Act I. of _Tristan_], which he wanted to

Produced by Andrés V. Galia, Chris Curnow, Jude Eylander,

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WAGNER AS MAN AND ARTIST

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

GLUCK AND THE OPERA.

A STUDY OF WAGNER.

WAGNER (_The Music of the Masters_).

MUSICAL STUDIES.

ELGAR (_The Music of the Masters_).

HUGO WOLF.

RICHARD STRAUSS

(_Living Masters of Music_).

&c., &c.

[Illustration: _RICHARD AND COSIMA WAGNER._]

WAGNER

AS MAN & ARTIST

BY

ERNEST NEWMAN

[Illustration]

MCMXIV

LONDON & TORONTO

J. M. DENT AND SONS LTD.

_All rights reserved_

TO

MRS. BERKELEY OF SPETCHLEY

PREFACE

Some apology is perhaps needed from an author for writing three books

on the same subject. I can only plead in extenuation that the subject

of Wagner is inexhaustible; and I am defiant enough to refuse to pledge

myself not to repeat the offence in another ten years or so. It is

possible that readers who have done me the honour to make themselves

familiar with my _Study of Wagner_ (1899) may discover that in the

present book I express myself differently upon one or two points. My

defence is that even a musical critic may be allowed to learn something

in the course of fifteen years; and I can only hope that if here and

there I have changed sides since then, the side I am now on is that of

the angels.

In spite of the size of this volume, many readers will no doubt feel

that it either discusses inadequately several aspects of Wagner's

work and personality, or that it passes them over altogether. Again

I plead guilty; but to have followed Wagner up in every one of his

many-sided activities,--in all his political, ethical, economic,

ethnical, sociological and other speculations--would have necessitated

not one book but four. I have tried to keep within the limits of my

title--first of all to study Wagner as a man, and then his theory

and practice as a musician. His operas are now so universally known

that I could afford to dispense with detailed accounts of them; in

any case the reader will find them fully described in a hundred

books, and best of all in Mr. Runciman's admirable _Richard Wagner,

Composer of Operas_--though I must dissent from Mr. Runciman's views

on _Parsifal_. Nor could I bring myself to attempt a biography of

Wagner. A new biography, incorporating all the material that the last

ten years have placed at our disposal, is urgently needed. The work of

Glasenapp is copious enough and fairly accurate, but it is hopelessly

uncritical of Wagner either as man or artist,--to say nothing of its

occasional lapses into the disingenuous. But even if I had felt that

I were qualified for a new biography of Wagner I should have shrunk

appalled from the magnitude of the task. I have preferred to give

the reader a chronological digest of Wagner's life in the Synthetic

Table at the conclusion of the present volume, and for the rest to

try to reconstruct him as man and musician from his own letters, his

autobiography, the letters and reminiscences of others, his prose

works, and his music. As the book is going to press I learn that

a new edition of his correspondence, containing some two thousand

hitherto unpublished letters, is to appear under the editorship of

that indefatigable Wagner researcher Dr. Julius Kapp. But it ought

to be possible to reconstruct the man from the 2700 letters of his

that we already have, though the picture will no doubt need some

filling-in and perhaps some corrections in detail when Dr. Kapp's

edition is available. With the expiration of the Wagner copyrights, and

the passing of the control of his letters out of the hands of Villa

Wahnfried, we may hope for a higher standard of literary rectitude in

these matters than we have been accustomed to in the past. The earlier,

and even some of the later, editions of the letters have been so

manipulated as to be thoroughly misleading. I have drawn attention to

one or two of these manipulations in the following pages.

I have made all translations from the prose works, the letters, the

autobiography, &c., direct from the originals. This has necessitated

referring to them throughout in the German editions; but no one who has

the current English versions will have any difficulty in tracing any

particular passage by means of dates and indices. I cannot hope that

with prose so involved as that of Wagner's I have always been able to

achieve perfect accuracy; but I am consoled by the consciousness that

native German scholars to whom I have referred a few passages have been

as puzzled over them as myself.

I have used Wagner's prose works in the latest edition (the fifth) of

the _Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen_ (always referred to in the

following pages as _G.S._), the Wagner-Liszt correspondence in the new

and expanded and more conscientiously edited third edition, and all

the other letters in the latest editions available. The operas are

always referred to in the new Breitkopf edition.

I have to express my thanks to several friends for help of one kind and

another,--to Mr. Bertram Dobell, the publisher of my earlier _Study

of Wagner_, for allowing me to make whatever use I liked of that book

for the present one; to Messrs. Breitkopf and Härtel for placing at

my disposal a set of proofs of the full scores of Wagner's earliest

unpublished operas, _Die Hochzeit_ and _Die Feen_, and proofs of a

number of other unpublished compositions of his; and, above all, for

lending me the manuscript score of the still unpublished opera _Das

Liebesverbot_. I am indebted also to Professor H. G. Fiedler, Mr. R. A.

Streatfeild, and other friends for assistance of various sorts.

Some of the matter of the book has already appeared in the _Fortnightly

Review_, the _Contemporary Review_, the _Nation_, the _New Music

Review_ (New York), the _International_ (New York), the _Musical

Times_, and the _Harvard Musical Review_. My thanks are due to the

editors of these journals for permission to reproduce such portions of

the articles as I desired to make use of here.

E. N.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PAGE

GENERAL CREDIBILITY OF "MEIN LEBEN" 1

THE HORNSTEIN CASE 6

THE LACHNER CASE 12

THE HANSLICK CASE 19

CHAPTER I

THE MAN

I. CHILDHOOD 24

II. THE APEL CORRESPONDENCE 26

III. DISLIKE OF CRITICS 28

IV. ASPERITIES OF TEMPER 33

V. MINNA AND THE WAGNERIANS: THE CASE OF FIPS 36

VI. WAGNER AND MINNA 42

VII. THE JESSIE LAUSSOT EPISODE 45

VIII. IN LOVE WITH MINNA 57

IX. AFTER MARRIAGE 67

X. THE MATHILDE WESENDONCK AFFAIR 84

XI. HIS DUAL NATURE 100

XII. LATER LOVES 106

XIII. COSIMA VON BÜLOW 114

XIV. CONTRARIETIES OF CHARACTER: LOVE OF LUXURY 120

XV. EGOISM IN FRIENDSHIP 128

XVI. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 137

CHAPTER II

THE ARTIST IN THEORY

I. HIS EARLY ITALIANISM 146

II. COMING TO HIMSELF 150

III. THE AWAKENING IN PARIS 155

IV. ÆSTHETIC PRINCIPLES 157

V. ESSAY ON THE OVERTURE 163

VI. FERMENTATION IN DRESDEN 172

VII. POLITICAL AND ARTISTIC IDEALS 174

VIII. "ART AND REVOLUTION" 176

IX. "THE ART-WORK OF THE FUTURE" 180

X. "OPERA AND DRAMA" 185

XI. HIS INSENSITIVENESS TO THE OTHER ARTS 203

XII. THE MUSICIAN DOMINATING THE POET 208

XIII. WAGNER AND BEETHOVEN 212

XIV. BEETHOVEN A TONE-POET 215

XV. SYMPHONIC AND DRAMATIC FORM 220

XVI. WAGNER'S SYMPHONIC LINEAGE 223

XVII. POETIC MUSIC AND THE PROGRAMME 228

XVIII. CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE 230

CHAPTER III

THE ARTIST IN PRACTICE

I. THE EARLY MISCELLANEOUS WORKS 238

II. THE EARLIEST OPERAS 246

III. THE OPERAS OF THE SECOND PERIOD 257

IV. THE MATURE ARTIST:

1. THE "PHILOSOPHY" OF THE OPERAS 266

2. THE NEW STYLE OF THE "RING" 270

3. THE EARLY LEIT-MOTIVE 272

4. THE LEIT-MOTIVE IN THE "RING" 274

5. THE LATER CONDENSATION OF THE LEIT-MOTIVE 277

6. SINGULARITIES IN HIS USE OF THE LEIT-MOTIVE 282

7. THE VOICE AND THE ORCHESTRA 288

8. POETRY, DRAMA, AND MUSIC 292

9. THE PREGNANCY OF HIS THEMES 301

10. HIS POWER OF DRAMATIC CHARACTERISATION 302

11. THE PICTORIAL ELEMENT IN HIS MUSIC 307

12. SOME GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS STYLE 312

13. "PARSIFAL" 315

14. HIS LINEAGE AND POSTERITY 321

APPENDIX A. THE RACIAL ORIGIN OF WAGNER 326

" B. WAGNER AND SUPER-WAGNER 335

SYNTHETIC TABLE OF WAGNER'S LIFE AND WORKS AND

SYNCHRONOUS EVENTS 359

INDEX 381

ILLUSTRATIONS

RICHARD AND COSIMA WAGNER _Frontispiece_

(_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner,"

published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)

WAGNER'S MOTHER _face page_ 26

(_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner,"

published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)

MINNA WAGNER " " 56

(_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner"

published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)

WAGNER. From a photograph taken in Paris

in 1861, with facsimile of signature " " 106

(_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner,"

published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)

WAGNER IN THE _TRISTAN_ PERIOD " " 144

(_By permission, F. Bruckmann, Munich._)

RICHARD WAGNER, 1877 " " 236

(_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner,"

published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)

RICHARD WAGNER " " 278

(_From the painting by H. Herkomer at

Bayreuth._)

WAGNER: THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH " " 320

(_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner,"

published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)

LUDWIG GEYER " " 326

(_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner,"

published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)

WAGNER

AS MAN AND ARTIST

INTRODUCTION

While there is at present no adequate Life of Wagner, there is

probably more biographical material available in connection with him

than with any other artist who has ever lived; and on the basis of

this material it seems justifiable now to attempt--what was impossible

until the publication of _Mein Leben_ in 1911--a complete and impartial

psychological estimate of him. There has probably never been a more

complex artist, and certainly never anything like so complex a

musician. A soul and a character so multiform as this are an unending

joy to the student of human nature. It has been Wagner's peculiar

misfortune to have been taken, willy-nilly, under the protection of a

number of worthy people who combine the maximum of good intentions with

the minimum of critical insight. They have painted for us a Wagner so

impeccable in all his dealings with men and women--especially women--a

Wagner so invariably wise of speech, a Wagner so brutally sinned

against and so pathetically incapable of sinning, that one needs not

to have read a line of his at first hand to know that the portrait

is a parody--that no such figure could ever have existed outside a

stained-glass window, or, if it had, could ever have had the energy

to impress itself upon the imagination of mankind even for a day. The

real Wagner may be hard enough to disentangle from the complications

and contradictions presented by his life, his letters, his prose

works, his music, his autobiography, and the testimonies of his

friends and enemies; but in the case of no man is the attempt better

worth making. For the enduring interest of his character, with its

perpetual challenge to constructive psychology, is in the manysidedness

of it. The well-meaning thurifers who try to impose him upon us in a

single formula as one of the greatest and best of mankind,[1] do but

raise him to their own moral and reduce him to their own intellectual

level, making their god in their own image, as is the way of primitive

religious folk. The more interesting Wagner is the one who stands naked

and unashamed before us in the documents of himself and others--equally

capable of great virtues and of great vices, of heroic self-sacrifice

and the meanest egoism, packed with a vitality too superabundant for

the moral sense always to control it; now concentrating magnificently,

now wasting himself tragically, but always believing in himself with

the faith that moves mountains, and finally achieving a roundness and

completeness of life and a mastery of mankind that make his record read

more like romance than reality.

It is in keeping with the whole character of the man that he should

have left us more copious documentary material concerning himself than

any other artist has ever done. Publicity was as much a necessity

to him as food and air. The most interesting person in the universe

to him was always himself; and he took good care that the world

should not suffer from any lack of knowledge of a phenomenon which he

rightly held to be unique. It would be a sign of unwisdom to despise

him for this. It has to be recognised that whatever criticism the

contemporary moralist might have to pass upon this or that portion

of Wagner's conduct with the outer world, he was always the soul of

purity and steadfastness in the pursuit of his ideal. He believed he

had come into the world to do a great and indispensable work; and if

he occasionally sacrificed others to his ideal, it must be admitted

that he never hesitated to sacrifice himself. Regarded purely as an

artist, no man has ever kept his conscience more free from stain.

And it is precisely this ever-present burning sense of the inherent

greatness of his mission that accounts primarily for his constant

pouring-out of himself, not only in music--his musical output, after

all, was not a remarkably large one--but in twelve volumes of literary

works and in innumerable letters. I say "primarily," because a second

set of impulses obviously comes into play here and there. Wagner had

the need that many men of immense vitality have felt--Mr. Gladstone

was a notable example in our own day--of dominance for dominance'

sake; there is something aquiline in them that makes it impossible

for them to breathe anywhere but on the heights. Wagner felt the need

of over-lordship as irresistibly as his own Wotan did. Had he been a

soldier living in a time of warfare he would have become one of the

world's rulers, with Alexander, Julius Cæsar, and Napoleon. Had he been

a business man he would have controlled the commerce of a continent

through the strength and the thoroughness of his organisations. Being

an artist, a dealer in the things of the mind alone, his ends could be

achieved only by example and argument. His voluminous letters and prose

works are the outcome of the one great need of his life--to win the

world to see everything as he saw it. The letters to Liszt, to Roeckel,

to Uhlig, and others show how powerful was this desire in him; the

least expression of disagreement, the least failure of comprehension,

would call forth a whole pamphlet of eager explanations. He yearned to

hunt out misunderstanding with regard to himself as Calvin yearned to

hunt out heresy. Always there was the inability to conceive himself,

Wilhelm Richard Wagner, except as the central sun of his universe;

ideas and persons had to revolve round him or find orbits in another

and smaller universe. Here again ethical commentary by way of either

praise or blame would be the merest supererogation. One simply notes

the phenomenon as one notes the colour of his eyes or the shape of his

head; it was one of the things that made Wagner Wagner, as the lion's

mane is one of the things that make him a lion.

The need for mastery over everything and everybody that came within

his orbit extended from art to life. All accounts agree that with

people who loved and looked up to him he was the most charming of

men;[2] while not only the testimony of his associates but his own

words and conduct show with what difficulty he accommodated himself to

the natural desire of others to take life in their own way. Read, for

example, his naïf account of his anger with Tausig and Cornelius for

not coming to him when he wanted them:

"Cornelius and Tausig had again been to see me. Both had first of all

to bear the brunt of my real ill-temper for their behaviour during the

previous summer [1862]. Having had the idea of bringing the Bülows

and the Schnorrs to me at Biebrich, my cordial interest in these two

young friends of mine decided me to invite them too. Cornelius accepted

immediately, and so I was all the more astonished when one day I

received a letter from him from Geneva, whither Tausig, who suddenly

seemed to have money at his disposal, had taken him on a summer

excursion--no doubt of a more important and more agreeable nature.

