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Marking the Mind A History of Memory 1st Edition Kurt
Danziger Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Kurt Danziger
ISBN(s): 9780521898157, 0521898153
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.38 MB
Year: 2008
Language: english
This page intentionally left blank
Marking the Mind

Memory is one of the few psychological concepts with a truly

ancient lineage. Presenting a history of the interrelated
changes in memory tasks, memory technology and ideas
about memory from antiquity to the late twentieth century,
this book confronts psychology’s ‘short present’ with
its ‘long past’. Kurt Danziger, one of the most influential
historians of psychology of recent times, traces long-term
continuities from ancient mnemonics and tools of inscription
to modern memory experiments and computer storage. He
explores historical discontinuities, showing how different
kinds of memory became prominent at different times, and
examines these changes in the context of specific themes,
including the question of truth in memory, distinctions
between kinds of memory, the project of memory experi-
mentation and the physical localization and conceptual
location of memory. Danziger’s unique approach provides a
historical perspective for understanding varieties of repro-
duction, narratives of the self and short-term memory.

ku rt danziger is Professor Emeritus, York University,

Canada and Honorary Professor, the University of Cape
Town, South Africa.
Marking the Mind
A History of Memory

KURT DANZIGER
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521898157

© Kurt Danziger 2008

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2008

ISBN-13 978-0-511-42889-0 eBook (EBL)

ISBN-13 978-0-521-89815-7 hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-72641-2 paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

Acknowledgements page vii

1 Does memory have a history? 1

Individual memory as a historical problem 2
A conceptual history 6
The history of memory and the discipline of psychology 9
About this book 14

2 The rule of metaphor 24

The persistence of metaphor 24
How the gift of mnemosyne changed 27
Inscription: writing as memory 31
First sketch of a literary model: Aristotle 35
The culture of literacy and its standard model
of memory 37
Physical analogies 41
Computer memory 48

3 The cultivation of memory 59

From the singer of tales to the art of memory 59
The order of places and the order of things 66
Monastic memory 71
Medieval manuscripts as mnemonic devices 73
Working with texts 78
Decline of mnemonics and memory discourse 83

4 Privileged knowledge 91
Esoteric knowledge 92
The privatization of memory 98
Alienated memory 106
Biology and the science of forgetting 109
Memory as injury 112
Another kind of victim 116

5 An experimental science of memory 124

Is memory a scientific category? 124
The memorizing trap 127
The road not taken: Gestalt psychology 133
Sir Frederic’s insight: reproduction is reconstruction 137

v
vi contents

The Dark Ages of memory research and its critics 143

A different language 145

6 Memory kinds 156

A coat of many colours 156
Sensory memory and memory of the intellect 158
Enter phrenology 161
Phylogenesis and individual memory 162
Philosophers make distinctions 164
Amnesics speak 168
Memory systems in experimental psychology 171
The memory that is short 176

7 Truth in memory 188

Imagination and memory 189
A science of testimony 193
Psychoanalysis as an art of memory 197
Politics, truth and traumatic memory 205

8 A place for memory 222

Where is memory? 222
Generic phrenology 225
Loss of geographical certainties 229
A note on networks 233
The decade of the brain 234

9 Memory in its place 243

Fuzzy boundaries 243
The inner senses 246
Faculty psychology and its demise 248
Memory, perception and the individual 251
Is memory in the head? 259

Bibliography 278
Index 302
 Acknowledgements

When I embarked on the studies that form the basis for this book I regarded
them simply as extensions of previous interests that would provide some
amusement in old age. Gradually, this solitary pursuit turned into a book, a
process that could not have come to fruition without the help of others. It is
pleasant and appropriate to recall the stimulation provided by my Berlin
friends, Lorraine Daston and Gerd Gigerenzer, who opened up important
vistas for me. Subsequent conversation with David Murray showed me how
much I did not know about the psychology of memory.
In the later stages, Alan Collins, Gerry Cupchik and John Mills made
many suggestions for which I am grateful, especially those pertaining to
arguments that seemed perfectly clear to me but, apparently, to no one else.
At very early and very late stages of this project my former students Adrian
Brock, Jennifer MacDonald and Jim Parker made specific contributions that
are much appreciated.
I would like to thank Andrew Peart for his crucial role in keeping the
publication of this book on track. Judy Manners’s indispensable assistance
with the manuscript proved that even a typographically challenged writer
like me can be transformed into a publishable author. My son, Peter, went far
beyond the call of twenty-first-century filial duty in providing technical
advice whenever it was needed.
This is also the place to acknowledge permission from Princeton
University Press to quote passages from Plato’s Collected Dialogues,
edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns.

vii
1 Does memory have a history?

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Individual memory as a historical problem

A conceptual history
The history of memory and the discipline of psychology
About this book
Notes

All human societies remember their ancestors but they do so in very different
ways. Where there is no writing, memory of one’s forebears is evoked by
shared reminiscences, mementos or ceremonies, but never by rereading their
letters or obituaries. In some places, ancestors are recalled by donning
masks, by imitating their gestures and by going into a trance.1 We remember
our dear departed when we pay a visit to the cemetery. But cemetery
visits, as we know them, are essentially a nineteenth-century innovation.2
Memorial practices change through the ages. The role played by monuments
and processions, for example, has varied historically, not only in com-
memorating one’s immediate ancestors, but also in the way the collective
memory of societies is mobilized.3
Historical change in social practices of recall is not limited to ancestral
memory. Among non-literate people, rules and regulations cannot be recalled
by consulting written documents, though consultation of elders is common.
There may also be specialists in memory whose services may be required even
after the introduction of writing. Ancient Greece had the institution of the
mnemon, a person whose job it was to remember religious or legal matters
relevant to decision-making and jurisprudence.4 Roman politicians and law-
yers were known to own graeculi, ‘little Greeks’, who were intellectually
trained slaves that were also required to memorize social and technical
information so that they could prompt their masters during court sessions
and political or social events.5 With the accumulation of written documents the
essential function of these slaves would be passed on to archivists and librar-
ians. But this took many centuries, and in the Middle Ages oral testimony in
court would still enjoy greater trust than documentary evidence.6

1
2 does memory have a history?

Individual memory as a historical problem

That the practices and institutions of social memory are historically

embedded is not a matter open to doubt. Whether this has serious implications
for the understanding of individual memory is, however, a far trickier question.
The literature of modern psychology strongly implies that history has no
relevance for the study of individual memory processes. Within that body of
work the lack of any relationship between the history and the psychology of
memory appears to be taken for granted, for there are virtually no psycho-
logical studies that so much as raise the question. The neurophysiological basis
of memory processes is frequently addressed, their social basis rarely.
Yet recognizing the neurophysiological, and hence biological, basis of
human memory processes should lead one to the conclusion that these
processes must indeed have undergone a certain historical development. The
biological evolution of human brain physiology simply cannot account for
the kinds of memory skill that the modern individual employs every day:
‘Human memory is clearly not an adaptation for remembering telephone
numbers, though it performs this function fairly well, nor is it an adaptation
for learning to drive a car, though it handles this rather different problem
effectively too.’7
Any activity that involves reading must rely on memory processes that
could not have existed in that form before the invention of writing, a com-
paratively recent development in human history. Certainly, the possibility of
such a development may be considered to have been latent in the biological
equipment of the species homo sapiens, but that still leaves open the question
of how this equipment became adapted to serve the memory tasks that are
routinely accomplished by literate individuals. There can be no question of
biological adaptation here because the time-scale is far too short. One is
dealing with developments that take place in social-historical time, counting
perhaps in centuries rather than the millions of years of biological time. We
cannot expect to explain how we ended up with the cognitive abilities we
have by short-circuiting human cultural and social development.8
Such short-circuiting has sometimes taken the form of treating historical
change as a mere continuation of biological evolution, explained by the same
principles. For example, in the course of biological evolution, a trait ori-
ginally selected for one kind of adaptation may eventually come to serve
quite a different function. Feathers may have served the function of ther-
moregulation long before they were used to fly. Darwin’s term was
‘preadaptation’, whose teleological connotations are hopefully avoided by
the more recent neologism, ‘exaptation’.9 Applying this principle to the
social evolution of human memory, however, at best provides a statement of
the problem, while drawing attention away from the direction in which a
solution must be sought. The increasing complexity of human society and
vast technological progress have greatly multiplied the functions that human
memory has to serve. It follows that whatever memory facilities were
 Individual memory as a historical problem 3

