddesses introduced or referred to were the embodiments of Greek ideals. Though the populace was not so able a doctrinaire as to know that there was in truth but one deity, Zeus, of whom all the others were but aids and expressions, it had the enormous advantage of intimate acquaintance with the poetic attributes of the galaxy of gods. It was a public ripe for its religious drama.

Now, when Richard Wagner set out to build up a modern theatre which should have the same relation to the life of the people as the theatre of the Greeks had to theirs, he started on the right path. He took the legendary materials to be found in German literature. He wrote with unerring judgment when he created his operatic version of "The Flying Dutchman." The pity of it is that he did not compose this work when he was at the period of the maturity of his genius. We should have had something almost as splendid as "Tristan und Isolde," for while the story is not so suggestive as the old legend treated by Gottfried von Strassbourg, it is not far behind it. At any rate, it is purely Teutonic in its character, though in its origin it is Greek. For, of course, Vanderdecken is but a modern replica of Ulysses. The Germans knew the story, for Heine had made it theirs. Wagner wrote wisely and well in this drama.

In "Tannhäuser" again he found his materials in the vast treasure-house of German literature and legend. Possibly this story was known to fewer Germans than "The Flying Dutchman," but its character was sympathetic to them and there was no mistaking the force of its moral lesson. Yet the religious doctrines of this drama are not essentially those of the Christian Church; they are those of religion and morality in general. The idea of salvation through love of a pure woman is the Goethean doctrine of the eternal womanly leading us upward. It was not original with Wagner, but it was beloved by him.

In "Lohengrin" we come nearer to the mystical thoughts of such a work as "Parsifal," yet here humanity operates in the natural desire of Elsa to reach into the secrets of her husband's heart and life, and still more powerfully in the vengeful character of the sexless and inexorable Ortrud.

In both of these splendid dramas of Wagner's genius we are confronted at every step with the normal working of human passions, and love throbs through both of them. In "Parsifal" we have no single pulse of love. In "Parsifal" salvation is brought by ignorance and miracle. In "Tannhäuser" it comes triumphantly through suffering, repentance, and prayer. In "Parsifal" the sufferings of Amfortas are relieved by the purity of another man. In "Tannhäuser" the misery of the hero is assuaged by his own repentance and the holy love of Elizabeth. The religion of "Tannhäuser" is human; that of "Parsifal" is ceremonial, panoramic, abstract.

"Parsifal" is a dramatization of ceremonials. In the first and third acts we behold the pageant of religious rites; in the second the diorama of bacchanalian orgies. Externals are thrust upon us constantly; the depths are hidden under a veil of scenic pretence and musical delusion. The bulk of the music of the work is external and descriptive. Little, indeed, is there of the tonal embodiment of subjective ideas. Compare the three acts of "Parsifal" with the three great emotional episodes of "Tristan und Isolde." What a stupendous development the latter work shows of the tragedy of fatal passion!

In its first act the operation of a magical agency breaks down the hitherto safe bonds of restraint and plunges two typical human beings into the very vortex of flaming love. In the second act they rush together and forget honor. The stroke of retribution falls; fate deals her deadly blow. In the third act remorse, agony, death, and the salvation of suffering souls by negation.

There is a drama which preaches no religious doctrine, which has no dogma save the Buddhistic one of release from suffering by death, yet which stands in closer relation to the life of the people than all of Wagner's religious dramas, because it deals with world-thoughts.

When Wagner worked with the purely mythical and legendary tales of the German people, he built dramas of national character and power. When he undertook to turn into theatrical pageants the teachings of Christianity, he failed utterly. The Greek succeeded because his religion was one of symbols, of deifications of the powers of nature, with its literature developed from tales of the fabulous doings of gods and goddesses, tales embodying in imaginative form fundamental facts of nature.

When Wagner sought his inspiration in the mythology of the North, which was developed in precisely the same manner as the Greek mythology, he found material of poetic and suggestive kind. But when, by dramatizing Christian doctrine and history, he tried to bring his national theatre into such relation to the life of the people as the Greek dramatists brought theirs, he failed, for the simple reason that at this point his entire theory as to the suitability of mythical and legendary material to the use of the dramatist broke down.

There is nothing mythological in the teachings of the Christian religion, nor in the acts of its Founder or apostles. These things stand apart from mythology and are differentiated from it absolutely. They are not and could not have been the product of human imagination, symbolizing human experience and speculation. The profoundest philosophers of antiquity never hit upon the basic doctrines of Christianity.

Beautiful as the teachings of Socrates are, they are essentially human. The Sermon on the Mount sets up a system of ethics never dreamed of by Aristotle or Plato. Only Buddha ever approached Christ, and the outcome of the Hindu's entire system was not eternal salvation and glory, but endless silence and the negation of death. From this Wagner could not escape, even in his "Parsifal," for Kundry, in the final scene, dies of what? Of a Buddhistic ethical idea!

Wagner's greatest works are unquestionably those in which the fundamental myths or legends were symbolical of human passions, of the worldwide experience of mankind. "Tannhäuser," "Die Walküre," "Siegfried," "Götterdämmerung," and "Tristan und Isolde" are Wagner's masterpieces of serious drama, not the saccharine "Lohengrin," nor the tinselled ritual, "Parsifal." Are not those, with the matchless comedy of manners, "Die Meistersinger," enough for one mind to have created? Why should we believe it incumbent upon us to uphold all that Wagner did?

We can say of him as Prentice said of Napoleon, "Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his own originality." Taking him by and large, as the sailors say, he was the most striking figure in musical history. Why discredit him by trying to show that "Parsifal," the feeble child of his artistic senility, was filled with the vigor of his young Volsung or the radiant power of his immortal song of love insatiate?