inferior to the other, is a serious mistake; it is too much like an attempt to separate the inseparable. What of Wagner the reflective artist or Wagner the thinker, whose thought is at heart simply an artistic demand? Testing the truth or soundness of Wagner's theories of art seems to me unprofitable business; but to see in them the play of an artistic personality, the ideal and credo of an artist to whom thought itself—as well as music or poetry-is a means of artistic self-expression, seems well worth while. The influence of Schiller and Schopenhauer may be admitted; so may the academic taint in most of Wagner's essays; but enough remains that is expressive of his own artistic self. His attack on the culture of his day is borrowed in part, but it is not in what he borrowed that the significance and interest of this attack lie. Rather do they lie in a strength of conviction which is itself nothing but the sustaining surface of an ideal of art. The same holds good on the whole of his constructive theory of the music drama. None of it is so much cold, hard thinking; it is the reflective artist who takes the plunge, and what he brings to the surface is a tangle of artistic motifs.

If it be granted that Wagner's theories as well as his music and poetry are the work of the creative artist there remains the task of getting the Wagner stamp: the thing that serves to mark the artistic consciousness that is back of this thought-tinted

art and color-soaked thought. That would be an easy matter if a consciousness like that of Maeterlinck were to be dealt with. We should then need

nothing but his own comment: Nothing in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything to which beauty clings so readily "; and an understanding of the soft, clear beauty that glows in his essays and plays alike. But Wagner's is far from simple. One word would not mark him; nor would two. He is nothing if not complex, in character, in development, in method, and in ideal. In describing his artistic personality one might use the terms character and dramatic quality, providedand this is the all-important proviso character were here defined as individuality, strength, intensity; and dramatic quality, in terms of conflict and transforming movement. Both as an artist and as a thinker Wagner has character. His music is individual, strong and passionate; his essays are personal reactions, intense and high-flavored in style; and in his art and his prose alike there is a lack of delicacy and self-restraint: a defect that is the very man himself. As for dramatic quality, there is plenty of a thoroughly characteristic kind. It expresses itself in Wagner's life and work first of all as conflict, as a struggle between such opposing forces as optimism and pessimism, need of life and need of love; then as transforming movement. There are other instances of an artistic consciousness that

is dramatic at heart: Browning, Rodin, Nietzsche; and, with certain reservations, Hegel; but at one point or another there is a sharp contrast. Both Rodin and Wagner are elemental, passionate, and dramatic in the sense of giving titanic struggles. There the likeness ends. Rodin's world-view is the simpler; he means his art to express cosmic struggle and unrest, cosmic passion and yearning. Dramatic in this sense, he is not dramatic in another; he gives no cosmic dialectic, no play and counterplay of great forces, no transforming clash of ideals. But these are the things that make up half the dramatic power of Tannhäuser and Der Ring des Nibelungen. Where Rodin is farthest Hegel seems nearest. Reality is for him nothing but dialectic; he gives not only the stress of thought, but its dramatic evolution by means of a chain of conflicts. In this sense his philosophic genius is dramatic to the core. It is significant that he has given a profound theory of the drama in terms of an antagonism of ideals, and hinted at the principle of emotional fluidity in music. But his life work in philosophy lacks full dramatic power; thought-dialectic seems thin and ghostly when set over against the massiveness and the spontaneous, electrifying touch of passion-dialectic. Nietzsche has caught the spirit of life as a contest without end, but his dramatic genius is much more subjective than Wagner's. Nor is Wagner's like Schopenhauer's. The dra

matic is not the deepest or most essential thing about Schopenhauer, neither a world-butchery nor a Nirvana being favorable to it. And it must be remembered that Schopenhauer, for all his brilliant theory of music, championed classical music, as he did elsewhere classical architecture. They seem to touch in their emphasis on conflict, but Wagner adds what Schopenhauer lacks, the principle of transforming movement. It is not present in Schopenhauer's theory of the successive objectifications of will-so many stone steps or separate blocks; it is present in Wagner's prose, where an imagination at once heavy and impatient pushes thought into thought and harmony into discord; or better still in his music: a music of violent contrasts, of fusings, and of a constantly changing life.

Understood in this way, character and dramatic quality may serve to mark Wagner the Artist and the Thinker.

V

HEGEL

And take upon us the mystery of things,

As if we were God's spies.

-SHAKESPEARE.

Ar first sight Hegel seems very unpromising material. What in the way of interesting art criticism or of a sympathetic theory of art can be expected of a man who grinds everything to powder between a pedantic terminology and an aggressive method? What place has the artistic in the personality of this intellectual contortionist? And why, if we do not care for contortions, should we pay so high a price of admission to this most difficult of all philosophies?

I can well understand the temptation to ask such questions. One has to break into Hegel's system by main force; and will find there among much of value a great deal that is worthless and puzzling. It must be admitted that his æsthetics share the defects of that system. Of his keen interest in art there can be no doubt; he spent much of his leisure in the picture galleries of Berlin and at art exhibitions, and at Vienna and Paris he had more than a

104