selected in the course of human evolution must have come to serve a host of
new functions in the course of human history. But this is merely to state the
obvious. The question that should be on our agenda now concerns the course
of this functional change, a course that takes place within socio-historical
time, not biological time. For an understanding of this process we have to
turn to concepts and categories that are adequate to socio-historical change,
which ‘preadaptation’ and its variants are not.
Theoretical speculations about the evolution of human cognitive abilities
have thrown little or no light on the development of human memory in
historical time. This is because they have been preoccupied with the evo-
lution of proto-humans into humans and with human functioning during the
hunter-gatherer stage. Very little psychological attention has been directed at
the huge cognitive changes, particularly in human memory, that took place
after the advent of permanent settlement and literacy.
The work of Merlin Donald remains a notable exception.10 Although the
bulk of his work is concerned with the development of proto-human and
human cognitive skills before the advent of literacy, he identifies the fun-
damental link between the earlier and the later periods and recognizes that
human cognitive change did not stop with the early cave paintings of homo
sapiens. It may be true that our brains have not changed over the last few
millennia, but what sort of brain are we talking about? First of all, it is not
the brain of an isolated creature. In its natural environment this organ
functions within a network of social interaction linking the activity of several
brains. Second, this organ specializes in plasticity, so that its functioning can
be profoundly affected by the networks it is part of. Human brains are
specifically adapted for life within human culture. That includes highly
developed capacities for representation, the ability to use one cognitive
content to signify another.
For the history of human memory the crucial development involves the
use of materials outside an individual’s body for purposes of representation.
If those materials possess some permanence, such as marks on a rock surface
or a tree bark, they come to function as an external memory. Acts of
remembering may now be evoked, not only by the immediate presence of
other individuals, or by some kind of bodily activity, but also by previously
constructed symbols preserved by means of an external medium. From then
on the further development of human memory is inextricably bound up with
the historical development of external memory, a link that becomes par-
ticularly close once external memory takes the form of writing.
External memory is based on the purposeful modification of a physical
medium by means of specifically designed tools and skills. In short, external
memory constitutes a kind of technology, and like all technology it exhibits
historical change and improvement that depend on the social conditions of its
employment but also affect those conditions in turn. The technology of
external memory is a part of human history. But it can only function as part
of a system that includes the biologically constrained equipment of human
4 does memory have a history?

individuals. A tool is a tool only for those who know how to use it.
Developing various external memory systems was not just a matter of
material invention but also of acquiring the specific skills needed to get the
most out of those inventions. This means that the functioning of individual
memory, too, would be subject to historical change. The relatively brief
time-scale of human history may preclude significant phylogenetic change,
but this does not mean that human memory functions exactly the same way
now as it did 5,000 years ago.
For technologies of inscription to be of any use people had to acquire the
art of reading, something that was not hard-wired in their brains. But for
inscriptions to function as a useful external memory, people had to develop
memory skills that were just as novel as reading once was. They had to
discover ways of linking their own memories to the memory that was
potentially available outside. Without pointlessly reproducing everything
that was in external memory, they had to find ways of making the content of
external memory accessible. In other words, they faced special retrieval tasks
that were different from any retrieval tasks they would have faced in the
absence of external memory. Old mnemonic aids lost their value and new
ones had to be invented. As the archive of external memory became more
extensive, complex phonological and situational cues became much less
useful for recovering its content. Instead, people had to learn to organize this
content so that it became accessible through the use of new kinds of address
systems and logical arrangements. Externally archived material is useful
only to the extent that its organization is reflected in individual memory. If
the archive’s organization changes, as it certainly has in the course of his-
tory, individual memory eventually has to adapt its own organization.
But perhaps the organization of external memory is simply a reflection of
features that were already built into individual memory before there was any
external memory at all. This can be true only in the tautologous sense that
humans would not have been able to develop ways of linking external and
internal memory that were beyond the physiological limits of their biological
equipment. However, as those limits allow considerable latitude in the forms
of actual memory organization, these forms cannot be derived from them. It
certainly does not look as though the organization of external memory
required only the projection of an organization already established in the
human brain. If that had been the case, one would have expected far more
rapid advances in the organization of external memory than are observed in
human history. The slow rate of progress suggests rather a co-evolution of
external memory and the corresponding cognitive functions.
With the benefit of numerous inventions, accumulated over many cen-
turies, it is easy for us to assume that forms of memory organization which
we were taught in childhood are direct pointers to the way ‘natural’ memory
operates. We are thoroughly accustomed to accomplishing the retrieval of
verbal information by using indexes, titles, hierarchical arrangement and so
 Individual memory as a historical problem 5

on. Yet all these devices had to be gradually developed in the course of many
centuries during which people were slowly learning how to make the most of
their new forms of external memory. Nor were the advantages of each new
invention immediately obvious: there were false starts, setbacks and long
delays before mnemonic aids that seem to us so natural became widely
adopted.11 Thus, even after the adoption of alphabetic script, the use of
single-word units for representing and remembering written information was
far from natural to human external memory users. For those using the non-
Semitic scripts of the West, the very concept of ‘word’, as we understand it,
appears as a consequence of extended use of written information.12
Such observations raise questions about what exactly is being investigated
in modern memory research. Is it the constitution of a species-wide and
generic ‘human memory’ that is being studied in twenty-first-century
laboratories, or is it a socially embedded way of functioning that is the result
of a long period of adaptation to a gradually developing culture of literacy?
To decide this question the use of historical evidence is indispensable.
Individual memory is not only closely linked to historically changing
forms of external memory, it also does its work in the service of tasks whose
parameters are set by changing social demands and conventions. Consider
some of the culturally embedded memory tasks that have provoked thought
and wonder about the nature of human memory at various times. There is, for
example, the task faced by the designated storyteller, bard or keeper of
traditional lore in a non-literate society. Some of these individuals appear to
accomplish prodigious memory feats when they reproduce verbal narratives
that extend over many hours. Their reproduction is of something heard, not
read; they cannot go back to check the script in the middle of their narration,
yet they do not falter. How do they manage this feat? More to the point in the
present context, do they employ the same memory skills as a lawyer in
classical Rome mustering legal arguments without a prepared text in front of
him? Do either of them have anything in common with the medieval
preacher exhorting his flock by piling up biblical analogies and quotations
that he has not only ‘learned by heart’ but also ‘taken to heart’? If so, what?
Without looking at the historical evidence we cannot know. Nor can we
know whether the findings of modern memory research represent anything
more than a documentation of how human memory functions when con-
fronted with memory tasks that are as historically culture-bound as the tasks
faced by an illiterate storyteller, a Roman lawyer or a medieval preacher.
Because human memory functions in a social context, engaged in tasks
that bear the stamp of specific social demands, it has a history, a history that
did not stop when the first psychological memory experiment was set up.
Social demands give direction to the activity of remembering. In some social
contexts exact reproduction of certain words is important, for example, in
liturgical renderings of sacred texts or in many classical memory experi-
ments. In other situations the exact words need not be remembered as long as
6 does memory have a history?

their emotional impact is faithfully reproduced, for example, in the retelling

of an ancient legend. Sometimes there is a premium on remembering the
logical structure of an argument; at other times it is vital to remember the
layout of a building. But such memory tasks do not vary at random between
cultures and historical periods. At certain times and in certain places,
accurate memory for sacred texts is terribly important, but under different
circumstances this sort of memory may actually be discouraged. The same
can be said of all the other examples mentioned above and of most instances
of remembering one might care to think of. The point is that the social
context of memory is marked by what one might call mnemonic values that
give direction to the process of remembering.
Many of the historical changes in memory are due to changes in these
mnemonic values. They affect not only what is to be remembered, but also
how it is to be remembered. For example, medieval texts devoted to the
memory practices of monastic culture emphasize that biblical narratives
must be remembered with full emotional engagement.13 The kind of memory
that is sought after here is very different from the depersonalized storage of
discrete facts that has been so highly valued in more recent educational
contexts (and in many memory experiments). The memory the monks were
trying to develop did not express itself in the regurgitation of ‘information’
but in a kind of reliving, body and soul, of sacred narratives and parables.14
In another historical period, the Renaissance, a more embodied, emotionally
involving kind of memory would be compared to falling in love or being
lovesick.15 People have not always remembered in the same way, and their
most valued ways of remembering have not always been the same.

