The passage on page 6 seems to have roused the ire of Mr. Ashton Ellis,
who devotes some seven and a half strenuous pages of the fifth volume
of his "Life of Wagner" partly to childish personal abuse of myself,
partly to an attempt to discredit my arguments. Over Mr. Ellis's
mixture of clumsy rudeness and heavy Teutonic facetiousness we need
not linger; these things have no novelty for Wagner students who have
sojourned long in the Elysian fields of controversy. Nor need we turn
aside to follow Mr. Ellis in his wild attempt to make it appear that
I had relied solely on a passage in Tiersot's _Berlioz et la société
de son temps_, when my remarks on Hueffer's translation of Wagner's
word "Geschmacklosigkeiten," as applied to _Faust_, might have shown
him that I knew both Hueffer's volumes and the German original. These
things are entertaining but irrelevant. Let us rather get to the real
business--the guilt or innocence of Wagner.
Let me, for clearness' sake, summarise the main facts again.
(1) In 1848, Liszt, having become all-powerful at Weimar, began to
make valiant efforts on behalf of modern composers. He did much
for Wagner, especially by his performances of _Lohengrin_. He also
revived Berlioz's opera, _Benvenuto Cellini_. Wagner fully agreed
with _Lohengrin_ being given, but not so fully with the revival of
_Benvenuto Cellini_. He told Liszt he did not see what great good could
come from this, though all the time anxiously protesting that his
feeling towards Berlioz was of the kindest.
(2) Writing to Liszt on 8th September 1852, disparaging Berlioz's
_Cellini_ and his _Faust_, he speaks of the latter as the "Faust
Symphony."
(3) The use of the term "symphony" is _à priori_ evidence of Wagner's
ignorance of the work.
(4) No evidence can be brought to show that he knew either _Cellini_ or
_Faust_, while everything indicates that he could not know them. Wagner
was not in Paris in 1838 and 1846, when they were respectively given;
nor could he have known them from the scores, which were not published
till after 1852--the date of the letter to Liszt.
(5) In Hueffer's translation of the Wagner-Liszt correspondence, of
which the second edition is "revised and furnished with an index by W.
Ashton Ellis," the word "symphony" is deliberately omitted, thus hiding
from the reader the one word that might set him doubting whether Wagner
really knew the work he disparaged.
(6) In the third volume of Mr. Ellis's "Life of Wagner," which deals
with this correspondence of 1852, the whole sentence referring to the
"Faust Symphony" is omitted. Wagner is thus made to appear a perfect
angel of goodwill towards Berlioz, without any such qualification as
the letter as a whole suggests.
Mr. Ellis is first of all very angry with me for dragging him into the
matter at all. Then he gets more angry with me for failing to see what
is clear enough to him, that Wagner was invariably and inevitably right
in everything he did or said--as it were the "Archibald the All-right"
of music. Finally, he produces what he takes to be conclusive evidence
in Wagner's favour. Let us look into these matters in a calm and
friendly way.
(1) It cannot be disputed that Hueffer's omission of the word
"symphony" from his translation of Wagner's letter to Liszt of 8th
September 1852 was deliberate. Now in his preface to the volumes he
goes out of his way to plume himself on the perfect fidelity of his
translation to the original. "There are things in the letters," he
says, "which are of comparatively little interest to the English
reader." "There is no doubt that judicious omissions might have made
these pages more readable and more amusing." But the book "is almost
of a monumental character, and his deep respect for this character
has induced the translator to produce its every feature.... Not a
line has been omitted." And again: "To sum up, this translation of
the correspondence is intended to be an exact facsimile of the German
original." As we have seen, these statements are not true; Hueffer
suppressed a vital word. The only reason we can imagine for his doing
so was the knowledge that the inclusion of the word might make people
suspect that Wagner did not know the work he miscalled a "Faust
Symphony."
(2) A second edition of Hueffer's translation was brought out,
"revised, and furnished with an index, by W. Ashton Ellis." Mr. Ellis
now indignantly points out that in his preface he distinctly stated
that "in view of the admirable nature of Dr. Hueffer's work, revision
was unnecessary save in the case of a few misprinted words and
dates." Very good. Did Mr. Ellis compare Hueffer's translation with
the original? Then he should have detected and rectified Hueffer's
suppression of the word "symphony." Did he not compare the two? Then he
had no right to certify Hueffer's work as so "admirable" that "revision
was unnecessary." In this one point, at any rate, it was decidedly not
admirable; it evidently stood more in need of Mr. Ellis's revision than
Mr. Ellis's certificate.
(3) Mr. Ellis can say nothing better in defence of his own omission of
the whole passage from the third volume of his "Life" than that, as
he was writing a life not of Berlioz but of Wagner, he had no space
for "a dissertation on so entirely distinct a theme as the _Faust_ of
Berlioz." No one expected from him a dissertation on _Faust_. All he
was expected to do was to find space, in a voluminous biography that
takes about 1800 pages to tell the story of the first forty-two years
of Wagner's life, for five or six lines of a letter that threw an
important light on Wagner, especially as Mr. Ellis was actually quoting
from the letter in question.