Without the slightest expression of regret at not being able to meet

me this summer, I was simply told that they had just gaily 'smoked

a splendid cigar to my health.' When I met them again in Vienna, I

could not refrain from pointing out to them the offensiveness of their

conduct; but they did not seem to understand that I could have had any

objection to their preferring the beautiful tour in French Switzerland

to visiting me at Biebrich. _They obviously thought me a tyrant._"[3]

All through the correspondence and the autobiography we see the

same spirit of unconscious egoism. His conviction that he was always

in the right naturally led to a passionate desire that those who

differed from him should hear every word he had to say on his own

behalf. Hence the frequent and lengthy _plaidoyers_ in the letters;

hence too the autobiography. His lust for dominance looked even beyond

the grave; thirty years after his death the world should read a

document which should be his final, and, he hoped, successful effort

at self-justification. We cannot, I think, understand Wagner fully

unless we recognise that, however honest he was in intention, this

consuming desire to prove himself always in the right should make us

chary of accepting everything he says at its face value. No man is a

perfectly unprejudiced witness on his own behalf, in his own suit; and

in Wagner's case the very vehemence of his pleading lets us see how

earnestly he desired to impress his own reading of himself upon the

world, and is therefore a warning that he may often have seen things as

he desired them to be rather than as they were. It is pretty clear that

at an early age he realised that he was destined to be a great man, and

took care that the world should not suffer from any lack of materials

for the writing of his life.[4] The autobiography is simply the last

and longest speech of a thousand long speeches for the defence. We need

not consider at present the particular opinions upon his friends and

associates and enemies that Wagner expresses there. The only question

for the moment is as to the general trustworthiness of the book. That

he has been exceedingly, even embarrassingly, candid on some points

all the world now knows. Whether he always saw things at the correct

angle is a different matter. It is obviously impossible to check him

throughout, even where one suspects him to be unconsciously distorting

the truth;[5] but there are several instances in which he is obviously

not telling quite the truth or all the truth, and in more than one

instance he can certainly be convicted of manipulating the facts to

suit his own purpose.

I shall try to show later that the account he gives of the episode

with Madame Laussot in 1850 does not square at every point with his

letters to Minna. He deliberately tries to mislead the reader with

regard to his relations with Frau Wesendonck; everyone who has read

Wagner's ardent letters to her must have gasped with astonishment

to find him in _Mein Leben_ glossing over that long and passionate

love-dream, and actually speaking of "Minna's coarse misunderstanding

of my real relations--friendly relations--with the young wife, who was

continually concerned for my repose and my well-being."[6] That is not

an actual untruth, but it is considerably less than the truth. In the

preface to _Mein Leben_ Wagner tells us that the only justification of

the volumes was their "unadorned veracity." Perhaps he found "unadorned

veracity" at this point a trifle embarrassing; perhaps he forgot his

letters to Mathilde, or had never considered the possibility of their

being published. But the fact remains that his own letters show the

account he gives of his relations with Mathilde Wesendonck to be quite

unreliable. What warrant have we, then, for believing him implicitly in

other cases in which it may have been to his interest to suppress or

distort the truth?

Let us take one of the most striking cases of this suppression and

distortion. One of the friends of the middle period of Wagner's life

was a certain Baron Robert von Hornstein. In 1862 Wagner--who was at

that time in Paris--was, as frequently happened with him, looking

for someone who would undertake the burden of keeping a home above

his head. He tried two or three people, but without success; then he

thought of the young Baron von Hornstein. This is the account he gives

of the matter in _Mein Leben_:

"Finally I bethought me of looking for a quiet abode in the

neighbourhood of Mainz, under the financial protection of Schott. He

had spoken to me of a pretty estate of the young Baron von Hornstein

in that region. I thought I was really conferring an honour upon the

latter when I wrote to him, at Munich, asking permission to seek

shelter for a time at his place in the Rhine district; and I was

greatly perplexed at receiving an answer that only expressed terror at

my request."[7]

On the face of it this seems candid and credible enough. Von

Hornstein's son, Ferdinand von Hornstein, has, however, thrown another

light on the affair. When Baron Ferdinand published a memoir of his

father in 1908, he omitted certain letters, he tells us, "out of

consideration for Wagner and his family." The wounding allusions to

Baron Robert in _Mein Leben_, and the evident animus displayed against

him there, unlocked, however, the son's lips. He resents Wagner's

description of his (Hornstein's) father--the friend of Schopenhauer,

Paul Heyse, Hermann Lingg and others--as a "young booby,"[8] and

proceeds to explain "why Wagner has misrepresented my father's

character."

On an earlier page (627) of _Mein Leben_ Wagner tells us that during

their stay together at Zürich in the winter of 1855-6 Hornstein

declared himself to be so "nervous" that he could not bear to touch

the piano--that his mother had died insane, and that he himself was

greatly afraid of losing his reason. "Although," says Wagner, "this

made him to some extent interesting, there was blended so much weakness

of character with all his intellectual gifts that we soon came to the

conclusion that he was pretty hopeless, and were not inconsolable when

he suddenly left Zürich."[9] The impression conveyed--and obviously

intended to be conveyed--is that the young man's departure was a piece

of half-mad caprice.

As it happens, however, Hornstein at his death had left among his

papers an account of the affair that puts a different complexion on

it. Wagner's own eccentricities had been making the relations of

the little circle none too pleasant.[10] And Hornstein, so far from

leaving Zürich in obedience to a sudden impulse, had actually made

arrangements at his lodgings under which he could leave at any time

when the "scenes" with Wagner became intolerable. He often expressed

to Karl Ritter and the latter's mother[11] his regret that he was not

in a position to "take his revenge" for the invitations he received

to Wagner's table. Their reply always was: "Wagner does not at all

expect this now. He knows your circumstances, and is sure to follow

you up later. He is waiting for a more favourable moment." When he

voiced his regret that there should be anything but ordinary friendly

feeling to account for Wagner's attentions to him, his friends replied,

"Oh, there is no doubt Wagner likes you and prizes your talents

greatly; but these calculations (_Hintergedanken_) are too much second

nature with him for him to be able to make an exception." "This,"

says Hornstein, "was to become still clearer to me." He learned that

Wagner's guests were expected to bring bottles of wine with them--a

point on which Hornstein, as a young man of breeding,[12] evidently

felt some delicacy. On his birthday the great man entertained Hornstein

and Baumgartner at dinner. "During the dessert, Wagner asked his

sister-in-law--it came like a pistol shot--to bring him the wine-list

from a neighbouring restaurant. She hesitatingly carried out this

unexpected commission. The card comes. Wagner runs down the list of

the champagnes and their prices, and orders a bottle of a medium

quality to be brought. Everyone felt uncomfortable. The bottle having

been emptied, Wagner turned to his two guests with a sneering smile,

and said loudly, 'Shall I now present another thaler to each of these

two gentlemen?' His wife and his sister-in-law fled in horror, like

the ladies in the Wartburg scene in _Tannhäuser_. Baumgartner and I

were stunned; we looked at one another, and each of us probably had

an impulse to throw a glass at the head of our dear host." Instead of

doing so, they burst into laughter, thanked him, and took their leave.

Baumgartner declared to Hornstein that he would never accept another

invitation from Wagner, "and I, for my part," says Hornstein, "_was

firm in my resolve to leave Zürich as soon as possible_." Afterwards

Wagner, as was no doubt his wont, came and excused himself to Hornstein

and Karl Ritter.[13] He had not meant _them_, he said, but "the German

Princes" who performed his operas and raved about him, but gave him

nothing: "it does not occur to them to send me a hamper of wine"; and

so on. The young men, however, were not to be so easily appeased, and

Wagner "had to listen to many things that he would rather not have

heard." An outward reconciliation was effected, but the sting remained;

Hornstein delayed his departure for a few weeks, and still visited

Wagner's house, though less frequently than before. "I had," he writes,

"to tell this distressing story, as it gives the key to my later

conduct when, soon after my father's death, Wagner tried to borrow so

heavily from me. The correspondence connected with this attempt led to

a permanent separation from Wagner."[14]

All this, it will be seen, puts the Zürich episode in a new light.

There is not the least reason for doubting Hornstein's veracity. What

he says is quite consistent with the accounts of Wagner's behaviour

that we get from other sources, private and public. Moreover,

Hornstein's reminiscences simply take the form of a note left among his

personal papers. He could not have anticipated the misleading version

that was to appear in _Mein Leben_ many years after his death,[15]

and, as has been said, his own version would probably have remained

unpublished for ever, but for the provocation given to his son by the

autobiography.

Baron Ferdinand von Hornstein gives further evidence of the pettiness

of Wagner's rancour against this young man from whom, notwithstanding

his disparagement of him, he was willing to borrow money. For now comes

the full record of the incident to which Wagner alludes so airily in

the passage from _Mein Leben_ quoted on page 6. Here is the actual

letter, dated, "19, Quai Voltaire, Paris, 12th December 1861," in which

Wagner, according to his account, simply asked permission to stay for a

time at Hornstein's place in the Rhine district.

"DEAR HORNSTEIN,--I hear that you have become rich. In what a wretched

state I myself am you can easily guess from my failures.[16] I am

trying to retrieve myself by seclusion and a new work. In order to

make possible this way to my preservation--that is to say, to lift me

above the most distressing obligations, cares, and needs that rob me

of all freedom of mind--I require an immediate loan of ten thousand

francs. With this I can again put my life in order, and again do

productive work.

"It will be rather hard for you to provide me with this sum;

but it will be possible if you WISH it, and do not shrink from a

sacrifice. This, however, I desire, and I ask it of you against my

promise to endeavour to repay you in three years out of my receipts.

"Now let me see whether you are the right sort of man!

"If you prove to be such for me,--and why should not this be expected

of some one some day?--the assistance you give me will bring you into

very close touch with me, and next summer you must be pleased to let

me come to you for three months at one of your estates, preferably in

the Rhine district.

"I will say no more just now. Only as regards the proposed loan I may

say that it would be a great relief to me if you could place even six

thousand francs at my disposal immediately; I hope then to be able to

arrange to do without the other four thousand francs until March. But

nothing but the immediate provision of the whole sum can give me the

help which I so need in my present state of mind.

"Let us see, then, and hope that the sun will for once shine a little

on me. What I need now is a success; otherwise--I can probably do

nothing more!--Yours,

RICHARD WAGNER."

"I must confess," says Hornstein, "that the largeness of the amount and

the tone of the letter made a refusal easier to me. What made it easier

still was my knowledge that I had to do with a bottomless cask,--that

while ten thousand francs were a great deal for me, they were simply

nothing to him. I knew that Napoleon, Princess Metternich, Morny, and

Erlanger had been bled of large sums that were simply like drops of

water falling on a hot stone." Hornstein was particularly grieved at

the remark that the loan would draw him nearer to Wagner. "Was I not

near to him, then," he asks, "before I gave him money? Was the intimate

intercourse with him at the Lake of Geneva, on the Seelisberg, in

Zürich, intended only to prepare the way for the borrowings he had in

view when my father should die?"[17] So he replied to Wagner in these

terms:

"DEAR HERR WAGNER,--You seem to have a false idea of my riches. I have

a modest (_hübsch_) fortune on which I can live in plain and decent

style with my wife and child. You must therefore turn to really rich

people, of whom you have plenty among your patrons and patronesses all

over Europe. I regret that I cannot be of service to you.

"As for your long visit to 'one of my estates,' at present I cannot

contrive a long visit; if it should become possible later I will let

you know.

"I have read in the papers with great regret that the production of

_Tristan and Isolde_ will not take place this winter. I hope that

it is only a question of time, and that we shall yet hear the work.

Greetings to you and your wife.--From yours,

ROBERT VON HORNSTEIN."

To which Wagner replied thus:

"PARIS, _27th December, 1861_.

"DEAR HERR VON HORNSTEIN,--It would be wrong of me to pass over

without censure an answer such as you have given me. Though it will

probably not happen again that a man like me (_ein Mann meines

Gleichen_) will apply to you, yet a perception of the impropriety of

your letter ought of itself to be a good thing for you.

"You should not have presumed to advise me in any way, even as to who

is really rich; and you should have left it to myself to decide why I

do not apply to the patrons and patronesses to whom you refer.

"If you are not prepared to have me at one of your estates, you

could have seized the signal opportunity I offered you of making the

necessary arrangements for receiving me in some place of my choice. It

is consequently offensive of you to say that you will let me know when

you will be prepared to have me.

"You should have omitted the wish you express with regard to my

_Tristan_; your answer could only pass muster on the assumption that

you are totally ignorant of my works.

"Let this end the matter. I reckon on your discretion, as you can on

mine.--Yours obediently,

RICHARD WAGNER."[18]

I have given this episode in such detail because, as Ferdinand von

Hornstein caustically remarks, it enables us to test the value of

Wagner's claim for the "unadorned veracity" of his memoirs. He is

plainly guilty of serious sins both of omission and of commission in

his account of his dealings with Hornstein. What guarantee have we that

he was any more scrupulous in his record of other matters in which his

reputation or his _amour propre_ were concerned? Let us check him in

one or two other cases.

How unreliable the autobiography is, with what caution we have to

accept Wagner's opinions of men in the absence of confirmatory

testimony, may be seen from a survey of his dealings with Franz

Lachner.[19]

The first reference to Lachner in _Mein Leben_ is under the date 1842.

Wagner had written two articles in Paris _à propos_ of Halévy's opera,

_La Reine de Chypre_.[20] In the article published in the Dresden

_Abendzeitung_, he says, "I made particularly merry over a mischance

that had befallen Kapellmeister Lachner." Küstner, the Munich director,

had commissioned a libretto for Lachner from St. Georges, of Paris (the

librettist of _La Reine de Chypre_). After the production of the latter

opera, it turned out that this book and that of the Lachner opera were

virtually identical. In reply to Küstner's angry protests, St. Georges

"expressed his astonishment that the former should have imagined that

for the paltry price offered in the German commission he would supply a

text intended only for the German stage. As I had already formed my own

opinion as to this French opera-text-business, and nothing in the world

would have induced me to set to music even the most effective piece of

Scribe or St. Georges, I was greatly delighted at this occurrence, and

in the best of spirits I let myself go on the subject for the benefit

of the readers of the _Abendzeitung_, who, it is to be hoped, did not

include my future 'friend' Lachner."[21] Evidently he did not love

Lachner.

The next reference to him in _Mein Leben_ is in 1855. Wagner had

returned to Zürich after his London concerts. There he learned that

Dingelstedt, at that time Intendant of the Munich Court Theatre,

wished to give _Tannhäuser_ there, "although," says Wagner, "thanks

to Lachner's influence," the place was not particularly well disposed

towards him.[22]

The third reference to Lachner is in 1858, just before Wagner's

departure from the "Asyl"; there was a "national vocal festival" at

Zürich that seems to have irritated Wagner a good deal, depressed as he

was at that time by the Minna-Mathilde catastrophe. Lachner was taking

part in the festival. Wagner gave him the cold shoulder, and refused to

return his call.[23]

Now let us see, from documents of the time, how matters really stood

as regards Lachner. In 1854 Wagner was hoping to get _Tannhäuser_

produced at Munich, where, as we have seen, Dingelstedt was Intendant

and Lachner Kapellmeister. Lachner was a conductor and composer of the

old school. Wagner had a poor opinion of him, and apparently thought

him incompetent to do justice to _Tannhäuser_. "I don't at all know,"

he writes to Liszt on May 2, 1854,[24] "how to get Lachner out of the

way. He is an utter ass and knave." In the summer of 1852 there had

been some talk of giving _Tannhäuser_ at Munich. Lachner thought it

advisable first to familiarise the public with the style of the work

by giving the overture at a concert on 1st November. The success was

doubtful. Wagner had previously sent Lachner a copy of the explanatory

programme of the overture that he had written in the preceding March

for the Zürich orchestra. Perhaps this was thought too long for the

Munich programme; in any case a much shorter "explanation" was given,

that aroused Wagner's ire.[25] With his customary blind suspicion of

people he did not like, he assumed that the concert production of the

overture was a deliberate attempt to prejudice the public against the

opera. This suspicion, as Sebastian Röckl says,[26] finds no support

in the external facts. A fortnight after the Munich performance of

the overture, _Tannhäuser_ was given at Wiesbaden with great success,

and soon became one of the favourite pieces in the repertory of the

theatre there. Dingelstedt at once sent his theatre inspector, Wilhelm

Schmitt, to Zürich to arrange with Wagner for a production at Munich.