A conceptual history

The array of experiences, functions and capabilities to which the

term ‘memory’ was applied changed in the course of human history. The
details of this process are complex and include many different aspects
that await specific elucidation. Some aspects are more easily investigated,
because they have left records in the form of monuments, images or lin-
guistic inscriptions. Other aspects we know about because they are men-
tioned in surviving documents, for example, the use of mnemonic techniques
in what used to be called the ‘art of memory’. Yet other aspects, mainly
pertaining to memory in oral speech situations, can still be observed in
contemporary forms that may point to cultural survivals.
Describing and analyzing the social context for different ways of remem-
bering is a task best left to professional historians. In this book I draw heavily
on their work in order to supply the necessary background for my main topic,
the conceptualization of memory in the texts of different historical periods. In
 A conceptual history 7

these texts memory has become an identified object of reflection. No doubt

acts of remembering had sometimes occasioned comment, discussion and
speculation before the advent of literacy, but the exploration of that kind of
evidence requires the methods of the anthropologist and the oral historian.
That dimension is not covered in this book because it would inordinately
expand a topic that is already too large. There are many aspects to the history
of memory, and the aspect that provides the focus here emerges in the writings
of philosophers, physicians, psychologists and others who ensured the dis-
semination of beliefs about memory that these writings had probably helped
to crystallize in the first place. With the advent of this textual material con-
cepts of memory became part of the historical archive and therefore an
identifiable part of intellectual history.16
In these writings memory is posited as a distinguishable feature or cat-
egory about which things can be said. It forms the objective pole in a
subject–object relationship. As an object, memory is marked by a certain
degree of resistance or even recalcitrance. It does not automatically do what
one would like or expect it to. It plays tricks on one, refuses its help when
one needs it, distorts and decays. But perhaps it can be tamed? In one way or
another, all the historical moves discussed here constitute attempts at doing
just that, domesticating memory.
Concepts of memory have never constituted an isolated domain of ideas –
they were always deeply connected to social practices and cultural arte-
facts. Some of these social practices, such as ancient mnemonic techniques
or modern experimental techniques, have been directly targeted at memory
itself; other practices, such as those of literacy, have had an indirect, though
pervasive, effect on the conceptualization of memory. Cultural artefacts
whose history is intertwined with that of memory include written and
printed texts, more modern recording devices and digital computers.
Although the examination of concepts of memory forms the thread that
runs through this book, these concepts are placed in the relevant context of
changing practices and artefacts whenever the available historical evidence
permits.
During the period covered by this book, remembering ceases to be
something that people just do without being conscious of what they are
doing. They have come to separate remembering from their many other
activities and to reify it in the form of an object called memory. They begin
to reflect on this object, invent models for its working, intervene in its
processes, supply it with ever more sophisticated aids, and generally seek to
overcome its unreliability and recalcitrance. All this is happening in the
context of vast changes in their societies and their technologies, changes that
make new demands on human memory but also offer new possibilities for its
effective employment. Unreflective acts of remembering were supplemented
by deliberate attempts to modify the way memory operated and to enlist it in
specific human projects. Beliefs about memory, efforts to improve memory
8 does memory have a history?

and the social tasks for which memory was mobilized, affected each other in
a complex, historically changing interrelationship.
If one observed the manifestations of memory at any particular time one
would be getting a snapshot of a particular moment or phase in the long
history of this interrelationship. If one then forgot about the historical
dimension one might be tempted to imagine that people’s beliefs and
theories about memory are quite separate from the object itself. In that case,
ideas relating to memory would be on a par with theories in physics: the
theories might change but that would not affect their objects. One function of
a historical perspective is to remind us of the limitations of this analogy.
Perhaps a better analogy would be one that compared the way memory
works to the way a physical world transformed by technoscience works. Such
a world owes its existence to human insights and practices applied to the
physical world, though the laws of physics are still the same. Analogously,
the way memory operates in its social context – and there is always a social
context – depends in part on the way memory tasks and techniques have been
modified by beliefs, values and presuppositions applied to memory. This does
not imply any changes in the principles of neurophysiology, because there is a
fundamental difference between the socially embedded achievements and
failures of memory and the physiological resources that provide the possi-
bility of such achievements and failures. Achievements and failures are
always socially defined and therefore historically variable.
Ways of remembering are affected by changing mnemonic values: cul-
turally grounded assumptions about what is most worth remembering, what
ought not to be or need not be remembered, how the shards of memory should
fit together, what kinds of tasks memory should be expected to serve. Such
mnemonic values always imply certain conceptions of the nature of memory
and sometimes these conceptions are made explicit in texts that address the
topic. Historically, changes in memory practice were associated with changes
in discourse about memory, reflecting a change of mnemonic values.
For example, the precise reproduction of material from external memory
began to be highly valued in the period of the European Enlightenment and
became a common feature of everyday experience during the Industrial
Revolution. The emphasis on accurate factual memory affected educational
practice as well as business and industrial institutions. Some of the tech-
nological advances of this time led to the development of new visual and
auditory recording devices (camera and phonograph) that provided a ready
source for theoretical models of memory as a machine for the copying,
storage and exact reproduction of sensory input.17
The very concept of memory had changed. In previous times, as we will
see later, the copying function of memory had been recognized but subor-
dinated to other functions, such as moral improvement or imaginative pro-
duction. In modern times, the conception of memory as essentially a copying
machine meshed smoothly with the kind of memory work that was
 The history of memory and the discipline of psychology 9

increasingly being demanded in rapidly expanding commercial and indus-

trial institutions. When widely shared, this conception helped to focus
the deliberate exercise of memory in a particular direction and encouraged
the development of certain kinds of memory skills. Memory concepts,
technology, mnemonic values, institutional practices and memory perform-
ance were linked in a network of reciprocal influence.
Precisely because they have never existed in isolation, but have always
been part of a network of interrelated phenomena, conceptions of memory
have been implicated in the social manifestations of memory. Their history
therefore has to be examined in relation to memory technology and the social
practices linked to memory. There has never been any doubt that theories
about memory have changed historically. But one only needs to look at the
mnemonically relevant context of these changes to recognize that historicity
is a feature, not only of the theoretical component, but of many other
important aspects of human memory as well.

The history of memory and the discipline of

psychology

For the discipline of psychology, historical change in human

memory is a non-topic. There are two broad sets of reasons for this, one
related to psychology’s understanding of its subject-matter, the other to its
place among the disciplines. Let us consider these in turn.
Traditionally, the subject-matter of psychology was defined in terms of what
went on within individual minds. The behaviourist interlude changed that by
introducing environmental adaptation, but the concept of ‘environment’ con-
sidered appropriate for a psychological level of analysis was totally abstract.
As long as one was doing psychology, the kind of environmental richness
encountered in historical studies would be irrelevant because all environmental
features were reducible to generic ‘stimuli’ whose effects were governed by
behavioural ‘laws’ that did not vary across species, let alone across historical
periods. When behaviourism lost its attractiveness the traditional definition of
psychology’s subject-matter reasserted itself in a form that excluded any
psychological relevance for history as effectively as ever.
With the exception of some marginalized clinical studies, the psychological
study of memory now came to share the assumptions and precepts of what
became known as cognitive science. According to a widely cited and sym-
pathetic overview of cognitive science of the mid-1980s, the principles that
guided its approach included: (1) a commitment to a level of analysis
‘wholly separate’ from the sociological or cultural; (2) ‘faith that central to
any understanding of the human mind is the electronic computer’; (3) a
‘deliberate decision to de-emphasize . . . the contribution of historical and
cultural factors’; and (4) a list of relevant disciplines that significantly
excluded history.18
10 does memory have a history?

Within this framework what was called ‘memory’ consisted essentially of a

linear three-part process that encoded, stored and then retrieved informational
input from the environment. The entire sequence was understood as taking
place inside an individual mind/brain. What happened before encoding and
after retrieval was not considered part of the psychology of memory. Guided
by an inappropriate analogy with digital computers, this model constructed a
‘memory’ whose link with the outside world took the form of ‘inputs’ and
‘outputs’. Inputs took the form of presented information and outputs were fed
into an entirely separate sensori-motor system that was not part of the
psychology of memory. The system was iterative only with respect to cog-
nitive output in the form of symbols, which generated more symbols. What
was outside the scope of the model was the kind of feedback that occurs when
system-produced motor action in a material environment affects the system’s
own perceptual input. The limitation to pre-packaged presented information
cut the intrinsic link between memory and perception and reduced memory to
one functionally independent cognitive ‘module’ among others. Processing of
information in such modules was supposed to occur via symbols that were
defined purely syntactically, i.e. in terms of their relation to other symbols,
rather than in terms of anything they represented.
It was of course recognized that this kind of model could not deal with real-
world action in a socio-cultural context. But it was felt that such features
could be added later, once the basic architecture of human cognition had been
worked out. This strategy of cognitive science reflected an essentially Car-
tesian metaphysics that prioritized the thinking individual’s mind excerpted
from any social and cultural entanglements.19 The ‘memory’ of such a mind
would be outside human history: it dwelt only in the walled interior of the
universalized individual. Within such a framework, a history of memory
would not merely be irrelevant but would actually make no sense.
Towards the end of the twentieth century the limitations of this framework
became more and more apparent. Although it still underlies a great deal of
research in cognitive science, some fundamental rethinking has been
occurring in various quarters.20 Most relevant in the present context is a
growing realization that the rigid boundary between what is inside and
outside the individual mind should be abandoned, and that cognitive func-
tions like memory should not be isolated from perception and from action in
the world. Cognition is said to be ‘situated’ in a world that includes other
individuals and material artefacts. From this point of view ‘memory may not
be something really located within the individual’.21 That kind of shift
creates a conceptual space within which a historical psychology of memory
could play a relevant role. Potentially, the historical interlinking of memory
culture, memory technology and memory theory becomes significant for an
understanding of the psychology of memory. Bridging the gap between
human cognition and human history becomes not only possible but also
desirable.
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rely on elephantine effects to the neglect of finely wrought detail,
and to trust to stage mechanism to eke out the weaknesses of his
musical invention. The only improvement on the earlier Wagner that
the friend would have been able to observe in Rienzi would be that
in spite of all its absurdities and infelicities, its commonness and
elephantiasis, there is a new strength in the work. It is a strength
clumsily used; the youthful hobbledehoy's limbs have hardened
without his acquiring much more command over them than he had
before, the boyish voice has gained in volume without much
improvement in quality: but the general signs of muscular growth
are unmistakable. Crude as the overture is, no one can deny its
rampant, horse-power vigour. But the final convincing proof that
though Wagner's voice was abnormally energetic in Rienzi his
imagination was virtually at a standstill is the fact that the opera has
no colour, no atmosphere of its own. Every other work of Wagner
has. In Die Feen, as Mr. Runciman acutely points out, there is a
strange new feeling for light; in the Flying Dutchman we are always
conscious of the sea, in Tannhäuser of a world of sensuous heat set
over against a world of moral coolness and rather anæmic
aspiration, in Lohengrin of the gleaming river and the tenuous air of
Monsalvat. Rienzi conveys no pictorial or atmospheric suggestions of
any kind.
But the opera was only a reculer pour mieux sauter. He needed a
text that should be more purely musical in its essence than this; and
when he found it, in the Flying Dutchman—the idea of which came
to him shortly after he had commenced work on Rienzi—his genius
took its first decisive leap forward. For some years he had been
strangely undecided as to a suitable subject for an opera. He had
experimented, and was still to experiment, in several fields. In 1836
he had turned König's novel Die hohe Braut into a libretto, making
quite a good romantic opera in four acts out of it.[400] (It was
afterwards set by Joseph Kittl, in 1853, under the title of Bianca und
Giuseppe, oder die Franzosen vor Nizza.) In 1837 he made a comic
opera out of a story in the Arabian Nights, entitling it Die glückliche
Bärenfamilie, oder Männerlist grösser als Frauenlist ("The Happy
Bear Family, or Woman outwitted by Man"). This is a delightfully
vivacious little libretto, which might well be set by some modern
composer. Wagner wrote some fragments of the music for it, but
quickly became disgusted with the style, and turned his back on the
piece. In Paris in 1841 he made a preliminary prose sketch for a
libretto on a gloomy and rather striking subject of Hoffmann's, Die
Bergwerke zu Falun ("The Mines of Falun"), which one is sorry he did
not set to music, for it has colour and a certain individuality: he
would probably have made more of it than he did of Rienzi. But
perhaps he felt that the sombre vein he would have had to pursue in
Die Bergwerke zu Falun had been worked out to the full extent of
which he was capable in the Flying Dutchman. In the same winter of
1842 he made a first sketch of Die Sarazenin ("The Saracen
Woman"), expanding it in Dresden two years later.[401]
It was after all a sound instinct, no doubt, that made him
concentrate on the Flying Dutchman and let the other schemes drop,
for the Flying Dutchman gave him just what Rienzi did not—a
concentrated dramatic theme, and one with a very individual
atmosphere. Had his dramatic and musical technique been more
advanced than they were at that time he would probably have
condensed the story still further. He saw clearly enough that the
whole essence of the legend—or at any rate the whole of the
musical essence of it—lay in the Dutchman and Senta, and that all
the rest was mere scaffolding or trimming. "I condensed the material
into a single Act, being chiefly moved to do this by the subject itself,
since in this way I could compress it into the simple dramatic
interaction of the principal characters, and ignore the musical
accessories that had now become repellent to me."[402] But his
musical faculties, which developed with a strange slowness, were
still lagging a good deal behind his dramatic perceptions; and the
result is that to us to-day there seem to be a good many superfluous
"musical accessories" in the Flying Dutchman, owing to the fact that
Wagner has not been able to give real musical life to such characters
as Daland and Erik. He himself has described for us very lucidly in A
Communication to My Friends the diverging impulses in him that
gave the Flying Dutchman its present only partly satisfactory form.
He was wholly possessed by his subject, saw that it was necessary
to allow it to dictate its own musical form and method of treatment,
and honestly thought that he had let it do so; but the traditional
operatic form was more potent within him than he imagined at the
time. As in Rienzi, aria, duet, trio and the other established forms
somehow "found their way into" the opera without his consciously
willing them.
Still the structure of the Flying Dutchman is a great advance on that
of Rienzi: what was really happening was that the musician in
Wagner was beginning to see that the whole drama must be musical