Unexpected difficulties arose, however; an outcry was raised against

the proposed performance of a work by "the Red Republican, Richard

Wagner"; and there was opposition on the part of the Bavarian Minister,

von der Pforten. By the spring of 1854 all obstacles had been removed,

and, as we have already seen, Dingelstedt now arranged with Wagner for

the production, although the composer thought Munich "not particularly

well-disposed towards him, thanks to Lachner's influence." Having heard

that the singer destined for the part of _Tannhäuser_ was incompetent,

Wagner asked Dr. Härtinger, of the Munich Opera, to undertake it.

Härtinger came to Zürich in May to study the rôle with the composer,

and seems to have deepened Wagner's mistrust of and contempt for

Lachner. The performance did not take place, as was intended, in the

summer of 1854, but, as Röckl says, the cause of the postponement was

not Lachner but the cholera.

Later on, Dingelstedt found himself unable to fulfil his promises

to Wagner with regard to the honorarium. "Thereupon," says Röckl,

"Lachner, fearing that he might be looked upon as answerable for the

production having fallen through a second time, wrote to his friend

Kapellmeister G. Schmidt, of Frankfort, asking him to arrange with

the composer for more favourable conditions."[27] In the end this was

done. "And now," says Röckl,[28] "Lachner, although in his innermost

conscience an opponent of the 'musician of the future,' did all he

could in order to produce the work as excellently as was possible to

him. Rehearsal after rehearsal was held, though the musicians were

always moaning over the extraordinary efforts they were called upon

to make"--as is shown by reference to a Munich comic paper of the

time. As the tenor was unmistakably incompetent, a singer who was

already familiar with the work was engaged from another opera house.

_Tannhäuser_ was given on 12th August 1855 with extraordinary success.

Lachner was called on the stage, whence he thanked the audience in

Wagner's name. He communicated the evening's result to the composer,

and received a letter, dated 17th August 1855, warmly thanking him for

the trouble he had taken over the work and the sympathy he felt with

it, and for the friendliness of his feelings towards Wagner; and he

was asked to thank the singers and orchestra in the composer's name.

"Finally accept the assurance of my great gratification at having been

brought by this circumstance closer to yourself. I sincerely hope for a

continuance of this approach to an understanding that is necessary for

the artist and possible to him alone."[29]

The success of _Tannhäuser_ emboldened Dingelstedt to venture upon

_Lohengrin_ for the winter of 1856, but various events conspired

against the production. In February 1857 Dingelstedt resigned the

Intendantship. _Lohengrin_ was put in rehearsal by his successor, von

Frays, in November 1857, and produced on 28th February 1858, under

Lachner. It was well received on the whole, but the opera found more

antagonists than _Tannhäuser_ had done.

From 21st July to 2nd August there was held at Zürich the vocal

festival at which, as we have seen, Wagner refused to receive

Lachner. What Röckl rightly calls the ambiguous words of Wagner in

this connection in _Mein Leben_ are explained by the following letter

from the composer to Lachner, that is published for the first time in

Röckl's book:

"VENICE, _26th September 1858_.

"HIGHLY HONOURED SIR AND FRIEND,--Now that, after a long and painful

interruption of the way of living I have been accustomed to for many

years, I have again won a little repose, permit me to approach you

with the remembrance of your so friendly advances to me last summer,

in order in some degree to link myself again with the life on which

you have imprinted a significantly agreeable memory. If you found

something strange at our meeting, something on my part apparently

not quite corresponding to your friendly intentions, I now permit

myself, by way of exculpation, to say that at that time I was in a

very agitated and embarrassed frame of mind; few people know what

difficult resolutions were maturing in me at that time.[30] It may,

however, suffice for me to tell you that only now, after leaving my

friendly refuge by the Lake of Zürich, in order to compose my mind

here, in the greatest seclusion, for the resumption of my work, has

the pleasant and encouraging significance of your Zürich visit become

quite clear to me. By my sincere regret to know that you were in

some degree hurt through a mistake of my servant,[31] you probably,

nevertheless, understood even then how earnestly I realised the value

of your visit; your friendly assurance that you were satisfied with my

explanation of that misunderstanding was most tranquillising for me.

Let me now say that I estimate highly the value of your advances, and

with my whole heart I shall do my best to deserve your friendship--if

you will favour me with it--can and most sincerely to reciprocate it.

On the occasion of another personal meeting, if you will be so good, I

hope that you will learn, with some satisfaction, in what sense I give

you this assurance. I chiefly remember with the greatest pleasure that

you expressed to me the wish that perhaps the first performance of my

latest work, _Tristan and Isolde_, might be entrusted to you. I have

so agreeable a recollection of this wish, that I can only regret not

being able to gratify it immediately. Unfortunately just at the time

when we met I was so grievously interrupted in this very work that

only now again, for the first time, can I cherish the hope of getting

into the proper mood for continuing and completing it. Consequently

this _opus_ is not one as to the time of whose coming to the light I

can decide anything definite--which is in every respect unpleasant for

me.

"The friendly wish you showed to occupy yourself with me once more

soon, emboldens me, however, to approach you with regard to the

granting of a very big request on my part. My _Rienzi_ has again been

given in Dresden with real success, and since I now no longer have

any special reason for keeping back this effective work of my youth,

I have been inviting the theatres that are friendly to me to take up

this opera as quickly as possible; in so doing I am moved by the firm

conviction that I am recommending to them a very good and remunerative

work. Almost all whom I have approached have fallen in with my wishes.

Would you therefore think it too bold of me if I were to request you

also to get this score (which you have only to ask for, in my name, of

Chorus-master Wilhelm Fischer, of Dresden), without much hesitation

and delay, and to see what you can do with this tamed rebel (_mit

dem gezähmten Unband_) for my consolation and benefit, while I am

finishing _Tristan_?

"I beg you to take this in good part. But in any case I owe you very

great thanks, and if you are not angry with me on account of this

request, I shall take this as a particularly good sign.

"In any case I may probably hope to receive soon from you a friendly

reply; console me also with the assurance that you have forgiven me,

and accept in return the assurance of the sincerest devotion and

esteem of your most indebted

RICHARD WAGNER."[32]

Lachner at once got the score of _Rienzi_ from Fischer, and wrote to

Wagner (October 13) expressing his pleasure at the prospect of an

early production of the opera. "In spite, however, of his sincere

endeavours," says Röckl, "_Rienzi_ was not put into rehearsal. The

reading committee felt the subject to be inadmissible on religious

grounds."

In July 1860, von Frays had the idea of giving the _Flying Dutchman_,

and wrote to Wagner on the matter. Wagner thought that Lachner had

been the moving spirit in this, and thanked him warmly in a hitherto

unpublished letter of 20th August 1860.[33] But again Wagner's

malignant demon intervened. Von Frays had to resign the Intendantship

on account of illness, and his successor abandoned the _Flying

Dutchman_ project owing to the expense of the new inscenation. It

was taken up again in 1864, and produced on the 4th December, Wagner

conducting. Lachner had taken most of the rehearsals, and, though not

much in sympathy with the work, he plainly did his best with it.[34]

The reader is now in a position to estimate the true value of Wagner's

disparaging references to Lachner in _Mein Leben_. He seems to have

started out with a prejudice against him that nothing could alter.

Lachner was admittedly by temperament and training, and both as

conductor and composer, in the opposite camp to Wagner. This, however,

only entitles him to the more commendation for the pains he took to

establish Wagner in Munich, and for the care he expended upon the

performances.[35] Wagner nurses his imaginary grievance against the

man, persists in believing that he is prejudicing all Munich against

him, insults him, and denies him his door in Zürich; and then, when he

has need of him, writes to him in the friendliest and most flattering

way. Finally, when he pens his memoirs, he forgets all that Lachner

had, on his own admission, done for him, forgets his own letters of

thanks, and refers to him throughout in a tone of scarcely-veiled

contempt and dislike. What conclusion can we come to except that it

would be imprudent of us to accept, without corroborative evidence,

Wagner's disparaging record of anyone he detested? No doubt he found

Lachner in his way when, under cover of King Ludwig's favour, he was

trying to transform the musical life of Munich. But even if Lachner

_did_ intrigue against him then, as the Wagnerians always hold, he

was simply acting in self-defence; and in any case Wagner, when he

came to write his autobiography, should not have passed over Lachner's

earlier services to him without a word, and still less have given the

unsuspecting reader the impression that Lachner's opposition to him

began several years before it actually did. Once more we feel that had

Wagner only postponed the writing of _Mein Leben_ for a few years, till

he had quite got over the bitterness of his Munich failure, the book

would have been both pleasanter in tone and more reliable in fact.

Let us now take another case--his treatment of Hanslick in _Mein

Leben_. At one time these deadly enemies had been friends.[36] In the

course of years Hanslick's antipathy to Wagner became more and more

pronounced, and by the spring of 1861, when Wagner visited Vienna, the

critic of the _Neue Freie Presse_ was an opponent to be feared. Wagner,

as he more than once tells us, never troubled to be particularly polite

to critics; but in Vienna he seems, by his own account, to have been

gratuitously rude to Hanslick. The critic was introduced to him on the

stage at a rehearsal of _Lohengrin_. "I greeted him curtly, and as

if he were a total stranger; whereupon Ander, the tenor, introduced

him to me a second time with the remark that Herr Hanslick was an

old acquaintance of mine. I replied shortly that I remembered Herr

Hanslick very well, and turned my attention to the stage again."[37]

The opera singers did their best to smooth matters over, but Wagner

was irreconcilable; and to his refusal to be friendly with Hanslick he

attributes his subsequent failure to make headway in Vienna.

A little while after, they met again at a dinner party at Heinrich

Laube's, where Wagner refused to speak to Hanslick.[38] They met a

third time, at an evening party at Frau Dustmann's, who was to sing

Isolde in the projected performance of _Tristan_. Wagner being, as he

tells us, in a good temper, he treated the critic as "a superficial

acquaintance." Hanslick, however, drew him aside, "and with tears and

sobs assured me that he could no longer bear to be misjudged by me;

whatever extraordinary there might be in his judgment of me was due

not to any malicious intention, but solely to his limitations; and

that to widen the boundaries of his knowledge he desired nothing more

ardently than to learn from me. These explanations were made with such

an explosion of feeling that I could do nothing but try to soothe his

grief, and promise him my unreserved sympathy with his work in future.

Shortly after my departure from Vienna I heard that Hanslick had

praised me and my amiability in unmeasured terms."[39]

Whether Wagner's account of the interview is strictly accurate or

not, we have no means of knowing; but the story, even as he tells it,

indicates that Hanslick was not at this time a hopelessly prejudiced or

evil-natured antagonist. In November 1862 they met again at the house

of Dr. Standhartner in Vienna. Wagner read the _Meistersinger_ poem to

the company. "As Dr. Hanslick was now supposed to be reconciled with

me, they thought they had done the right thing in inviting him also. We

noticed that as the reading went on the dangerous critic became paler

and more and more out of humour; and it was noticed that at the end

he could not be persuaded to stay, but took his leave at once with an

unmistakable air of irritation. My friends all agreed that Hanslick

regarded the whole poem as a pasquinade against himself, and the

invitation to listen to it as an outrage. And truly from that evening

the critic's attitude towards me underwent a striking change; it ended

in an intensified enmity, of the consequences of which we were soon

made aware."[40]

The innocence of it, the air of perfect candour, of conscious

rectitude, of surprise that men should be found so base as Hanslick

proved himself to be! Would it be believed from this ingenuous record

that Wagner had given Hanslick the most unmistakable cause of offence?

It may have occurred to more than one reader to ask _how_ Hanslick

managed to recognise a caricature of himself in Beckmesser. It is

hardly likely that he could have done so from the poem alone. We may be

tolerably sure he had something more to go upon.

We possess three prose sketches of the _Meistersinger_ libretto. The

first was made in 1845, the second and third--there is hardly any

difference between the two--in the winter of 1861. The actual libretto

was written in Paris in November 1861 and January 1862. In the second

sketch the Marker is given the name of "Hanslich."[41] In the third

he becomes "Veit Hanslich." In these two later sketches the Marker is

drawn with a perceptibly harsher hand. That the conferring of this name

on the Marker was something more than a passing joke is shown by its

appearing in both sketches, and not merely in the list of _dramatis

personæ_, but written out in full throughout. These two sketches were

made, as we have seen, after the first meeting of Wagner and Hanslick

in Vienna in 1861. With an author so fond of reading his own works

to his friends as Wagner was, it is incredible that news of Hanslick

being satirised as the pedantic Marker in the forthcoming opera should

not have spread through musical Vienna, and have reached the critic's

ears. His feeling, therefore, at the party in November 1862, that the

shaft was aimed at himself may safely be put down not so much to his

own intuition as to a pre-suspicion of the truth. He would be quite

justified, then, in regarding the invitation to be present at the

reading as an insult. But even if we allow no weight at all to this

theory, in spite of its inherent probability, what are we to think of

Wagner's later conduct? He tells us more than once of Hanslick's enmity

towards him; he makes no mention of himself having treated Hanslick, in

the _Meistersinger_ sketches, in a way that the critic and his friends

could only regard as insulting. Hanslick was of course hopelessly wrong

about Wagner the musician; but after Wagner's brusque treatment of

him whenever he met him, and after the attempt to ridicule him in the

_Meistersinger_, who will say that Hanslick was under any obligation to

be fond of Wagner the man? Yet it is only Wagner's side of the case, as

usual, that is given us in _Mein Leben_.

The autobiography, then, has to be used with caution: not that Wagner,

I suppose, ever consciously perverted the truth, but that it was

impossible for him to believe he was ever in the wrong in his judgments

of other people, and that it would therefore be necessary to let the

reader have the whole of the story in order that he might judge for

himself. Nor can the careful student of his letters resist the feeling

that Wagner was often writing with at least one eye on the possibility

of the publication of his words at some time or other. His intense

egoism--I use the term here in no condemnatory sense, but simply to

denote the passion of vigorous temperaments like his for mastery--his

intense egoism could probably not bear the thought that any estimate of

his conduct but his own should obtain currency. Time after time we feel

that his letters to and about Minna are speeches of the counsel for the

defence, addressed to a larger audience than their first recipient.

Here again it is only a thick-fingered psychological analysis that

would write him down as a deliberate trickster. Wagner was in some

respects a selfish man, as numberless testimonies agree; but he was

not a bad man in the sense that it ever gave him pleasure to inflict

suffering. His heart no doubt bled for Minna, but it is probable that

he pitied her out of the vast fund of æsthetic and ethical feeling

that was in him, as in all artists, without being a motive part of

his life. The commonest daily facts prove that a musician need not

have a beautiful soul of his own in order to write beautiful music or

to perform music beautifully. This implies no conscious insincerity;

it is simply the actor's faculty for dramatisation, for momentary

self-hypnosis. And many of them can carry the exercise of this faculty

beyond art into life itself. Wagner was apparently one of these. When

he pitied Minna, it was in the abstract, detached way that we pity

Desdemona or Cordelia on the stage--without feeling in the least

impelled to rise from our seats and run any personal risk in order

to save her. Nietzsche, who, for all his tendency to over-write

his subject, often saw to the secret centre of Wagner's soul, was

always laying it down that the instinct of the actor was uppermost

in everything Wagner did. "Like Victor Hugo," he says, "he remained

true to himself even in his biography--he remained an actor."[42] An

actor he certainly is in many of his letters--an actor so consummate

as to deceive not only his audience but himself. And so, when we read

the plentiful and handsome certificates of good conduct that he gives

himself, in _Mein Leben_ and the letters, with regard to Minna,[43]

we may be pretty sure that he believed every word he said, and really

regarded himself as a monumentally patient and saintly sufferer of

unmerited misfortunes. But the Hornstein and other affairs have shown

us that Wagner is not always a perfectly veracious witness in his own

behalf; and we may reasonably decline to give him a verdict in this or

that episode of the Minna matter on his unsupported testimony.