drama, the poet not being allowed to insert anything that was
inconsistent with the spirit of music. He himself persisted in putting
it the other way,—that the poet in him gradually took over the
guidance of the musician. But we can see now that he misread his
own evolution. The poet in him undoubtedly outgrew, bit by bit, the
musical forms that had become stereotyped in the opera of the day;
but the poet's growth only became possible when the musician,
beginning to feel his own strength, gave the poet more and more
imperative orders to shape his "stuff" in a form that would afford the
musician the freest course. Wagner in later years insisted that after
he had elaborated Senta's ballad in the second Act, he found that he
had unconsciously hit upon the thematic kernel of the whole, and
that this thematic idea then spread itself naturally over the whole
drama like a network. That is not true if we take his words literally,
for of course a good deal of the thematic material of the Flying
Dutchman has no affiliation with Senta's ballad. But in the broad
sense, and with regard more to his intentions than his achievements,
we can see that he was right. The whole drama really emanates
from Senta; the Dutchman himself, as Mr. Runciman puts it, is
merely Senta's opportunity personified; the remaining characters are
only there to make the before and after of the central episode clear.
With more experience and a surer technique he could have cut away
more of the excrescences of the libretto and concentrated the action
still further, making it yet more purely musical, as he did with
Tristan. But for the day he did marvellously well. With the Flying
Dutchman was born the modern musical drama.
There is no mistaking the intensity and certainty of his vision now.
He no longer describes his characters from the outside: they are
within him, making their own language and using him as their
unconscious instrument. The portrait painter and the pictorial artist
in him are both coming to maturity. The Dutchman and Senta are
both drawn completely in the round; we feel, for the first time with
any of Wagner's characters, that we might meet them any day and
that they would be solid to the touch. Even Daland and Erik, though
not as real as the other two—for Wagner had not yet the art of
breathing life into every one of his subordinate characters—have a
certain substantiality. And roaring and whistling and surging round
them all is the sea,—not so much the mere background of the drama
as the element that has given it birth. Stylistically and technically the
new work is leagues beyond Rienzi. There is still something of the
old melodic mannerism—which, indeed, he was not to lose for many
years yet—but in many of the melodies there is a new leap, a new
swing, a new articulation; harmonically the work is richer; it often
attains a rhythmic freedom beyond anything that Wagner had been
capable of before; he is learning to concentrate his expression, and
to beat out pregnant little figures that limn a character or depict a
natural force once for all; there is a new psychological as well as a
musical logic, binding the whole scheme together and working up
from the beginning to the end in one steady crescendo. Wherever
the score is tested, it shows something not to be met with hitherto
either in Wagner's previous work or in that of his contemporaries.
His imagination is at last unlocked.
After this he develops steadily and rapidly until a fresh check is given
him, it being borne in upon him that neither his imagination nor his
technique is equal to the creation of the new world that he feels
stirring vaguely within him. But for a time all goes well. The Flying
Dutchman had been finished in the winter of 1841. Tannhäuser was
fully ready by April 1845, and Lohengrin by March 1848—just after
he had completed his thirty-fifth year. In these seven years he
exhausted all the possibilities of the style he had made his own;
after Lohengrin he instinctively feels that he is at the end of the one
path and the beginning of a new one, though where this is to lead
him he has as yet no inkling. Both the later operas represent a
gradual clarification and intensification of the style he had tentatively
used in the Flying Dutchman. The breach with the older opera is
even yet not complete; disguise the conventional features of it as he
will, they are still recognisable; aria and duet and ensemble are still
there, though they merge almost imperceptibly into each other. But
if Tannhäuser and Lohengrin are in large part still the old opera, they
are the old opera transfigured. The musical web spreads itself more
and more broadly over the whole poetic material. Recitative virtually
disappears; the text still retains a number of non-emotional
moments for which no really lyrical equivalent can be found, but
what would have been recitative naked and unashamed in Rienzi is
now almost fully-clothed song—the address of the Landgrave to the
Knights in the Hall of Song scene is an excellent illustration. The
choral writing attains an unaccustomed breadth and sonority, and at
the same time the chorus becomes a more efficient psychological
instrument. The harmonic tissue becomes fuller. The melodic line
becomes more and more expressive and sensitive. The orchestration
begins to give a distinctive colour to both personages and scenes. A
very ardent and penetrating imagination, the imagination of the born
dramatist, seeing all his characters as creatures of flesh and blood, is
now playing upon the material offered to the musician by the poet.
Each scene suggests by its colouring its own indoor or outdoor
setting, the hour of the day, the time of the year; yet each opera as
a whole has a different light and is set in a different atmosphere
from the others. The Wagner of this period reaches the supreme
height of his powers in Lohengrin; and as one watches that
diaphanous and finely-spun melodic web unfold itself, one is almost
tempted for the moment to regret that the dæmon within him drove
him on so relentlessly to another style. No one, of course, can be
anything but thankful that Wagner evolved the splendid symphonic-
operatic style of the second half of his life—the most serviceable
operatic instrument that any musician has yet hit upon. But the
more purely lyrical style of Lohengrin is so exquisitely satisfying in
itself that one would have been grateful had he turned back to it for
a moment in later days, when his melodic invention was in its fullest
glory. The main burden of the expression, in the later work, shifts
more and more to the side of the orchestra. In Lohengrin the voice
is still the statue and the orchestra the pedestal. The whole work is
the product of that equipoise of all the faculties that is often
observable in composers at the end of their second period, a
serenity resting upon their music that it never wins again in the
more troubled after-years, when the soul is more at war with itself,
and the lips can hardly find language for the pregnant images that
crowd to them.
But vast as the imaginative growth had been from Rienzi to
Lohengrin, it seems almost like a mere marking time in comparison
with the subsequent development. Most instructive in this respect
are the alterations Wagner made in his earlier works in later life. The
Flying Dutchman ends with the destruction of the Dutchman's ship
as Senta leaps into the sea. The stage directions in the first edition
run thus: "In the glow of the setting sun the glorified forms of the
Dutchman and Senta are seen rising above the wreck, clasped in
each other's arms, soaring heavenward"; and the final page of the
opera in its original form consisted of the "Redemption" motive
followed by the motive of the Dutchman, the opera ending with the
latter. When Wagner revised the work some years later, he was
conscious of the abruptness and inconclusiveness of this ending. His
pictorial imagination saw the transfigured forms of Senta and the
Dutchman more vividly, and the more luminous vision found
expression in the great stroke of genius with which the opera as we
now have it ends. The thundering theme of the Dutchman no longer
has the last word; the fortissimo swell of the full orchestra suddenly
breaks, and in a slower tempo there steals out in the soft, pure
tones of the wood-wind and harps the theme of "Redemption" in the
form it first assumes in Senta's ballad, but with an unexpected
heavenward ascent in the violins at the finish—
 No. 22.

[PDF] [MusicXML] [
The effect is precisely as if the clouds had parted, and the figures of
the Dutchman and Senta were seen soaring aloft in their purified
and transfigured form.[403]
As the first version of the Faust Overture (1840) has not been
published, it is impossible to compare it with the version we now
have, which was made in 1855; but we may be certain that the
comparison would prove as interesting as that between the earlier
and the later versions of the Flying Dutchman finale. But the new
Venusberg music that he wrote for the Paris production of
Tannhäuser (1861) shows as emphatically as the altered Flying
Dutchman ending how immeasurably greater than all his
development from Die Feen to Lohengrin was the development from
Lohengrin to Tristan—for it was in the Tristan period that he made
this wonderful addition to Tannhäuser, the effect of which is to make
the remainder of the score seem almost cold in comparison, a pale
moon against a fiery sun. Had Wagner died after Lohengrin he
would still have been the greatest operatic composer of his time. But
the work of the later years is so stupendous in every respect,
imaginative, inventive, and technical, that even Lohengrin seems
hardly to be the product of the same mind.

IV.—THE MATURE ARTIST

 1

The years 1848 and 1849 saw the climax of a great crisis both in
Wagner's life and his art; it had been developing for two or three
years before, and its reverberations did not wholly die away for
some years after. All his life and his work at this time were, as I have
already said, simply a violent purgation of the spirit—a nightmare
agony from which he woke with a cry of relief. He shakes off the
theatre, and faces the world on a new footing as a man. And in
silence, unknown to everybody and almost to himself, he develops
into a new musician. For the moment his mind is a jumble of art,
ethics, politics and sociology. But as usual his artistic instincts guide
him surely in the end. After many gropings in this direction and that,
he settles down to the Ring drama, which he first of all plans, in
1848, in the form of a three-act opera with the title of Siegfried's
Death. He falters a little even then, being obsessed by two other
subjects, Jesus of Nazareth and Friedrich Barbarossa; but finally he
rejects them both, the greater adaptability of the Siegfried drama for
music being intuitively evident to him. The next twenty-six years are
to be taken up with the working out of this gigantic theme, with
Tristan and the Meistersinger as a kind of diversion in the middle of
it; then comes the quiet end with Parsifal. I do not propose to
discuss the philosophical—or pseudo-philosophical—ideas of any of
these works. It is only as a musician that Wagner will live, and to a
musician the particular philosophy or philosophies that he preached
in the Ring and Tristan and Parsifal are matters of very small
concern. Wagner himself was always inclined to over-estimate the
importance of his own philosophising, and his vehement garrulity
has betrayed both partisans and opponents into taking him too
seriously as a thinker. Had he not left us his voluminous prose works
and letters, indeed, we should never have suspected the hundredth
part of the portentous meanings that he and his disciples read into
his operatic libretti. To those who still see profound metaphysical
revelations in the later works it may be well to point out that Wagner
saw revelations equally inspired and inspiring in the earlier ones,
which no one takes with excessive seriousness to-day on their
dramatic side. The philosophising all smacks too much, for our taste,
of the sentimental Germany of the mid-nineteenth century. For
Wagner, Senta is "the quintessence of Woman [das Weib
überhaupt], yet the still to-be-sought-for, the longed-for, the
dreamed-of, the infinitely womanly Woman—let me out with it in one
word: the Woman of the Future."[404] Tannhäuser was "the spirit of
the whole Ghibelline race for every age, comprehended in a single,
definite, infinitely moving form; but at the same time a human being
right down to our own day, right into the heart of an artist full of
life's longing."[405] "Lohengrin sought the woman who should have
faith in him; who should not ask who he was and whence he came,
but should love him as he was, and because he was what he
appeared to himself to be. He sought the woman to whom he should
not have to explain or justify himself, but who would love him
unconditionally. Therefore he had to conceal his higher nature, for
only in the non-revealing of this higher—or more correctly
heightened—essence could he find surety that he was not wondered
at for this alone, or humbly worshipped as something
incomprehensible,—whereas his longing was not for wonder or
adoration, but for the only thing that could redeem him from his
loneliness and still his yearning—for Love, for being loved, for being
understood through Love.... The character and the situation of this
Lohengrin I now recognise with the clearest conviction as the type of
the only really tragic material, of the tragic element of our modern
life; of the same significance, indeed, for the Present as was the
Antigone, in another relation, for the life of the Greek state.... Elsa is
the unconscious, the un-volitional, into which Lohengrin's conscious,
volitional being yearns to be redeemed; but that yearning is itself
the unconscious, un-volitional in Lohengrin, through which he feels
himself akin in being to Elsa. Through the capacity of this
'unconscious consciousness' as I myself experienced it in common
with Lohengrin, the nature of Woman ... became more and more
intimately revealed to me ... that true Womanhood that should bring
to me and all the world redemption, after man's egoism, even in its
noblest form, had voluntarily broken itself before her. Elsa, the
Woman ... made me a full-fledged revolutionary. She was the spirit
of the folk, for redemption by whom I too, as artist-man, was
yearning."[406]
This seems all very remote from us now; one wonders how any one,
even Wagner himself, could ever have taken these operatic puppets
with such appalling seriousness. The Ring stands a little nearer to
us; but no longer can we follow Wagner in his philosophising even
there. For Wagner Siegfried was "the human being in the most
natural and gayest fulness of his physical manifestation.... It was
Elsa who had taught me to discover this man: to me he was the
male-embodied [der männlich-verkörperte] spirit of the eternal and
only involuntarily creative force [Geist der ewig und einzig
zeugenden Unwillkür], of the doer of true deeds, of Man in the
fulness of his most native strength and his most undoubted love-
worthiness."[407] We can hardly regard Siegfried in that light to-day.
As we meet with him in the libretto he is, as Mr. Runciman says,
rather an objectionable young person; we cannot quite reconcile
ourselves to his ingratitude and his super-athletic fatuousness; he
reminds us too much of Anatole France's description of the burly,
bullet-headed general in Les Dieux ont Soif—the sparrow's brain in
the ox's skull. As we see him on the stage he is, under the best
conditions, slightly ridiculous, a sort of overgrown Boy Scout. It is
only in his music that he is so magnificently alive, so sure of our
sympathy. Sensible musicians, indeed, do not trouble very much in
these days about the metaphysics or the esoteric implications of the
Wagnerian dramas. Wotan must stand or fall by his own dramatic
grandeur and by the quality of the music that is given to him to sing,
not by the degree of success with which he illustrates a particular
theory of the Will. Tristan is none the better for all its
Schopenhauerisms, natural or acquired; we may be thankful that it is
none the worse for them.
Wagner's philosophical stock, indeed, was never a very large one.
The "problems" of his operas are generally problems of his own
personality and circumstances. His art, like his life, is all unconscious
egoism. His problems are always to be the world's problems, his
needs the world's needs. Women obsessed him in art as in life: they
kindled fiery passion in man, or they "redeemed" him from passion,
or they set a sorrow's crown of sorrows on his head by failing to
redeem him. Passion, redemption, renunciation—these are the three
dominant motives of Wagner's work; and wherever we look in that
work we find himself. Indulgence—revulsion; hope—frustration;
passion—renunciation; these are the antitheses that are constantly
confronting us. In the Flying Dutchman, Vanderdecken-Wagner is
redeemed by the woman who loves and trusts him unto death.
Tannhäuser-Wagner fluctuates between the temptress and the saint.
Lohengrin-Wagner seeks in vain the woman who shall love him
unquestioningly. Wieland the Smith, the hero of a libretto he
sketched in 1849, is again Wagner, lamed by life, but healed at last
by another "redeeming" woman. Wotan-Wagner, finding the world
going another way than his, wills his own destruction and that of the
world. Tristan-Wagner finds love insatiable, and death the only end
of all our loving. Sachs-Wagner renounces love. Parsifal-Wagner
finds salvation in flight from sensual love. Always there is this
oscillation between desire and the slaying of desire, between hope
for the world and despair for the world. In 1848, in an hour of
physical and mental joy in life, he conceives a blithe and exuberant
Siegfried, the super-man of the future, striding joyously and
victoriously through life. But the revulsion comes almost in a
moment. He realises his solitariness as man and artist. "I was
irresistibly driven to write something that should communicate this
grievous consciousness of mine in an intelligible form to the life of
the present. Just as with my Siegfried the strength of my yearning
had borne me to the primal fount of the eternal purely-human; so
now, when I found this yearning could never be stilled by modern
life, and realised once again that redemption was to be had only in
flight from this life, in escaping from its claims upon me by self-
destruction, I came to the primal fount of every modern rendering of
this situation—to the Man Jesus of Nazareth." Like Jesus, confronted
with the materialism of the world, he longs for death, and reads a
similar longing into all humanity.
So the oscillation goes on to the very end of his days. There is no
need, no reason, to discuss the "philosophy" of such a mind. He is
no philosopher: he is simply a tortured human soul and a
magnificent musical instrument. All that concerns us to-day is the
quality of the music that was wrung from the instrument under the
torture.