What I have called his passion for self-justification is shown in

nothing more clearly than in the device of postponing his autobiography

for some thirty years after his death, when the persons so liberally

criticised in it would all be tolerably certain to be no more. It is

singular, indeed, how fortunate Wagner has been in having the stage to

himself throughout. This has materially helped to create and sustain

the Wagnerian legend. Most of the people with whom he came into

unfriendly or only partially friendly relations in his youth or middle

age died before it was realised what a world-figure he was to become;

consequently they have left hardly any records of their impressions

of him. Meyerbeer, for example, died in 1864. We need not take up

any brief for Meyerbeer as a whole; but will anyone contend that if

we could get _his_ account of his dealings with Wagner, the present

story would not have to be modified at many points? Wagner, it must be

confessed, was often lacking in delicacy of soul. Had Liszt and Bülow,

Wesendonck and Wille, Cornelius and Tausig been equally indelicate, and

written as frankly of Wagner the man as he has written of them, would

not many features of Wagner's portraits of all of them need altering?

And if Minna had had something of her husband's literary faculty and

passion for special pleading, could she not have shown more alloy than

_he_ ever suspected in the golden image he loved to make of himself?

Everywhere, in fact, in dealing with the memoirs and the letters, we

have to remember that we are face to face with an artist who is as

persuasive as he is powerful, with an overwhelming lust for mastery and

for unfettered self-realisation, and with a faith in himself that must

have made other people's occasional scepticism a pure mystery to him.

Wherever, then, his written words involve the interpretation of his own

or other men's acts and motives, they are to be accepted with caution.

For the rest, the psychologist can only be thankful that Wagner poured

himself out in such profusion. Let us now try to trace from his own

records his general development as a man.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "From her [Frau Wesendonck] it was I earliest learnt a truth which

added years have simply verified; that in Richard Wagner we have more

than a great,--a profoundly good man." Mr. Ashton Ellis's Introduction

to his version of the _Wagner-Wesendonck Letters_, p. xl.

[2] See, for example, the reminiscences of Judith Gautier, _Wagner at

Home_, English translation by Effie D. Massie.

[3] _Mein Leben_, pp. 829, 830.

[4] In 1835 he was travelling about in search of singers for the

Magdeburg Opera. A temporary financial stringency--neither the first

nor the last in his life!--forced him to remain a week at Frankfort.

"To kill time," he says, "I had recourse, among other things, to a

large red pocket-book which I carried about with me in my valise; I

wrote down in this, with exact details of dates, some notes for my

future biography." (He was twenty-two at the time, and almost unknown

outside his own little provincial circle.) "It is the same book that is

before me at this moment to refresh my memory, and which I have kept up

without any breaks at various periods of my life." _Mein Leben_, p. 133.

[5] It would be unwise, for example, to believe without further

evidence his story (_Mein Leben_, p. 743) that the Paris press during

the _Tannhäuser_ events of 1861 "was entirely in Meyerbeer's hands";

that (p. 723) Meyerbeer had some years before bribed Fétis _père_ to

write articles against Wagner; or (p. 708) that Berlioz was influenced

against Wagner by his wife, who had received a present of a valuable

bracelet from Meyerbeer. Everyone who has mixed much with musicians

knows how prone many of them are to believe that their colleagues--and

still more their critics--are always "intriguing against them."

[6] _Mein Leben_, p. 667.

[7] _Mein Leben_, pp. 795, 796.

[8] _Mein Leben_, p. 602. On another page (626) he speaks of the

"young booby" as being "agreeable [_anschmiegend_] and intelligent,"

apparently because he shared Wagner's views upon Schopenhauer.

[9] _Mein Leben_, p. 627.

[10] He admits, on the same page of _Mein Leben_ (627), that he was

very ill at this time, and prone to outbursts of irritability, during

which his friends often had to suffer.

[11] Frau Ritter was at this time making an allowance to Wagner.

[12] He was twenty-two at the time. Wagner was forty-two.

[13] Hornstein had told the story to Karl, who was furious, and

insisted on sending Wagner at once a hamper of champagne.

[14] There is not a word in _Mein Leben_ as to these borrowings.

[15] He died in 1890, twenty-one years before the publication of _Mein

Leben_.

[16] In connection with the Paris production of _Tannhäuser_, &c.

[17] This, it will be remembered, had been hinted by Karl Ritter.

[18] See _Zwei unveröffentlichte Briefe Richard Wagners an Robert von

Hornstein, zur Erklärung der auf Robert von Hornstein bezüglichen

Stellen in Wagners "Mein Leben"; herausgegeben von Ferdinand Frh. von

Hornstein_. Munich, 1911.

[19] Franz Lachner (1803-90) was successively conductor at Vienna,

Mannheim (1834), and Munich (1836). From 1852 to 1865 he was General

Musical Director at Munich.

[20] One of these appeared in the Dresden _Abendzeitung_ of 26, 27, 28,

and 29 January 1842, under the title of _Bericht über eine neue Pariser

Oper._ The other was written for Schlesinger's _Gazette Musicale_,

appearing in the February 27, March 13, April 24, and May 1, 1842,

numbers of that journal. A translation of this article is given by Mr.

Ellis in volume viii. of his English version of the Prose Works. Wagner

tells us in _Mein Leben_ (p. 248), however, that the editor of the

_Gazette Musicale_, Edouard Monnaie, had cut out a number of passages

praising Auber and belittling Rossini. The original German text of the

first half of the article has been preserved in the Wahnfried archives.

It was published for the first time by Julius Kapp in _Der junge

Wagner_, and is now to be had in volume xii. of the _G.S._ The first

two portions of the article are given in German on pp. 129 to 146. A

comparison of this with Mr. Ellis's version will show the passages that

have been omitted. The remainder of the article exists only in French,

as it appeared in the _Gazette Musicale_ of 24th April and 21st May. It

is given in _G.S._, xii. 404-11.

[21] _Mein Leben_, pp. 248, 249. The word "friend" is put in inverted

commas by Wagner himself. The passage to which he refers will be found

in the _Bericht über eine neue Pariser Oper_, in _G.S._, i. 244. He

there mentions 1500 francs as the sum paid by the Munich director for

the libretto. In the original article in the _Abendzeitung_, according

to Mr. Ashton Ellis, the amount was given as 3000 francs, and Lachner

was referred to not as Kapellmeister Lachner, but "der brave Lachner."

[22] _Mein Leben_, p. 626.

[23] _Mein Leben_, p. 675.

[24] _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, ii. 25.

[25] See his letter to Uhlig of November 27, 1852.

[26] See the first chapter of his _Ludwig II und Richard Wagner: Erster

Teil, die Jahre 1864 und 1865_. Munich, 1913.

[27] Yet Glasenapp (_Das Leben Richard Wagners_, ii. (2), 108) speaks

of Wagner having "forced his entry" into Munich with _Tannhäuser_ "in

spite of the bitter opposition of Lachner." In dealing with Wagner's

Munich days, again, Glasenapp speaks of Lachner as being "from of old

an embittered opponent, whom the most obliging and amiable behaviour

could not reconcile" (iv. 43).

[28] _Op. cit._, p. 8.

[29] Röckl, p. 12.

[30] The reader will remember that the Wesendonck catastrophe was just

then drawing to a head.

[31] In the light of Wagner's own account of the affair in _Mein

Leben_, we only regard this as a piece of fiction.

[32] Röckl, pp. 17 ff.

[33] Röckl, pp. 21 ff.

[34] Röckl, p. 56.

[35] It is even doubtful whether his conducting was as detrimental

to the operas as Wagner seems to have thought. The records show that

both _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_ were very well received under his

baton. Liszt heard a performance of _Tannhäuser_ under Lachner at

Munich in 1856, and writes thus to Wagner under date 12th December of

that year: "Lachner had certainly rehearsed the score with the utmost

precision and care, for which we can only thank and praise him." He

doubts whether Lachner understood the _drama_ as Wagner meant it to be

understood; but granting that, the trouble that Lachner had evidently

taken to do justice to the music is all the more creditable to him.

That he was pretty free from prejudice towards Wagner is shown by his

recommending him for the Maximilian Order in 1864, and again in 1873.

The King granted Wagner the Order the second time. See Röckl, pp. 57,

234.

[36] They had met in Dresden in 1845.

[37] _Mein Leben_, p. 761.

[38] _Mein Leben_, p. 784.

[39] _Mein Leben_, pp. 818, 819.

[40] _Mein Leben_, p. 829. Writing against Hanslick in the

_Musikalisches Wochenblatt_ of 1877, Wilhelm Tappert gave an account of

these two episodes as he had received it from Wagner himself. Wagner

had presumably copied from _Mein Leben_ the two passages I have just

cited, for they agree almost word for word with the _Wochenblatt_

article. See Glasenapp, _Das Leben Richard Wagners_, iii. 352, 405,

483. Hanslick seems to have denied the authenticity of Wagner's version

of what happened at Standhartner's.

[41] The "h" is without significance. Wagner often spelt proper names

along the line of least resistance.

[42] Postscript to _The Wagner Case_ (English translation), p. 37.

[43] See, for example, _Mein Leben_, pp. 158, 499, &c.; his letters to

Minna of April 17, 1850, January 25, 1859, May 18, 1859, &c. &c.; and

his letter of August 20, 1858, to his sister Clara.

CHAPTER I

THE MAN

I

From the autobiography and the letters to Apel we can get an excellent

idea of what he was in his boyhood. He came of a family of rather

more than average ability. As a child he was nervous, excitable and

imaginative, impatient of control either at home or in school, but

quick enough to assimilate life and knowledge in his own way. It is

clear, both from what he says in _Mein Leben_ and from scattered hints

in that book and in his letters, that he was occasionally a source

of great anxiety to his relations. Already he had a bias towards the

theatre, which would be increased by his frequent association with

actors and singers.[44] For a time he haunted the smaller gambling dens

of Leipzig--even going so far on one occasion as to stake his mother's

pension--entered into the usual students' follies and dissipations,

and generally must have seemed to the ordinary eye as complete a young

wastrel as could be imagined. He himself tells us: "I bore, as if in

a state of complete stupor, even the contempt of my sister Rosalie,

who, like my mother, hardly vouchsafed a glance at the incomprehensible

young profligate (_Wüstling_), whose pale and troubled face they

only rarely saw."[45] He picks up the rudiments of a general and of

a musical education. Then he knocks about from one small theatrical

troupe to another, his character inevitably coarsening and relaxing

in the process. He was at this time extraordinarily sensitive to his

environment; and as this was as a rule of an intellectually superficial

kind, he came to take the average actor's or singer's superficial view

of life and art. And as from his boyhood he was hopelessly incapable

of managing his financial affairs with any prudence, and soon acquired

that habit of borrowing from friends and eluding tradespeople that

clung to him for the greater part of his life, the iron was not long in

entering into his soul. So rich a nature as his could of course afford

to waste itself extravagantly, and in the end no doubt his art was all

the better for his having eaten so freely of the tree of the knowledge

of good and evil; but to the relations and companions who cared for him

in those early years he must often have seemed to be wasting himself

beyond all power of recovery. His life until long past his fiftieth

year resembles a ship steering with incredible recklessness among every

sort of shoal and rock. More than once it looked as if the vessel

would founder; only a unique combination of courage and determination

and extraordinary good fortune managed to keep it afloat and bring it

finally into haven.

II

The best picture of him in his adolescent years is given in the

correspondence with Theodor Apel, the friend of 1832-1836. There

we have in epitome the whole Wagner of the later years, with his

imprudence in all the practical affairs of life, the irrepressible

vitality that enabled him to recover so quickly after each of the many

crises he went through,[46] his extravagance, his incurable tendency to

run up debts with tradesmen and to borrow money from his friends, his

Micawberish confidence in the speedy turning of his luck. It is evident

that at an early stage of their friendship he had drawn upon the purse

of Apel, who had the dangerous gift--for a friend of Wagner's--of

riches. But the young Micawber has no doubts as to the future. In

October 1834 he is quite convinced that he is going to have a great

success with _Die Feen_, which will lead to a still greater success

for _Das Liebesverbot_; he will make a lot of money, and he and Apel

will go and enjoy themselves in Italy for a year or two. This desirable

consummation is to come about in the spring of 1836. In Italy he will

write some Italian operas, and then they will go to France, where he

will write a French opera; and so on.[47] We have some indication of

the depth of the draughts he was then taking of the physical joy of

life in a letter of 6th June 1835, in which he tells Apel to "enjoy and

be merry." "I have now resolved," he says, "to be a complete Epicurean

with regard to my art: nothing for posterity, but everything for the

present and the moment."[48]

[Illustration: WAGNER'S MOTHER.]

But soon there comes an emotional crisis of the kind that occurred so

frequently in Wagner's life. The tearful, almost hysterical, letter to

Apel of 21st August 1835 is a remarkable document. Wagner seems to have

got heavily into debt, to have done all sorts of foolish things, and to

have vexed and saddened his friends and relations. Even Apel appears to

have been for a while estranged from him. Wagner beats his breast in

agony. He has been mad; the promised happiness of youth has fled from

him; but he will make a brighter future for himself. Note already, in

this letter, the passion for self-revelation and self-dramatisation

that is evident in so much of his later correspondence. He was not a

dramatist, said Nietzsche once: he merely loved the word drama. He

certainly loved the words repentance and morality.

"I have sinned. Yet not so! Does a man sin when he is mad? I have

fallen out with my family, and must regard our relations as at an

end.... Till now I have managed my life very badly. Dearest, I was

not wicked, I was mad; that is the only expression I can find for

my conduct--it was a conventional madness (_ein konventioneller

Wahnsinn_). I see now only too well that money is not a chimera, not

a despicable, worthless thing of no importance; I have formed the

conviction that money is as much alive as the society in which we

are placed. I was mad, I say, for I did not understand myself and my

relation to the world. I knew that I had no surely-founded foothold

and support at all, and yet I acted like one insane, went beyond my

circumstances in every respect, and with the ignorance and inexperience

of a man who has never any solid title to money; no one, not even a

rich man, throws away money as I did. The result was a whirlpool of

perplexity and misery, the entanglements of which I cannot contemplate

without dismay. I cannot reckon up the details; it is unheard of and

inexplicable into what an abyss I have fallen. Your enormous and

incessant efforts to rescue me from it only made me more daring, and

made me put my trust in a blind something of which, indeed, I could

give no clear account to myself, but that blinded my eyes more and more

completely. My life in Leipzig, the pitiable position I had there, were

intolerable burdens; I was driven into so-called independent displays

of strength; I broke out into extravagances which, combined with the

still lasting consequences of my earlier follies, completely estranged

my family from me, and at last brought about a rupture with all my

surroundings." He is sure, however, that he has now learned wisdom.

Then comes a passage of a type that we often meet with in his letters.

"I cannot, however, go back to Magdeburg[49] until I have got rid of

the burden of a debt of 400 thalers. So I stand--I am forsaken by, and

separated from, everyone, everyone on whom I might otherwise reckon,

and accompanied only by the painful anxiety of my mother. She can give

me nothing. You are the only one left to whom I can appeal"; and so on,

and so on, in the customary professional borrower's style.

A few months later there is a similar wail. He has recovered his

elasticity of spirit; he is working incredibly hard not only at his

conducting but at the composition of his new opera. "I am now at the

focal point of my talent; I do everything easily, and am pleased with

it," he writes to Apel on 27th December 1835. In another three weeks

the repentant sinner who had been so eloquent about having learned

wisdom is once more distracted at the thought of his debts. "I must

have money," he tells Apel, "if I am not to go mad."[50]

III

We can visualise him in these early years as a creature of the

strangest contradictions--charming enough with those he liked,

supercilious and insulting to people he disliked, and always liable to

some fit of the nerves that would make him unaccountably irritable,

perverse, tactless, and ready to wound even friends; generous with his

help where his sympathies were engaged, and with a fine code of honour

for many of the relationships of life, but a sad lack of delicacy and

even of honour with regard to money matters. The full extent of his

borrowings and his debts, even at this early period of his life, will

never be known; but one feels a sort of terror at the hints as to the

total of them that are given here and there in _Mein Leben_ and his

letters. It is easier to explain than to justify his conduct in this

regard. He was never too well paid, and he had an ineradicable artistic

inclination towards certain of the good things of life that only money

can buy. His incurable optimism, too, was always painting the future

the rosiest of rose-pinks. One can understand his habit of borrowing,

and even sympathise with him to some extent; what one finds it harder

to explain or to condone is his evident callousness towards his

creditors, especially his tradesmen, some of whom had to wait ten years

or more for their money, and then only obtained it with much difficulty.

A man who, for all his fine qualities, had two or three grave defects

of character of this kind, was likely to make as many enemies as

friends--perhaps more. The worshipping official type of biographer

paints for us a sort of ineffable angel of a Wagner, always in the

right, always misunderstood and traduced. The untruthfulness of the

portrait is evident to the most casual readers of the letters and

the autobiography. Wagner's now notorious laxity of principle with

respect to money matters must have been common knowledge in the

small provincial towns in which he lived, and must have done a good

deal to make him distrusted and disliked. In addition, his frequent

irascibility and rudeness must have made many enemies for him. In

_Mein Leben_--more candid and more critical in this respect than his

incense-bearers--he makes several confessions on this score. His

outbursts can no doubt be mostly explained by the irritability of

his temperament and its swift transitions of mood, by his frequently

bad health, or by the action of wine. But it is one thing to make

allowances for a man's failings of temper or manners half a century or

so after the event; it is another to make allowances at the time. We

smile now at the stories that are told of Beethoven's grossness and

ill-breeding; but had we experienced the effect of these at first-hand

we should certainly have voted him an impossible person to live with.

Wagner was undoubtedly very trying to live with at times. In _Mein

Leben_ he occasionally gives us a glimpse of himself in his least

likeable moods. In 1834 he visits Prague, where he meets again some

people whose acquaintance he had made on a previous visit there--the

daughters of the recently deceased Count Pachta. With one or both of

these girls the ever-amorous young man had apparently been in love. "My

behaviour," he says, "was wild and arrogant; in this way the bitter

feelings with which I had formerly taken leave of this circle now

found expression in a capricious passion for revenge." He does nothing

but indulge in the maddest pranks. "They could not understand this

astounding change in me; there was no longer in me any of the old love

of intimacy, the mania for instructing, the zeal for converting,[51]

that they had previously found so annoying. But at the same time no

one could get a sensible word out of me, and the ladies, who were now

disposed to discuss many things seriously, got no answer from me but

the wildest buffoonery."[52]

Every now and then, in his account of the misunderstandings with

Minna, he confesses to the coarseness of his language when he was

angry, the "raging vehemence" of his insults, the "unrestrained

violence" of his speech and behaviour. Nietzsche has given us a hint of

what Wagner could be in a mood of this kind.[53] In Dresden especially,

in the years of his conductorship (1842-49), he appears to have made

many enemies, particularly among the critics. These gentlemen were,

of course, generally wrong as against Wagner in matters of art. But

though musical critics are frequently stupid, they are not, as a rule,

all stupid in the same way. It is possible, as many of the modern

Wagnerians have shown, to be as stupid in approbation of Wagner as

anyone could be in disapprobation of him. So that when we find the

critics--in Dresden, for example--so uniformly opposed to Wagner, it

is a fair supposition that there was more behind their words than mere

disapproval of his art or his theories. They apparently pursued him

with unusual rancor. Even in the absence of evidence, we should be

entitled to assume that when a man becomes the object of such general

and unrelenting hostility in his own town, it implies some defects in

his own character as well as in those of his assailants. Evidence is

not lacking that this was so. Wagner, we all know, loved most those

who agreed with him, and had no use at all for men of opposite ways of

thinking.[54] His constant craving for love in life had its counterpart

in his desire to be approved and believed in as an artist. In _Mein

Leben_ he is always praising someone or other for his devotion to

him, and speaking coolly or angrily of others for their indifference

to his concerns. Alwine Frommann is "faithfully devoted" to him;

he speaks of Bülow's "warm and heart-felt devotion"; the Laussots,

the Ritters, Uhlig, and others are all lauded for their "devotion,"

their "fidelity." He speaks well of Meyerbeer so long as he believes

his interests are being furthered by him, and turns on him and makes

sundry unproved and unprovable charges against him when he thinks

his aid is withdrawn. One does not censure him for this: rational

criticism aims less at giving or withholding marks for conduct than at

understanding the complexities of human nature. One merely notes the

idiosyncrasy, not unsympathetically, and tries to see how it worked in

the actualities of life. A nature of this kind was constitutionally

incapable of taking criticism philosophically; the critic's sin would

not be against the artist so much as against the art. And granting that

many of his critics were not very intelligent men, it is clear that

part at least of their enmity towards him was the result of his own

tactless attitude towards them. "Though I was anxious to be obliging

with everyone, yet I always felt an unconquerable aversion to showing

special consideration towards any man because he was a critic. In the

course of time I carried this to the point of almost studied rudeness,

as a consequence of which I was my whole life long the victim of

unheard-of persecution from the press."[55] It seems probable that his

studiously unconciliatory manners brought him more ill-will than was

ever necessary.

That the mere lack of intelligence of some of these critics was not the

reason for his rudeness to them is shown by the warmth of his welcome

to critics no more intelligent who happened to be with him instead of

against him. A certain Gaillard, of Berlin, happened to have written an

"entirely favorable" criticism of the _Flying Dutchman_. "Although,"

he naïvely says, "I had already of necessity accustomed myself to be

indifferent as to the attitude of the critics, this particular article

impressed me greatly, and I invited the unknown writer to Dresden to

hear the first performance of _Tannhäuser_." The young man comes to

Dresden, and Wagner is distressed to find that he is threatened with

consumption. "I saw from his knowledge and capabilities that he would

never attain to any great influence; but his sincerity of soul and

the receptivity of his intelligence filled me with genuine regard for

the poor man." He dies in a few years, "having never swerved from

his fidelity to and thoughtfulness for me, even in the most trying

circumstances."[56] In other words, he was that very common product, an

enthusiastic admirer possessed of only limited intelligence; but his

"fidelity" was sufficient to make Wagner tolerate and even like him. It

looks as if the "systematic rudeness" was not for "the critics," but

only for the critics who disagreed with Wagner.

How badly he could behave when irritated by the press was shown by his

incessant insinuations against the honesty of the London critics during

and after his conducting of the Philharmonic Concerts in 1855. There is

no proof forthcoming of their being bribed to oppose him. Mr. Ashton

Ellis, who has gone thoroughly into the newspaper history of that

period, and who will not be suspected of any desire to smooth matters

over for Wagner's antagonists, gives it as his opinion that "James

Davison bears the character of an unimpeachably honest 'gentleman.'"

But Wagner could never imagine any other motive for opposing him except

(1) that the opponent was paid to do so, or (2) that he was either a

Jew or under the orders of the Jews.[57] In a letter to Otto Wesendonck

of 5th April he vents his rancour against Davison and Chorley, and

recklessly charges them with being corrupt: "they are paid to keep me

down, and thus they earn their daily bread."[58] He throws out a hint

to the same effect in _Mein Leben_.

IV

Of his irritability and tactlessness we have several instances, some

of them given us by himself. Take, for example, Meissner's account

of the supper that Wagner gave to Laube[59] after the performance

at Dresden of the latter's play, the _Karlsschüler_. There were a

number of people present, and the usual compliments passed. Meanwhile,

however, "Wagner had been fidgeting about on his chair for some time,

and finally he threw out the question: Whether, in order to put a

Schiller into a play, one ought not to have something of Schiller's

genius oneself? The question was first of all couched in general terms;

some compromised, some disagreed. Then Wagner proceeded to a more

positive criticism of the piece that had been produced: it was merely

a well-constructed comedy of intrigue in the style of Scribe, with

several very piquant scenes, and did not at all solve the problem of

how to write a drama the hero of which was the most ideal poet of the

German race. Not till the ice-bucket appeared with its champagne did

he cease; and everything was to be put right again by a congratulatory

toast. But nothing now could put matters right; people emptied their

glasses, and dispersed all out of tune. I myself went off with Laube,

and wandered about for some time with the dejected man in the dark,

quiet streets by the river."[60] Mr. Ellis, in translating this

passage, has to admit that "however exaggerated, there is a grain of

truth in the little tale,[61] for Pecht also informs us: 'After the

performance Wagner gave Laube a feast, at which he congratulated the

poet very intelligently and to the point, but, to the minds of us

enthusiasts, by far too insufficiently, the consciousness of his own

superiority seeming to dominate it all.' Whichever account we accept,"

Mr. Ellis goes on to say, "it was awkward for the guest of the evening,

and scarcely more palatable because, as Meissner himself adds, 'Perhaps

Wagner was right.' He had no intention of wounding his guest,[62] but

he does appear to have had the unfortunate habit of thinking aloud;

and his standards were so far above the heads of his company that his

thoughts were bound to bruise when suddenly let fall on them." Plain

people would probably sum it up in much simpler terms--that Wagner had

been unnecessarily tactless and rude to a guest.

I have already cited Wagner's own confession of similar tactlessness

and ill-breeding towards Count Pachta's daughters in Prague in

1834. He makes a similar confession with regard to his conduct to a

certain Professor Osenbrück, whom he met at a party in Zürich about

1851. "I remember that I made a special exhibition of the immoderate

excitement that was characteristic of me at that time, in a discussion

with Professor Osenbrück. All through supper I irritated him with my

obstinate paradoxes till he had such an absolute horror of me that for

ever afterwards he anxiously avoided meeting me."[63]

The Hornstein episode in Zürich gave us an example of the bad manners

into which his excited nerves sometimes betrayed him. In _Mein Leben_

he frequently confesses that his irritability was very trying to his

friends; and in 1858 he congratulated himself on now being able to

argue with them without getting excited as of old.[64] Whether the

improvement was permanent or not we cannot say; but certainly his

temper stood in need of a curb. In March 1856, he says, "My illness

and the strain of work [on the _Valkyrie_] had reduced me to a state

of unusual irritability. I remember the extreme ill humour with which

I greeted our friends the Wesendoncks when they paid me a sort of

congratulatory visit on the evening of my completion of the full

score. I expressed myself with such extraordinary bitterness on this

way of showing sympathy with my work that the poor distressed visitors

departed at once in the utmost dismay; and it afterwards cost me many

difficult explanations to atone for the mortification I had caused

them."[65]

How tactless and lacking in ordinary courtesy he could be even where

his temper was not on edge, was shown by his conduct to Gounod in Paris

in the _Tannhäuser_ time of 1861. "With Gounod alone did I preserve

friendly relations. I was told that everywhere in society he championed

my cause with enthusiasm; he is said to have remarked: 'Que Dieu me

donne une pareille chute!' To requite him for this I gave him a full

score of _Tristan_,--for his conduct was all the more gratifying to me

in that no consideration of friendship had been able to induce me to

hear his _Faust_."[66]

Sufficient has been said to show that he must have been an exceedingly

difficult person to get on with at times, and that of the many enemies

he made, some of them must have had quite good reasons for disliking

him.

As one studies him, indeed, the innocent, long-suffering angel of the

sentimental biographers disappears from our view, and is replaced by

a less perfect but more complex and more humanly interesting figure.

Again let me repeat that we are not taking sides against him any more

than for him, but simply showing him as he was. That he had some

serious intellectual and moral defects, that he could at times be

selfish and quarrelsome and unjust, can be disputed by no one who reads

him with an open mind. The trouble was that with his immovable belief

in himself it was impossible for him ever to doubt that he was wholly

in the right. A tragedy of some sort is never far from the homes of men

of this type. Wagner's greatest tragedy was Minna; and it will be as

well to consider the history of his relationship with her in detail,

some recent documents having thrown new light upon the old perplexing

problem.

V

Minna has always been the subject of contumelious and sometimes

venomous remarks from the simpler-minded Wagnerians, especially those

who have apparently taken their cue from Villa Wahnfried. Their quick

and easy way with the problem has been to assume, as usual, that

Wagner was in all things the just man made perfect; his marriage with

a woman who was his intellectual inferior was a mistake, but his

conduct was always that of an affectionate husband and an honourable

gentleman,--his patience and forbearance, indeed, with such a thorn

in his side being nothing less than angelic. The Wagnerians detest

poor Minna even more than they detest Meyerbeer or Nietzsche. The

climax of comic pettishness was reached a few years ago in Mr. Ashton

Ellis's remark that for the offence of flicking a pellet of bread on

to a manuscript that Wagner was reading to a young friend she should

have been put in a cab and taken to the nearest station, railway or

police.[67] Fortunately even the Wagnerians are not always so comical

as this; but by way of doing justice to the memory of Wagner, they have

showered their contempt or their hatred in abundance upon poor Minna's

head. How grievously the recollection of the old unhappy days rankled

in Wagner's memory is shown by the meanness of some of his revelations

about her in _Mein Leben_. The fires of fate, when he dictated these

reminiscences, seemed to have scorched rather than warmed him; he had

learned many things from life, but neither delicacy nor magnanimity.

Nor, one regrets to say, was Cosima, vastly as we must admire the power

of her remarkable personality, the woman to impose these virtues upon

him. One can recall nothing in literary history quite so unpleasant in

its moral shabbiness as this spectacle of the second wife taking down

from her husband's dictation the most damaging details he can remember

of the conduct of his first wife,--both of them knowing that in the

circumstances under which these reminiscences would be published it was

impossible for either Minna or her friends to state her case for her

as she herself must have seen it. And all the world knows that this

second wife, when Wagner fell in love with her, was herself wedded

to another man, who divorced her on the 18th July 1869; that their

son Siegfried was born on 6th June 1869, and that she and Wagner were

married on 25th August 1870.[68] Plain people, used to putting things

in plain language, would say that this virtuous gentleman, who was so

severe a censor of Minna's matrimonial conduct, first of all stole

the affections of a friend's wife--or at any rate accepted them when

they were offered to him[69]--and afterwards lived in adultery with

her, to the anger of her father and many of Wagner's best friends.[70]

It strikes one, then, as rather a mean thing for a couple of people

with a far from immaculate record of their own to be laying their

heads together, day after day, to commit to paper, for the benefit of

the world half a century or so later, a record of the failings of a

poor creature who was no worse than either of them,--and a record, of

course, coloured throughout by their own prejudices. The disproportion

between what Richard tells us about Cosima and Frau Wesendonck and what

he tells us about Minna, and the vast difference in candour in his

treatment of these episodes, is very remarkable in a book of which the

sole value is supposed to reside in its "unadorned veracity." Of course

in telling the story of how you took your second wife from a friend,

and deceived him day by day, the fact that the lady herself happens to

be your amanuensis rather militates against "unadorned veracity"; but

Wagner and Cosima might have reflected on this simple fact, and stayed

their eager hands a little when dissecting the first wife. People so

vitreously housed should be the last to commence stone-throwing.