The most astounding fact in all Wagner's career was probably the
writing of Siegfried's Death in 1848. That drama is practically
identical with the present Götterdämmerung; and we can only stand
amazed at the audacity of the conception, the imaginative power the
work displays, the artistic growth it reveals since Lohengrin was
written, and the total breach it indicates with the whole of the
operatic art of his time. But Siegfried's Death was impossible in the
idiom of Lohengrin; and Wagner must have known this intuitively.
This is no doubt the real reason for his writing no music for six
years, from the completion of Lohengrin in August 1847 to the
commencement of work on the Rhinegold at the end of 1853. His
artistic instincts always led him infallibly, no matter what confusion
might reign in the rest of his thinking. He conceives the idea of the
Meistersinger, for instance, in 1845, just after finishing Tannhäuser.
But a wise and kindly fate intervenes and turns him aside from the
project. He was not ripe for the Meistersinger, either poetically or
musically, as we can see not only by a comparison of his later
musical style with that of Tannhäuser, but by comparing the sketch
of the drama that he wrote in 1845 with the revised drafts of 1861.
It was his original intention, again, to introduce Parsifal into the third
Act of Tristan; but his purely artistic instincts were too sound to
permit him to adhere to that plan. How unripe he was in 1848 for a
setting of Siegfried's Death hardly needs demonstration now. The
swift and infallibly telling strokes with which he has drawn Hagen
and Gutrune in the Götterdämmerung, for example, were utterly
beyond him then; it took twenty years' evolution before he could
attain to that luminousness and penetration of vision, that rapidity
and certainty of touch. So much, again, of the tragic atmosphere in
which the Götterdämmerung is enveloped comes from the subtle
harmonic idiom that Wagner had evolved by that time, that it is hard
to imagine the extent of his probable failure had he persisted in
setting the text to music in 1848. The lyrical style of Lohengrin, the
leisurely spun tissue of that lovely work, were neither drastic
enough, close enough, nor elastic enough for Siegfried's Death. And
of this he must have had a dim consciousness.
So he puts the musical part of his task on one side for six years,
broods continually over the subject, finds it growing within him, and
at last shapes it into not one opera but four. When he begins work
upon the music of the Rhinegold he is a new being. His imagination
has developed to an extent that is without a parallel in the case of
any other musician. The characters and the milieu of the Rhinegold
are themselves evidence of the audacious sweep of his vision: he
undertakes to re-create in music gods and men and giants, creatures
of the waters and creatures of the bowels of the earth; the music
has to flood the scene now with water, now with fire, with the murky
vapours of the underworld and the serene air of the heights over
against Valhalla. Never before had any composer dreamed of an
opera so rich in all varieties of emotion, of action, of atmosphere.
The practice he had in the Rhinegold developed his powers still
further: in the Valkyrie the painting grows surer and surer, the
imagination sweeps on to conceptions beyond anything that any
musician before him would have thought possible: in Siegfried there
is an absolute exultation of style; the music seems to dance and cry
aloud out of pure joy in its own strength and beauty. His melody has
already become terser and more suggestive in the Rhinegold, and
has lost much of its earlier rhythmic formality. His harmonic range,
while narrow enough compared with that of Tristan and the
Götterdämmerung, has yet developed greatly. He dares anything in
pursuit of his ideal of finding in his music the full and perfect
counterpart of the characters and the scenes; that endless E flat
chord at the commencement of the Rhinegold prelude is an
innovation the audacity of which we can hardly estimate to-day.
It has been objected that the melody of the Rhinegold is on the
miniature side, and that the score has little of the grand surge and
sweep of the later operas. It may be so, but the style of the music
seems admirably suited to the broad and simple outlines of this
drama and the relatively simple psychology of the beings who take
part in it,—beings who are now taking only the first step along the
path that is to lead them all into such tragic complications. But in
any case Wagner was obeying a sound instinct when he abandoned
the broader style of Lohengrin in favour of the seemingly shorter-
breathed style of the Rhinegold. It was the consequence of his
intuition that his new dramatic ideas demanded a new musical form;
we have to remember that everything he says on this topic in Opera
and Drama is the outcome of his reflection upon Siegfried's Death
and the best manner of its setting. The older forms of opera being
inapplicable here, he had to devise a new method of unifying his
vast design. He found the solution of his problem in an application to
opera of the symphonic web-weaving of Beethoven; but for this he
needed short and extremely plastic motives. That as yet he cannot
weave these motives, and the episodical matter between them, into
so continuous a tissue as that of the later works is only natural; to
expect him to have done so would be as unreasonable as to expect
the texture of Beethoven's second symphony to be as closely woven
as that of his fifth. But Wagner knew he had a wonderful new
instrument in his grasp, and he did well to learn the full use of it by
cautious practice.

The leit-motive, of course, is not Wagner's invention. Other operatic

composers had tentatively handled the device before him; and in his
own day Schumann had seen the possibilities of such a method
being applied to the song. In his Frühlingsfahrt, for example, the
joyous major melody that accompanies the bright youths on their
first setting out in life changes to the clouded minor as the poet tells
of the ruin that came upon one of them; and everyone knows the
sadly expressive effect of the winding up of the Woman's Life and
Love cycle with a reminiscence of the melody of the opening song.
The device of reminiscence in poetic or dramatic music is indeed so
obviously a natural one that we can only wonder that the pre-
Wagnerian composers did not make more use of it. But Wagner did
more than employ it as a sort of index or label; he turned it into the
seminal principle of musical form for perhaps three-fourths of the
music of our time. He made it not merely a dramatic but a
symphonic-dramatic instrument. He had experimented with the
device from his youth, but until now without perceiving its
symphonic possibilities. We have seen him carrying forward a
significant theme from one scene to another in Das Liebesverbot. In
Rienzi there is very little real use of the leit-motive. He will adopt a
characteristic orchestral figure for a person or a situation at the
commencement of a scene or "number," and play with it all through
that particular set piece; but it is very rarely that he will remind us of
a previous situation by importing the theme that symbolises it into a
later situation. He does this, for example, with the "Oath" motive,
which first accompanies Rienzi's story of his own vow to avenge his
murdered brother (vocal score, pp. 77, 78), and is afterwards
employed to accompany Colonna's threat of vengeance if Rienzi
dooms him and his fellow conspirators to death (p. 266), Rienzi's
rejection of Adriano's plea for mercy (p. 337), and finally Adriano's
own resolve to be avenged upon Rienzi (p. 416). In the Flying
Dutchman the tissue is largely unified by typical themes, which,
however, are as a rule merely repeated without substantial
modification, though now and then a motive is melodically
transformed to suggest a psychological variation, as when the
"Redemption" theme from Senta's ballad—
 No. 23.

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afterwards becomes the motive of "Love unto death"—

No. 24.

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In Tannhäuser there is a good deal of recurrent material—the
Bacchanale and the Pilgrims' Chorus, for instance—but the leit-
motive can hardly be said to be used at all in the later sense.
Lohengrin is strewn with leit-motives that are marvels of
characterisation; but here too they recur in their original form time
after time. For the most part they merely label the character: they
do not change as he changes, nor do they spread themselves over
the score with the persistence of the motives of the later works.

The leit-motive in the Ring is quite another matter. Most of the

motives in the earlier operas were vocal in origin, and their relatively
great length—which makes them as a rule unsuitable for a flexible
symphonic treatment—is the direct consequence of the length of
Wagner's poetic lines at that time. In Rienzi, for example, the motive
of Rienzi's prayer, the "Sancto spirito cavaliere" motive, the
"Freedom" motive, the motive of the "Messengers of Peace," and
others, are all of this type. In the Flying Dutchman the motive of
"Longing for death," the two "Redemption" motives, the "Daland"
motive, the "Festivity" motive, the "Rejoicing" motive, the "Longing
for redemption" motive, and several others, are all vocal melodies in
the first place; of the same kind are the motives of "Repentance," of
"Love's magic," of "Love's renunciation" and others in Tannhäuser;
and in Lohengrin, the "Grail" motive, the "Farewell" motive, the
"Elsa's prayer" motive, the "Knight of the Grail" motive, the
"Warning" motive, the "Doubt" motive, and others. All of these are
fully developed, self-existent melodies, not germ-figures destined for
the weaving of a quasi-symphonic web. And though some of the less
important motives in the early operas are short, they were not made
so with any intention of using them plastically. The first things that
strike us in connection with the motives of the Ring are their general
shortness, their very plastic nature, and the sense they convey of
not having been conceived primarily in a vocal form. It is true that
some of them are vocal in origin, but that fact does not stare us so
aggressively in the face as it does in the previous works; while the
lines of the Ring are themselves so short that even when a phrase is
modelled on one or two of them it never spreads itself out so
extensively as the typical phrases of the Flying Dutchman,
Tannhäuser and Lohengrin do. This at first sight seems to imply that
the poetic form of the Ring exercised a powerful influence on the
musical form. It is permissible for us to-day to invert that
proposition. Wagner, writing in 1851, maintained that he had
discarded the older form of verse, with its long lines and its terminal
rhymes, because of his conviction that this was too conventional a
garment to throw over the sturdy limbs of Siegfried, the untutored
child of nature, and that he was therefore led to adapt the Stabreim
of the Folk. Consistently with the theory I have already advanced in
these pages, I prefer to believe—guided, as of course Wagner
himself could not be guided at that time, by the evidence of the
function the music performs in his later works—that the new
orchestral musician that was coming to birth within him felt the
necessity of shorter and more plastic germ-themes, and instinctively
urged the poet to cast his material into a form that would place no
obstacle in the musician's way. But explain it as we will, the fact
remains that now he is coming to maturity his leit-motives are on
the whole both more concentrated and more purely instrumental
than they had been hitherto; as I have said, even when they come
to us in the first place from the mouths of the characters, they
assume quite naturally the quality of instrumental themes in the
subsequent course of the opera, whereas a purely orchestral
rendering of the themes of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin can never
disguise their vocal origin. It is comparatively rarely that the Ring
motives extend beyond two bars, or at the most three. The
"Servitude" motive is virtually only one bar in length; so are the
"Rhine Maidens' song," the "Smithing" motive, and the "Reflection"
motive; the "Waves" motive, the "Ring" motive, the "Valhalla"
motive, the "Might of youth " motive, the "Twilight" motive, the
"Norns" motive, the "Dusk of the gods" motive, are all comprised
within a couple of bars; several others run to three bars, and only
one or two run to four.
In this respect, as in some others, the Meistersinger stands in a class
apart from the other works of Wagner's maturity. It is the most
purely vocal of all his later works, in the sense that while the
orchestral tissue is superbly full and unceasing in its flow, the voice
parts have an independence that is rare in the later Wagner. The
style is in a way almost a reversion to that of Lohengrin, allowance
being made, of course, for the more symphonic nature of the
orchestral portion, and the more continuous nature of the whole.
The Meistersinger is full of "set" pieces—arias, duets, trios, a quintet,
choruses, ensembles, and so on. The necessity for all these lay in
the nature of the subject; and Wagner, at that time at the very
height of his powers, has so cunningly mortised all the components
of the opera that not a join is observable anywhere. A superficial
glance at a table of the Meistersinger motives would be enough to
convince us, without any knowledge of the opera, that a great many
of the themes have had a vocal origin, either solo or choral. Others
owe their length to the fact that Wagner is painting masses rather
than individuals; only a fairly extended theme could depict, for
instance, the sturdy, pompous old Meistersingers and their stately
processions. Where he is not following a vocal line or painting with
broad sweeps of the brush, and is free to invent motives for purely
orchestral use, he generally throws them into the same concise form
as those of the Ring—the "Wooing" motive, for example—