Minnaphobia seems to be traditional in the circles that have chosen

to regard Wagner as peculiarly their own. Apparently no tittle-tattle

about her is too absurd for them to believe. Let us take, in

illustration, the portentous case--that really deserves to become

historic--of Mr. Ashton Ellis and the little dog Fips. Wagner and Minna

were both animal lovers, and were virtually never without a dog or a

bird. These beloved animals, as Wagner more than once tells us, counted

for much in their childless home. Fips had been a present from Frau

Wesendonck. He died somewhat suddenly and inexplicably in June 1861,

during the sojourn of Wagner and Minna in Paris. Apparently a legend

has grown up in certain quarters that as the dog was Frau Wesendonck's

present to Wagner, Minna poisoned it to gratify her hatred and jealousy

of that lady and of Wagner. Mr. Ellis, at any rate, propounded this

theory in his English edition of the letters to Mathilde Wesendonck.

Wagner's account of the death of the dog may here be quoted in Mr.

Ellis's own translation:

"At the last there even died the little dog that you once sent me

from your sick bed; mysteriously suddenly! It is presumed he had been

struck by a cart wheel in the street, injuring one of the little pet's

internal organs. After five hours passed without a moan, quite gently

and affectionately, but with progressive weakness, he silently expired

(June 23)."[71]

Mr. Ellis, in some "valedictory remarks" at the end of the volume,

asks why only fourteen of Frau Wesendonck's letters to Wagner have

been preserved, and of course finds the explanation in the wickedness

of Minna. "Looked at from whichever side [sic], I am forced to the

conclusion that _Minna destroyed the whole bundle_ just before

laudanuming Mathilde's living present, Fips--a doing to death so

plainly hinted page 273."[72]

The reader is now invited to turn once more to the above citation

from Wagner's letter, and to discover, if he can, where this

"laudanuming" of Fips is "so plainly hinted." We know that Minna used

to take laudanum to alleviate her heart trouble, but where in the

letter is the barest suggestion on Wagner's part of her having made

away with Fips by means of that poison? It is safe to say that this

theory that Mr. Ellis believes to be "so plainly hinted," would never

have occurred to a single reader of the letter if it had not been put

into his head by Mr. Ellis.[73] Apart from this, it is interesting

to see that _Mein Leben_ (which was published seven years after the

Wesendonck letters) gives no support to this wild charge. But though

there is not a hint in _Mein Leben_ of an insinuation against Minna in

connection with the dog's death, there is a curious discrepancy between

the account given there (English edition, p. 781; German edition, p.

765), and that in Wagner's letter of July 12, 1861. In the latter,

as we have seen, he says that "it is presumed he had been struck by

a cart-wheel in the street." There is not the barest hint here of

the barest suspicion of poisoning. Mr. Ellis conjectures that the

_vermütlich_ ("it is presumed") is really _vermeintlich_ ("allegedly")

in the manuscript of the letter. It is a wild conjecture, but let us

accept it. It at least makes it clear that Minna had "alleged" that

the dog had been struck by a cart-wheel, and that Wagner accepted the

statement. But in the autobiography we get this surprising sentence:

"According to Minna's account, we could only think that the dog had

swallowed some virulent poison spread in the street." On Wagner's own

showing, this had not been "Minna's account"; and for a true version

of that account one would rather trust a letter written within a few

days of the event than an autobiography written some seven or eight

years later. Does it not look as if the laudanuming legend had grown

up in the interval, among people who made detestation and denigration

of Minna a fundamental article of the Wagnerian faith? But there is

a further mystery to be solved. "Though he" (Fips) "showed no marks

of external injury," says the autobiography, "he was breathing so

convulsively that we concluded his lungs must be seriously damaged."

Why in the name of common sense _should_ he show any marks of _outward_

injury, or should anyone look for such marks, if it was suspected

that the dog had been poisoned? The curious thing is that if we omit

the sentence in the autobiography, quoted above, about the "virulent

poison," the account there agrees with that of the letter of July 12,

1861, in attributing the accident to some external injury received in

the street. It looks as if the "poison" theory had been spatchcocked

into the paragraph later on, without its being observed how it clashed

with the context. In any case it is satisfactory to see that not only

is there not a hint even in Wagner's later and fuller account of any

suspicion of Minna having caused the dog's death, but it is clear that

she was as grieved about it as he was. "In his first frantic pangs

after the accident,"[74] says Wagner, "he had bitten Minna violently in

the mouth, so that I had sent for a doctor immediately, who, however,

soon reassured us as to her not having been bitten by a mad dog."[75]

The dog could not have bitten Minna in the mouth unless she had had

her face very near his, probably against it, caressing and comforting

it; and one leaves it to common sense to decide whether a woman who

had been brutal enough to poison a dog out of hatred of her husband

and another woman would have been foolish enough to put her face near

the teeth of the writhing animal. And, by the way, would laudanum have

brought on "frantic pangs"? Is it not pretty clear that the laudanum

has only been suggested because it is known that Minna became addicted

to that drug as her heart disease developed?

It only needs to be added that although Fips had been given to Richard

and Minna by Frau Wesendonck, _it had always been Minna's dog rather

than Wagner's_. "A special bond of understanding," he says, "had

been formed between them [Minna and Mathilde] by the gift from the

Wesendoncks of a very friendly little dog to be the successor of my

good Peps. He was such a sweet and ingratiating animal that it very

soon gained the tender affection of my wife: I too was always much

attached to him. This time I left the choice of a name to my wife, and

she invented--apparently as a pendant to the name Peps--the name Fips,

which I was willing he should have. But he was always in reality my

wife's friend, for ... on the whole I never again established with them

[_i.e._ any later animals] the intimate relations I had had with Peps

[a previous dog] and Papo [a parrot]."[76]

On examination, then, of this theory that Frau Wesendonck had given

Wagner a dog, which dog Minna had poisoned in her fury against the

pair, it turns out (1) that the dog had always been Minna's pet rather

than Wagner's; (2) that while no reason is given for her suddenly

becoming inflamed with hatred against it, Wagner himself makes it clear

that she was distressed at its dying; (3) that Wagner's account of the

affair in his letters (written from two to nineteen days after the

event) agrees with that in _Mein Leben_ (not written till some years

after), with the exception of that one sentence, in the latter, as to

Minna having said that the dog had swallowed poison in the street;

(4) that this sentence obviously makes nonsense of the remainder of

the account in _Mein Leben_; (5) that the inference is (_a_) that the

poisoning theory was an after-thought on Wagner's or some one else's

part; and (_b_) that the "plain hinting" of Minna's guilt that Mr.

Ellis sees in the letter of July 12, 1861, but that no other living

being can see there, was not suggested to him at all by that letter,

but that he is indebted to some other source for it.[77]

VI

The publication of _Mein Leben_, the Wesendonck letters, and the

letters to Minna have made it possible to see both Wagner and Minna

more in the round than we could do a few years ago. Not that any number

of documents would ever bring reason into the writings of the more

extreme Minnaphobes; their method in the future, as in the past, will

no doubt be to insist that the composer was in every relation of his

life as near impeccable as mortal man could be, and that Minna was

very bad or very mad or a blend of both,--to belittle all the evidence

that does not square with the demigod theory of Wagner, to sneer at

the character and the intellectual attainments of everyone who seems

to be a witness for the other side, and to declare effusively that the

kind of evidence that _does_ square with the demigod theory is "worth

a hundred times" the testimony that does not.[78] It may soothe these

good people--who always become infuriated at the mildest refusal to

see Wagner through their spectacles--if we assure them that to believe

that Minna was not so black as she is generally painted is not at all

to hold that Wagner was an unmitigated villain. As a rule unmitigated

villains exist only in fiction; the tragedies of married life among

real human beings generally come not from deliberate and conscious

turpitude on one side or the other, but from the mere friction of two

quite normal characters who happen to be ill-adapted to each other

in a few more or less trifling respects. Wagner was certainly no

villain of the melodramatic sort. He could be kind enough to Minna at

times; he certainly--when away from her--felt the acutest pity for

her as well as for himself; and he could no more be consciously and

intentionally cruel to her than to any other suffering creature. Yet an

unprejudiced reader of the records can hardly doubt that he was often

cruel unconsciously and unintentionally. It was Minna's misfortune to

be the greatest obstacle to the realisation of himself along certain

lines. Everyone who has studied Wagner knows how impossible it was for

him to tolerate frustration anywhere. There probably never was a man

so honest with himself in most ways. His art absorbed the whole of

his nature. He knew what he wanted to do, and what he needed in order

to do it; and for him to need a thing and to insist on having it were

mental processes hardly separable from each other. At certain periods

of his life it became an imperative necessity for him to win from other

women the spiritual fervour, the idealistic glow, that were denied him

at home. He once found what he wanted in Frau Wesendonck. To reach

her he swept aside with calm indifference both his own wife and Frau

Wesendonck's husband. With the blindness of perfect honesty, he could

not see how Minna could regard the Mathilde Wesendonck affair from

any other standpoint than his own. It seemed unreasonable of Minna to

make such a pother over the matter after he had so carefully and fully

explained to her that his relations with Mathilde were purely ideal.

Why could not his wife keep home for him and be happy in administering

to his physical comfort, and leave his intellectual and emotional

appetites free to satisfy themselves where they would? As an abstract

logical proposition the theorem had a good deal in its favour. It

broke down through Minna declining to be thrilled by the beauty or the

abstract logic of it. She saw herself simply as the wife neglected for

another woman; it did not pacify her in the least to be told that so

far as Wagner was concerned this other woman was an ideal rather than a

reality,--that he sought her society less for what she was in herself

than for something in the finest soul of him that came into being

only when he talked to her. The average wife is not consoled for her

husband's obvious preference of another woman by the assurance that his

passion for the latter is free from any physical implications.[79] That

is simply equivalent to telling the wife, in a roundabout way, that

_she_ has not intelligence enough to be his spiritual companion. It

may be quite true that she has not; but the average wife is not likely

to be pleased at being told so. Minna was an average wife, and she no

doubt strongly objected to what could only appear to her as a criticism

and a slight. Wagner had to choose between her feelings and his own

satisfaction. He chose the latter, as he always did in these cases.

His letters to her place it beyond dispute that his heart bled for her

in her misery; but the demon within him forbade him to terminate the

acquaintanceship that was the cause of her misery. To have done that

would have hindered the one thing in the universe that seemed to him to

be worth any sacrifice to further,--the development of his personality

and his art to their very richest possibilities.

This, I venture to think, is a fair statement of the case as it must

have looked to any impartial friend of the pair in the later 'fifties

and 'sixties who tried to do justice to the psychology of both of them.

I would suggest, though, that there were hitherto unsuspected reasons

for Minna's unrelenting bitterness towards her husband throughout

the Wesendonck affair. Unfortunately we do not possess her letters

to him; but from many of Wagner's letters to her in the 'fifties and

'sixties we can see that she was for ever expressing suspicions of

him--suspicions which he combats at great length and with all the

epistolary skill he can command. Was there anything at the root of this

attitude of Minna's towards him beyond a merely suspicious and jealous

nature? Had she anything concrete to go upon? I think we can show that

she had. The key to a good deal of the trouble, I imagine, is to be

found in the Madame Laussot affair. And in that affair I am afraid

we cannot acquit Wagner of a certain amount of disingenuousness both

towards Minna and towards us.

VII

He was always much more fond of women than of men, having seemingly

found the former more sympathetic not only to his art but to himself.

His great desire, as a thousand passages in his letters and his prose

works show, was for love that knew no bounds in the way of trust

and self-surrender. In his immediate circle he probably had more

experiences of this kind among the women than among the men; the women

probably had a subconscious quasi-maternal sympathy for the sufferings

of the little man, and would no doubt be more likely to overlook the

angularities of his everyday character--if indeed, which is doubtful,

he showed those angularities as openly to them as he did to his male

friends. The story of his life is studded with the names of devoted

women, from the Minna of the earliest days to the Cosima of the latest.

Madame Laussot never attained the sanctification of some of the later

women who played a part in Wagner's life, for the episode in which she

figures was brief, and the end of it was of a kind that admits of no

going back; but for a while she certainly loomed larger in his thoughts

than has hitherto been suspected.[80]

Jessie Laussot was a young Englishwoman who had married a wine

merchant,--Eugène Laussot--of Bordeaux, in which town the pair lived

with Jessie's mother, Mrs. Taylor, the widow of an English lawyer.

Jessie was introduced to Wagner in Dresden, by Karl Ritter, in 1848.

Wagner's first account of the meeting is rather vague, but vague in

that peculiar way that suggests to the careful student of him that he

is deliberately saying less than he might. The young girl had shyly

expressed her admiration for him "in a way," he says, "I had never

experienced before." "It was with a strange, and, in its way, quite

a new sensation," he goes on to say, "that I parted from this young

friend; for the first time since my meeting with Alwine Frommann

and Werder, in the _Flying Dutchman_ days, I experienced again that

sympathetic tone that came as it were out of an old familiar past,

but never reached me from my immediate surroundings."[81] Knowing his

susceptibility to feminine sympathy, we may probably assume that Madame

Laussot counted for slightly more to him just then than he cared to put

into words some twenty years later.

In Zürich, whither he fled after the political troubles of 1849, he

received a letter from her in which she "assured him of her continued

sympathy in kind and affecting terms."[82] (She was a friend, by

the way, of Frau Julie Ritter, who gave Wagner as liberal financial

assistance as she could, both now and later.) Early in 1850 he goes

to Paris with the half hope of getting an opera produced there. He

is very depressed, and has a longing to escape to the East where, he

says, "I could live out my life in some sort of humanly-worthy fashion,

without any concern with this modern world."[83] While in this mood he

receives an invitation from Madame Laussot to spend a little time in

her house. He accepts, and goes to Bordeaux on the 16th March, where

he is received "in a very friendly and flattering manner." He learns

that the Ritters have been corresponding about him with the Laussots,

and that there is a scheme on foot under which Mrs. Taylor, who is

well-to-do, is to join with Frau Ritter in settling three thousand

francs a year upon him.[84] In the explanations that ensue from his

side, he divines that Jessie is the only one who thoroughly understands

him. An _entente_ is established between them.[85] "I soon discovered,"

he says, "the gulf which separated myself, as well as her, from her

mother and her husband. While that handsome young man was attending

to his business for the greater part of the day, and the mother's

deafness generally excluded her from most of our conversations, our

animated exchange of ideas upon many important matters soon led to

great confidence between us."[86] She was evidently intelligent and

cultivated, a good musician and an accomplished pianist. He read her

his poem of _Siegfrieds Tod_ and his sketch of _Wieland der Schmied_,

and they discussed these and other topics connected with his art. "It

was inevitable," he goes on to say with the crude frankness into which

he sometimes falls in _Mein Leben_,[87] "that we should soon feel the

people around us irksome to us in our conversations."