No. 25.

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which, by reason of its brevity, is one of the most plastic motives in
the score. But as a whole the Meistersinger lives in a different world
from the Ring or Tristan. There is no great fateful principle running
through it, that can be symbolised in a short orchestral figure and
flashed across the picture at any desired moment, after the manner
of the "Curse" or the "Hagen" motive in the Ring, or the "Death"
motive in Tristan. The people in the Meistersinger carry hardly any
shadows about with them. Their natures are mostly ingenuous,
transparent, unsubtle: such as we see them on the stage at any
given moment, such are they to themselves and others in every hour
of their lives. It was natural then that they should take upon
themselves more of the burden of the drama than the characters of
the Ring as a whole,—for these are only instruments in the hand of
a fate that is best symbolised by the ever-present orchestra—and
that the instrumental voices should co-operate joyously with them,
rather than dog them and lie in wait for them, as in the Ring, with
symbols of reminiscence and foreboding. That the whole essence of
the Meistersinger lies in its simple human characterisation and
simple story-telling is shown again by Wagner's reverting in the
Prelude to the pot-pourri feuilleton form of the Tannhäuser overture,
—a form he never used again after 1845, except here.

As he proceeds with the Ring his leit-motives in general become

more and more concentrated. Now and then he will employ a fairly
extended theme, but never without a good psychological reason.
One of the longest motives in the whole tetralogy is that of the
"Volsung race." Its length is justified by the duty it has to perform:
to concentrate the nobility and the suffering of that race into a chord
or two would be beyond the powers of any musician; none but
Wagner, indeed, could have expressed such an infinity of elevated
grief within the compass of seven or eight bars. Some of the other
motives are astounding in their brevity and eloquence. Not till after
his work on the Rhinegold had unsealed his imagination and
perfected his technique could he have hoped to hit off the wild, half-
animal energy of the Valkyries in some four or five notes that are
merely the expansion of a single chord, or have dared to trust to
what is virtually only a series of syncopations to symbolise Alberich's
work of destruction (the Vernichtungsarbeit motive). Never before
could he have written anything so eloquent of death as the
"Announcement of death" motive in the Valkyrie. In Siegfried,
though the number of new motives is comparatively small, the same
process of concentration is observable. The god-like nature and the
stately gait of the Wanderer are suggested to us in three or four
notes. And in the Götterdämmerung the concentration is amazing. In
that stupendous work he is, in my opinion, at the very summit of his
powers. He never wastes a note now: every new stroke he deals is
incredibly swift, direct and telling. Absolutely sure of himself, he
dispenses with a prelude—for the few bars of orchestral writing
before the voices enter can hardly be called one—and trusts to the
colour of a mere couple of chords to tune the audience's imagination
to the atmosphere of the opening scene. One short characteristic
figure suffices for the motive of Hagen, and nowhere in the whole of
Wagner's or anyone else's work is a figure of two notes used so
multifariously and with such far-reaching suggestion. It is evident
that he now feels the harmonic instrument to be the most
serviceable and flexible of all; and hundreds of his most
overpowering effects in the Götterdämmerung are achieved by
harmonic invention or harmonic transformation. The grisliness of the
Hagen theme comes in large part—putting aside the question of
orchestral colour—from the sort of dour, irreconcilable element it
seems to introduce into certain chords,—though in reality the
harmony has nothing essentially far-fetched in it—as in that
tremendous passage near the end of the first Act of the
Götterdämmerung—

No. 26.

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Hagen!
The new themes, too, rely for a great deal of their poignancy upon
some subtle and fleeting taste of sweetness or some swift
suggestion of darkness and mystery in the harmony, as in the
exquisite motive that is associated with the wedding of Gutrune—

No. 27.

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or in the motive of "Magic deceit"—
 No. 28.

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while others make their effect by means of the utmost concentration
of melodic meaning, like the "Blood-brotherhood" motive, or by an
epigrammatic condensation of rhythm, like the "Oath of fidelity"
motive, which only Wagner could have invented, and which no other
composer but Beethoven would have dared to use if it had been
offered to him—

No. 29.

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 Bruckmann

RICHARD WAGNER.
From the painting by H. Herkomer at Bayreuth.

It is on harmonic alteration that he chiefly relies again, in the latter

stages of the Ring, to suggest the fateful gloom that is gradually
closing in upon the drama; much of the tense and tragic atmosphere
of the Götterdämmerung comes from this clouding of the simpler
texture of the motives of the earlier operas. One of the most
remarkable instances of this is his treatment of the "Servitude"
motive, that is generally associated with Alberich. In the Rhinegold it
appears in a variety of simple forms, such as this—

No. 30.

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and this—

No. 31.

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In the Götterdämmerung a sense of almost intolerable strain, of a
great tragedy sweeping to its inevitable end, is conveyed by various
subtilisations of the harmony, of which the following may stand as a
type—
 No. 32.

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When Siegfried appears on Brynhilde's rock, disguised as Gunther,
the theme of the latter is metamorphosed from—

No. 33.

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into—
 No. 34.

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Here everything is exquisitely calculated,—the harmonic alteration,
the orchestral colouring (the soft mysterious tones of trumpet and
trombones), the interrupted ending, and the long fateful silence that
follows.
When Alberich, in his colloquy with Hagen at the commencement of
the second Act of the Götterdämmerung, looks forward to the
approaching destruction of the gods, the "Valhalla" motive becomes
altered from the familiar—

No. 35.

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to—
 No. 36.

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Many other illustrations might be given of this harmonic
intensification of themes.

It has to be admitted, however, that Wagner's use of the leit-motive

presents some singularities, and is at times open to criticism. He
undoubtedly introduces the motives more frequently than they are
really needed; there is no necessity, for example, for the "Siegfried's
horn" motive to be sounded at almost every appearance of Siegfried
or every mention of his name. Debussy has made merry over this
superfluity of reference, comparing it to a lunatic presenting his card
to you in person. But we can easily forgive Wagner this little excess
of zeal. He was doing something absolutely new for his time. He had
a gigantic mass of material to unify, and this incessant recurrence of
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