The visit lasts three weeks or so, at the end of which time Minna, like

a prudent and anxious wife, insists on his returning to Paris in order

to pursue his plans for a rehabilitation of the shattered finance of

the home.[88] He evidently does not like her letter. At the same time

he reads in the papers that his friends Röckel, Bakunin and Heubner

had been sentenced to death for their part in the Dresden rising. Out

of tune with the world, he determines, he says, to break with every

one and everything. He will give Minna half of the income his friends

intended to settle on him, and with the other half go to Greece or

Asia Minor, to forget and be forgotten. He communicates this plan to

Jessie, who, dissatisfied with her own life, is disposed to seek a

similar salvation for herself. "This resolve expressed itself in hints

and a brief word thrown out now and then. Without clearly knowing

what this would lead to, and without having come to any arrangement,

I left Bordeaux towards the end of April, more agitated than calmed,

full of regret and anxiety. I went to Paris in a sort of stupor, quite

uncertain what to do next."[89]

Wagner now begins to be a little disingenuous, and we catch a glimpse

or two of him as the "actor" that Nietzsche said he was. The facts and

the dates must be carefully borne in mind. Wagner says[90] that he

went to Bordeaux in the 16th March and that he stayed there more than

three weeks.[91] That would make the date of his departure about the

7th April. In a letter of 17th April to Minna he speaks of having been

"a fortnight again" in Paris,--which would make the date of his return

about the 3rd. The precise date is of no importance; it is sufficient

that it was somewhere between the 3rd and the 7th April.[92]

In this letter of the 17th April he refers to Minna's letter as having

caused "an irremediable" dissonance between them, and he gives, at

great length, the whole story of their married life, the thesis, of

course, being that he had always been the loving and she the loveless

and uncomprehending one. The _plaidoyer_ is needlessly elaborate, and

raises the suspicion that it was ultimately intended for more eyes

than those of Minna; it reads like a plea to posterity to see him as

he saw himself. But it is plainly insincere in part. "Your letters to

Bordeaux," he says, "have startled me violently out of a last beautiful

illusion about ourselves. I believed I had won you at last; I fancied

I saw you softening before the might of true love,--and then realised

with terrible grief, more deeply than ever, the inescapable certainty

that we belonged to each other no more. I could bear it no longer after

that: I could not talk to any one: I wanted to go away at once--to you:

I left my friends in haste and hurried to Paris, thence to go with

all speed back to Zürich. I have been here again a fortnight: my old

nerve-trouble got hold of me: like an incubus it lies on me: I must

shake it off,--I must, for my sake,--and yours." How little truth there

was in his remark that "I wished to go away at once--to you; I left my

friends in haste," &c., can be seen now from his own account in _Mein

Leben_. He plainly left Bordeaux with his head full of the scheme for

going to Greece or Asia Minor with Madame Laussot. Of this scheme he of

course does not breathe a word to Minna; the consummate, self-deluding

actor tries to persuade her that it was to her his injured heart turned

first.

Let us now take up the narrative again in _Mein Leben_. After

his return to Paris, he says, "I was at length obliged to reply

to my wife's urgent communication. I wrote her a copious letter,

recapitulating in a friendly but frank way the whole story of our life

together, _and explaining that I had firmly resolved to release her

from any immediate participation in my lot, since I was quite incapable

of ordering this in a way that would meet with her approval. She

should always have half of whatever money I might have; she must fall

in with this, and accept it as fact that the occasion had now arisen

for parting from me again, as she had said she would do on our first

meeting in Switzerland._ I brought myself to the point of breaking with

her completely."

He then writes to Jessie telling her what he had done, though, in view

of his lack of means, he is unable to give her any definite information

as to his plans for his "complete flight from the world." He receives

from her the positive assurance that she had determined to take the

same step as himself; she asks to be taken under his protection when

she has completely freed herself. "Much alarmed," he tells her that

it is one thing for a man in _his_ woeful difficulties to resolve

on flight, and another thing for a young woman in outwardly happy

circumstances to do so, for reasons which probably no one but he would

understand. This does not frighten her: she calmly tells him that her

flight will be quietly effected,--she will first of all pay a visit to

her friends the Ritters in Dresden. Wagner is so upset by all this that

he has to seek solitude at Montmorency, near Paris, in the middle of

April.[93]

Now of all that I have italicised in the last paragraph but one,

there is not a word in his letter of the 17th April to Minna. The

only passage resembling it is the final sentence of the letter: "Can

I hope to attain that [_i.e._ to make her happy] by _living_ with

you?--Impossible." It may be thought that, writing his reminiscences

of the affair twenty years or more after, his memory had played him

false, and that he imagined he had written to Minna what he no doubt

intended to say. But this explanation is negated by his next letter to

her, dated 4th May, in which he says, "I cannot help writing to you

once more before going far away from you. It has remained unknown to

me--as indeed I could have wished--how you received _the decisive step

on my part which I announced to you in my last letter_. As you have

long familiarised yourself with the thought of living apart from me,

and so regaining your independence, I presume and hope that you were,

if perhaps surprised, at any rate not alarmed by my decision."

Clearly then he _had_ announced, in the letter of 17th April, his

intention of leaving Minna. We may be sure that with his usual tendency

to copiousness he must have occupied considerable space in doing so.

What has become of this passage? Why is it not included in the printed

edition of the letters? If it has been intentionally omitted why has

not someone conceived it to be his editorial duty to advise the reader

of the fact?[94] In any case the omission of the passage does not

strengthen our already tottering confidence in the integrity of such

Wagnerian records as have come from Wahnfried.[95]

There is certainly something inaccurate in the sequence of events as

given in _Mein Leben_.[96] We have seen that, apparently on the 17th

April, he wrote to Minna announcing his intention of leaving her. A

few sentences after the narration of this part of the episode in _Mein

Leben_, he says that he left Paris to seek repose from his worries in

Montmorency, "about the middle of April." We are left to infer that in

these few days the events happened that are narrated in the sentences

in _Mein Leben_ describing his alarm at Jessie's reply. He fixes this

date, both for himself and for us, by the fact that while resting at

Montmorency he looks over the score of _Lohengrin_ and decides to send

it to Liszt, with a request that his friend shall produce it at Weimar.

"Now that I had also got rid of this score I felt as free as a bird,

and a Diogenes-like unconcern as to what might happen took possession

of me. I even invited Kietz to visit me in Montmorency and share the

joys of my retreat."

It is quite true that this happened "about the middle of April." We

have the actual letter to Liszt; it is dated the 21st April. But this

same letter makes it clear _that the project of flight to the East is

still in his mind_:

"Decisive events have just happened in my life: the last fetters have

fallen from me that bound me to a world in which I should shortly

have had to go under, not only spiritually but physically. Through

the endless constraint imposed upon me by those nearest to me,[97]

my health is gone, my nerves are shattered. Now I must live almost

entirely for my recovery. My livelihood is provided for; you shall hear

from me from time to time."[98]

Though there is here no specific mention of the East, there can be

little doubt that he is referring to his projected flight from Europe.

It is hard to explain otherwise the remark as to the last fetters that

bound him to the world having fallen from him, or his promise that

Liszt should hear from him from time to time; and there would be no

truth in his remark that his livelihood was provided for in his new

habitat, except in the sense that Madame Laussot's purse was at his

disposal.[99] Moreover he writes to Liszt some two months and a half

later, when the whole affair had blown over, "When we meet again I

shall have much to tell you: for the present only this much, as regards

my immediate past, that my contemplated voyage to Greece has been

knocked on the head. There were too many impediments (_Bedenken_), all

of which I could not surmount. I should have preferred to have gone out

of the world altogether. Well, you shall hear later."[100]

It is evident, then, that Wagner, whether by accident or design,

has got the sequence wrong in _Mein Leben_. He makes it appear as

if he had worried during the first week or two of April over Madame

Laussot's plan for leaving Europe with him, that he had sought

retirement in Montmorency about the middle of April, and that there the

burden had quickly been shifted from his mind. He says no more about

Madame Laussot and her scheme, but tells us that while in a "state of

complacency" in Montmorency with Kietz he is startled by the news that

Minna had come to Paris to look him up. Now the letter of 21st April

to Liszt suggests a doubt as to the absolute correctness of all this;

and that doubt is turned into certainty by Wagner's letter to Minna of

the 4th May, in which he definitely announces his intention of leaving

her: "The news I have to give you to-day gave me a special reason for

writing to you again, since I have a feeling that it may soften for you

all the possible bitterness of our separation. I am on the point of

setting off to Marseilles, whence I shall go at once in an English ship

to Malta, and thence to Greece and Asia Minor. I have always felt, and

most strongly of all of late, the need of getting out of this mere life

of books and ideas, that consumes me, and once more looking round me in

the world. For the present the modern world is closed behind me, for I

hate it and want nothing more to do either with it or what is nowadays

called 'art.' Germany can only become a field of stimulus to me again

when all its conditions shall be utterly changed.... So of late my

longing has been again directed to distant travel, so as to get quite

away for a time from our present-day conditions, and restore myself

bodily and mentally by a change of sight and sound in other climes."

Not a word, it will be observed, of Madame Laussot's accompanying him!

He has simply felt, as any man might feel, the need of a change of

scene.

He continues thus: "In these last decisive days, then, I conceived the

plan of going to Greece and the East, and am lucky enough to find the

means for carrying out this scheme placed at my disposal from London.

For in London I have gained a new protector,--one of the most eminent

English lawyers, who knows my works and will give me his support in

return for the original manuscript of everything I may write."

Even Mr. Ellis, writing before the publication of _Mein Leben_, was

constrained to conjecture, in a footnote to this letter, that this

"new protector" in London "strongly resembles a myth." Let us eschew

more forcible language, and be content to call it a myth. _Mein Leben_

puts it beyond dispute that the financier of the expedition was Madame

Laussot.[101]

Wagner's account of the affair so far is, I venture to say, coloured

by his desire, twenty years later, to minimise the seriousness of the

whole affair. But the story of his disingenuousness or his inaccuracy

is even yet not complete.

By his own account he now does a rather shabby thing. He apparently

dreads meeting Minna; so he "bilks" the lady. He leaves Montmorency,

goes to Paris, and instructs Kietz to tell Minna that he knew nothing

more of her husband than that he had left the capital. The ruse

succeeds. Wagner flies to Villeneuve, on the Lake of Geneva, where he

puts up at the Hôtel Byron. There, in a little while, he is joined

by Karl Ritter. He has not been long settled down at Villeneuve,

however, before the Laussot affair begins to take on a very unpleasant

tinge. Jessie had apparently told her mother, the mother had told

the husband, and the husband had expressed the intention of putting

a bullet through Wagner at the first convenient opportunity. Wagner

writes to Laussot "trying to make him see matters in their true light,"

but at the same time declaring, with characteristic impudence, that

he "could not understand how a man could bring himself to keep a

woman with him by force when she did not want to have anything to do

with him." He is on his way to Bordeaux, he says, where he is at M.

Laussot's service. He also writes to Jessie, advising her to be "calm

and self-possessed." In three days he is at Bordeaux: he sends word

to M. Laussot at nine o'clock in the morning. No reply is vouchsafed;

but late in the afternoon he is summoned to the police station. He is

requested to leave the town, ostensibly because his passport is not in

order, but in reality, as the authorities admit, because they have had

a communication from the Laussots. He obtains a respite of a couple of

days, which he uses to indite a letter to Jessie, "in which I told her

exactly what had occurred, and said that my contempt for the conduct

of her husband, who had exposed his wife's honour by a denunciation to

the police, was so great that I would have nothing more to do with her

until she had released herself from this shameful situation."[102]

The Laussots had left Bordeaux when he arrived; so he obtains admission

to the flat,[103] goes from room to room till he comes to Jessie's

boudoir, places his letter in her work-basket, and returns. Still no

reply is vouchsafed, and he makes his way back to Switzerland in quite

a cheery frame of mind, evidently sure of having acted impeccably all

through this affair.

In this, as in so many other episodes of Wagner's life, we have

unfortunately only his version of what happened. He calls just the

witnesses he wants, elicits just the evidence that suits him, and then

complacently gives the verdict in his own favour. To the outsider it

looks as if he had been extremely foolish with Madame Laussot and

extremely arrogant with her husband; and we may reasonably suppose that

if they could tell the story from their side they could make the case

rather worse for Wagner than he has done for himself. The real facts

will perhaps never be known: I say "the real facts," for no one who has

studied the autobiography carefully, with a knowledge of such cases as

those of Hornstein, Lachner, Hanslick, the Wesendoncks, and others, can

believe that Wagner's account of the affair gives us the whole truth

and nothing but the truth. But letting that pass, we may now observe

how once more the story in _Mein Leben_ fails to square with the

evidence obtainable elsewhere.

That Madame Laussot had become disillusioned concerning him is plain

from his own further account. One day Karl Ritter receives a letter

from her which he hesitates to show to Wagner. The latter tears it out

of his hand, and finds that "she had written to say she felt obliged

to let my friend know that she had become sufficiently enlightened

about me to make it necessary for her to drop my acquaintance." Her

mother and her husband had taken steps to break off all correspondence

between her and Wagner; he gracefully refers to them now as "the

two conspirators," and charges them with "calumniating" him. "Mrs.

Taylor had written to my wife complaining of 'my intention to

commit adultery,' expressing her sympathy with her, and offering

her support; poor Minna, who now suddenly thought she had found a

hitherto unsuspected reason for my resolve to live apart from her, in

turn complained to Mrs. Taylor." There has been, in fact, "a curious

misunderstanding" of a joking remark of his. He is very indignant

over it all, but chiefly at the way Minna had been treated! While he

was himself indifferent as to what the others might think of him, he

accepted Karl Ritter's offer to go to Zürich and set Minna's mind at

rest with a proper explanation.[104]

This looks plausible enough, but I am afraid there is a touch of

fiction in it. Let us look at a letter from Wagner to Minna of nine

years later:

"Neither can I blame you for giving me that dear Bordeaux to smell at

in return, especially as you have kept a secret from me, the hearing of

which really astounds me. So someone wrote you at the time, that I went

that second time to Bordeaux to abduct a young wife from her husband??

Now let me assure you on my honour and most sacred conscience that such

a shameless lie and calumny was never yet invented against any man. If

it would conduce to your honour and peace of mind, I should be quite

ready to give you the exact details of the whole of the episode, and

you would then find that I doubtless acted _very stupidly_ at that

time, but certainly _not evilly_ to any one."[105]

I do not see what meaning we can attach to this except that for nine

years Wagner had been unaware that Minna knew as much as she actually

did of the Bordeaux affair. The revelation evidently comes as a

complete surprise to him. We can take it as certain that, as he says

in _Mein Leben_, Mrs. Taylor had really written to Minna, telling her

what had happened. But the letter of 1859 makes it appear as if Minna

had kept the secret to herself all these years. The only conclusion we

can come to, then, is either that Wagner was in error in saying he had

deputed Karl Ritter to explain matters to Minna, or that he had told

Karl rather less than the full truth. This may seem a bold conclusion

to draw, but I do not see what other is possible from the evidence.

The remark in the letter--"so someone wrote to you at the time,"

&c.--squares with the account given in _Mein Leben_. But the rest of

the letter seems to indicate that till that moment he had no idea of

there having been such a letter. We seem forced to conclude either that

Wagner's memory was playing him false, or that his desire to make the

world see the facts as he would have preferred them to have been had

militated somewhat against strict accuracy--as it did in the Hornstein

and other cases.

And now we have, I think, the explanation, or partial explanation, of

a good deal of Minna's jealous suspicion in the 'fifties and 'sixties,

especially as regards Frau Wesendonck. Knowing of Wagner's relations

with Madame Laussot, knowing also that he had kept these relations a

secret from her both when he was writing to her at the time and in the

years that followed, knowing at first-hand, too, as well as we know

now through _Mein Leben_ and the letters, her husband's ineradicable

tendency to _prendre son bien où il le trouvait_, we can understand her

frequent uneasiness of mind. If we are to be fair to her we must get

away from the historical standpoint, from which all that is seen is the

great musician blundering through life and sacrificing everybody and

everything in order to consummate his art; we must look at it also from

the standpoint of Minna and the moment, putting the genius out of the

question and taking it purely as a case of any husband and any wife.

And when this is done, though we may still regret the tragedy of their

union and admit that Minna was not the best wife possible for such a

man as he--that she had, indeed, almost as many faults as a wife as

Wagner had as a husband--we shall at all events refuse to join in the

venomous outcry of the extreme Wagner partisans against her.[106]

[Illustration: MINNA WAGNER.]

VIII

That Minna was as much sinned against as sinning will hardly be

disputed by any unprejudiced reader of _Mein Leben_ and Wagner's

correspondence. Let us throw as rapid a glance as possible over the

various stages of their union.

Wagner himself sings the praises of the earlier Minna frequently

enough. The picture we first get of her is that of a pretty bourgeoise,

of no great intellectual capacity, but modest, sensible and

sympathetic. On the other hand, several of Wagner's self-revelations

show him in his youth as the harum-scarum one might expect a genius

of his dynamic temperament to be--not vicious, perhaps, in the style

of more stupid men, but keen for pleasure, and anxious to taste every

vintage that life could offer him. His early life probably differed

from that of tens of thousands of highly-strung young artists only in

the degree of ardour with which he pursued his will-o'-the-wisps, and

his quite abnormal imprudence in the affairs of daily life--financial

affairs in particular. Throughout his career the protection, the

solace, the domestic care of a woman were necessities to him. We may

believe him when he says that he was the most home-loving of men; home

and a devoted woman were haven and anchorage for him.[107] His longing

for this haven would always be increased by the despair into which his

vivacious nature, so keen for pleasure, was for ever bringing him. His

early twenties were undoubtedly a very critical time for him mentally

and morally. The debt-acquiring habit was already firmly rooted in

him, and we get hints here and there of a certain hectic quality in

his views of sex. In the _Autobiographical Sketch_ (1842) he tells us

how, under the impulse of these ideas, he dealt with Shakespeare's

_Measure for Measure_ in the act of metamorphosing it into his own _Das

Liebesverbot_:

"Everything around me seemed to be in a state of ferment, and it seemed

to me the most natural thing to give myself up to this fermentation.

During a lovely summer's journey amongst the Bohemian watering places

I drafted the plan of a new opera, _Das Liebesverbot_; I took the

matter for it from Shakespeare's _Measure for Measure_, only with this

difference, that I deprived it of its prevailing seriousness and cast

it in the mould of _Das junge Europa_: free and uncloaked [_offene_]

sensualism [_Sinnlichkeit_] won the victory, purely by its own

strength, over Puritanical hypocrisy."[108]

In this mood even the froth of the lighter French and Italian operas

became a pleasure to him:

"The fantastic dissoluteness of German student-life, after some

violent excesses (_nach heftiger Ausschweifung_) had soon become

distasteful to me: _Woman_ had begun to be a reality for me.[109] The

longing which could nowhere still itself in life found ideal nurture

in the reading of Heinse's _Ardinghello_, as also the works of Heine

and other members of the then 'Young-German' school of literature. The

effect of the impressions thus received found utterance in my actual

life in the only way in which Nature can express herself under the

pressure of the moral bigotry of our social system."[110]

His own commentary on the libretto of _Das Liebesverbot_ is that it

expressed a change in his moral nature of which he was fully conscious

at the time:

"If one compares this subject with that of _Die Feen_, it becomes

evident that there was a possibility of my developing along two

diametrically opposite lines: confronting the religious (_heilige_)

earnestness of my original sensibilities was a pert inclination to the

wild frothing of the senses (_zu wildem sinnlichem Ungestüme_), to a

defiant cheerfulness that seemed utterly at variance with the earlier

mood. This becomes quite obvious to myself when I compare the musical

working-out of these two operas.... The music to _Das Liebesverbot_ had

played its part in shaping both the matter and the manner; and this

music was only the reflex of the influence of modern French and (as

concerns the melody) even Italian opera upon my receptive faculties in

their then state of violent physical excitation."

His libretto and his music were the reflection of his life:

"My path led me first of all straight to frivolity in my artistic

views; this coincides with the epoch of my first practical experience

as theatrical musical director. The rehearsing and conducting of the

loose-jointed French operas that were then the mode, the knowingness

and smartness (_Protzige_) of their orchestral effects, often filled

me with childish delight when I could set the stuff going right and

left from my conductor's desk. In life, which from this time consisted

in the motley life of the theatre, I sought in distraction the

satisfaction of an impulse which showed itself in more immediate things

as sensualism (_Genusssucht_), and in music as a flickering, tingling

unrest."[111]

_Mein Leben_ shows him as he must have been in the Magdeburg days,

ardent, passionate, variable, lacking in self-control, eager for the

joys of life, and in danger of being sucked down into the maelstrom

of the minor theatrical world. His own version of the outcome of all

this--in the _Mittheilung an meine Freunde_--runs thus:

"The modern retribution for modern levity, however, soon visited

me. I was in love; married in impetuous haste; under the unpleasant

impressions of a moneyless home harassed myself and others; and so fell

into the misery whose nature it is to bring thousands upon thousands to

the ground."[112]

One may be allowed to surmise, however, that his marriage was at the

time a godsend to him: it probably steadied him at a critical moment

and saved him from greater spiritual damage. His picture of Minna as

she appeared to him at their first meeting must be given in his own

words:

"Her appearance and bearing formed the most striking contrast to all

the unpleasant impressions of the theatre which I had received on this

fateful morning. The young actress looked very charming and fresh: I

was struck by the remarkable seemliness (_Bemessenheit_) and grave

assurance of her movements and her behaviour, which lent an agreeable

and engaging dignity to the affability of her expression."[113]

Her "unaffected sobriety of character and her dainty neatness" did

something to reconcile him to the vulgar and superficial theatrical

world in which his lot had been cast. She was exceedingly kind to

the nervous and _maladif_ young conductor, yet all that she did for

him was done "with a friendly calm and composure that had something

almost motherly about it, without a suspicion of frivolity or

heartlessness."[114]

After a few weeks or months of acquaintance, in which he had showed a

decided liking for her society, Minna begins to be more distant with

him--apparently because there is a more serious lover in the field.

"I now experienced for the first time," he says, "the cares and pains

of a lover's jealousy." For a time they are estranged; but early in

1835 they return to their former friendly footing. And now we get the

first symptom of that egoism in his attitude towards her that was

afterwards to be so fruitful in misfortune. Though he was not her

accepted lover, he jealously objected to her receiving the attentions

of other men--of whom there were plenty always dancing attendance on

the pretty, engaging girl. He protests with "bitterness and quarrelsome

temper" against her receiving other men's attentions, though he admits

that "thanks to her grave and decorous behaviour, her reputation was

unimpaired"; and while _she_ remained as calm and sensible as ever,

_he_ cubbishly vents his rage in pretended dissipation, which had the

effect of "filling her with the sincerest pity and anxiety" for him.

He gives a New Year's party to the opera company, which is

evidently meant to be a lively affair, and asks Minna to it;

everyone doubts whether she will come. She accepts, however, "with

perfect ingenuousness." As the evening wears on and the liquor

circulates--punch succeeding champagne--"all the shackles of petty

conventionality were thrown off," and the conduct of the theatrical

ladies and gentlemen drifted into what Wagner calls "universal

amiability." One can imagine the scene.[115] Throughout it all Minna

acts with a simplicity, modesty and dignity that win Wagner's praise.

So far she appears much the more decent and likeable human being of the

two. Wagner's further account of her increases our respect for her:

"From that time onward my relations with Minna were of an intimately

friendly kind. I do not believe that she ever felt for me an affection

that came near passion--the genuine feeling of love--or indeed that she

was capable of such a thing; I can only describe her feeling for me as

one of heart-felt good-will, the most fervent wish for my success and

well-being, the kindest sympathy and a genuine delight in my gifts,

which often filled her with astonishment. All this became at last part

and parcel of her ordinary existence (_welches alles ihr endlich zu

einer steten und behäglichen Gewohnheit wurde_)."[116]

The fact that, feeling no genuine passion for him, she should have

been so kind to him as she was, and should have been willing to unite

her life with his, simply increases our respect for her. To her he was

simply a young wastrel of talent, who needed the care and protection of

a sensible woman. She "mothered" him, as other women were destined to

do in the course of his wild and wasteful life.

Then comes the--to Wagner--discreditable episode,[117] too long

for narration here, that makes them avowed lovers. Still there is

apparently nothing more on her side than kindliness and sympathy,

while Wagner is madly in love. He shrinks from marriage in view of the

difficulty and uncertainty of his position, while Minna too "declared

that she was more anxious to see these [their finances] improved than

for us to be married." But soon Minna leaves him to join a theatrical

company in Berlin. This precipitates matters. "In passionate unrest I

wrote to her urging her to return, and, in order to move her not to

separate her fate from mine, spoke formally of an early marriage." He

appears also to have threatened, in the same letter, that if she did

not return he would "take to drink and go to the devil as rapidly as

possible."[118]

He persuades the Magdeburg theatre authorities to renew her engagement,

and sets off "in the depth of an awful winter's night" to meet her on

her return, greets her "joyously, with tears from his heart," and leads

her back "in triumph to her cosy Magdeburg home, that had become so

dear to me."[119]

It is evident, however, that in _Mein Leben_ he is not telling the

reader the whole of the facts. Certain passages in the contemporary

letters to Apel make it clear that in at any rate the latter part of

the Magdeburg period he and Minna were husband and wife in everything

but legal form. On 27th October 1835 he writes thus to Apel: "Don't get

too many fancies in your head with regard to Minna. I leave everything

to fate. She loves me,[120] and her love means a great deal to me now:

she is now my central point; she gives me consistency and warmth: I

cannot give her up. I only know that you, dear Theodor, do not yet

know the sweetness of such a relationship; it has nothing common,

unworthy or enervating in it; our epicureanism is pure and strong--not

a miserable illicit liaison;--we love each other, and believe in each

other, and the rest we leave to fate;--this you do not know, and only

with an actress can one live thus; this superiority to the bourgeoise

can only be found where the whole field is fantastic caprice and poetic

licence."[121]

_Das Liebesverbot_ is given and fails; his career as musical director

in Magdeburg is terminated, and hungry creditors, seeing the end of

all his hopes and perhaps theirs, begin legal proceedings against him.

Every time he came home he found a summons nailed to the door. "And

now Minna, with her truly comforting assurance and steadfastness in

all circumstances, proved the greatest possible support to me."[122]

She gets an engagement in Königsberg, whither he follows her. Then

he begins to doubt her. He is uneasy as to one Schwabe, who is

"passionately interested" in her. He afterwards learned that the pair

had already been friendly; though he adds that he could not regard

her relation with Schwabe as an infidelity to himself, since she had

rejected the former in his favour. But he was made uneasy by the

reflection that the episode had been concealed from him, and by the

suspicion that Minna's comfortable circumstances were in part due to

the friendship of this man. In fact, he, Wagner, the butterfly amorist,

was jealous like any common person; and the desire grew upon him to

hasten the marriage with Minna in order that he might find peace and

quiet--a refuge from the storms of the miserable theatrical world in

which his lot had been cast.

In Königsberg he obtains an appointment as conductor: and now we behold

him drifting, like his own gods in the _Ring_, headlong to destruction.

His reason warns him of the folly of a union with Minna, but his

impulses drive him irresistibly into it:

"Minna made no objection, and all my past endeavours and resolutions

seemed to show that, for my part, I was anxious for nothing so much as

to enter into this haven of rest. Notwithstanding this, strange enough

things were going on at this time in my inmost being. I had become

sufficiently acquainted with Minna's life and character to be able to

see, as clearly as this important step required, the great differences

between our two natures, if only besides this perception I had had the

needed ripeness of mind."[123] But blind lover as he had been, he goes

into marriage with his eyes open:

"The peculiar power she exercised over me had no source in the

ideal side of things, to which I had always been so susceptible; on

the contrary she attracted me by the soberness and solidity of her

character, which, in my wide wanderings in search of an ideal goal,

gave me the needed support and completion."[124]

Always me! me! me! He used Minna as he used everyone else, as an

instrument for his own happiness and comfort. And as he was the more

intellectual of the two, and saw clearly the fatal differences of

character between them,[125] one can only regard the unfortunate

consequences of his marriage as an avengement of his own egoism and

jealousy. On her part, though she "made no objection" to the marriage,

she was plainly not anxious for it; she never seems to have concealed

the fact that her feeling for him was mainly one of sympathy. He learns

that her friendship with Schwabe had been more intimate than he had

suspected:

"It ended in a very violent scene between us; it established the type

of all the later similar scenes. I had gone too far in my outbursts,

treating as if I had some real right over her, a woman who was not

tied to me by any sort of passionate love, but who had yielded to my

importunities only out of kindness, and who, in the deepest sense, did

not belong to me at all. To reduce me to utter confusion, Minna had

only to remind me that from a worldly point of view she had refused

really good offers, and had yielded out of sympathy and devotion to

the impetuosity of a penniless and uncomfortable (_übel versorgt_)

man, whose talent had not yet been proved to the satisfaction of the

world. I did myself most harm by the raving violence of my speech, by

which she was so deeply wounded that as soon as I became conscious

of my extravagance I always had to appease her injured feelings by

admitting my injustice and begging her forgiveness. So this, like all

similar scenes in the future, ended, outwardly, in her favour. But

peace was undermined for ever, and by frequent repetition of these

affairs, Minna's character underwent a notable change. Just as in later

times she was perplexed by the (to her) more and more incomprehensible

nature of my conception of art and its relationships, which gave her a

passionate uncertainty as to her judgments upon everything connected

with it, so now she became increasingly confused by my opinion--so

different to hers--with regard to delicacy in moral matters; this

confusion--as in general there was so much freedom in my opinions which

she could not understand or approve--gave to her easy-going temperament

a passionateness that was originally foreign to it."[126]

The "delicacy in moral matters" is good. Minna would probably have

said that she considered it neither moral nor delicate to run away

without paying your tradespeople and to sponge, and make your wife

sponge, upon your friends. She was a bourgeoise, but at any rate she

had the normal bourgeois scrupulosity in matters like these, in which

Wagner's moral sense was anything but delicate. Posterity will refuse

to credit him with moral delicacy of any kind. His failings in this

respect were a source of sorrow to the friends who loved him most.

Cornelius, for example, who adored him, sums him up thus in his Diary

under date 3rd February 1863:

"Wagner! That is a leading chapter! Ah! I may not speak at large upon

that subject. I say in a word: His morality is weak and without any

true basis. His whole course of life, along with his egoistic bent,

has ensnared him in ethical labyrinths. He makes use of people for

himself alone, without having any real feeling towards them, without

even paying them the tribute of pure piety. Within himself he has

been too much bent on making his mental greatness cover all his moral

weaknesses; and I am afraid that posterity will be more critical (_die

Nachwelt nimmt es genauer_)."[127]

Yes, posterity sees the sharp division between the artistic greatness

and the moral littleness of the man even more clearly than his

contemporaries did; and it has learned to distrust the plausibility

of his accounts of himself and others, and to distrust them most when

they are most plausible. If only Minna could have survived to read

_Mein Leben_, and to have given her own version of why the pair drifted

so widely apart in the Dresden days--why she, who had borne untold

sufferings for him in Paris, should in the course of four or five years

have lost all respect for him and all belief in him!

So the breach widened between them. "The really painful feature of our

later life together was the fact that owing to this passionateness of

hers I lost the last support that Minna's peculiar nature had hitherto

afforded me. At the time I was filled only with a dim foreboding

of the fateful consequences of my marrying Minna. Her pleasant and

soothing qualities still had such a salutary effect on me, that with

the levity natural to me, as well as the obstinacy with which I met all

attempts at dissuasion, I silenced the inner voice that prophesied dark

disaster."[128]

Who, after that, will lay the blame wholly on Minna? He urges her into

a marriage for which she has no great desire, forces her to abandon the

career that had maintained her in decent comfort, hitches her to his

fiery and erratic chariot and drags her through misery and privation

unspeakable, quarrels with her from time to time and insults her with

the "raving violence" of his speech.[129]

IX

In the end they marry. Wagner was twenty-three and a half, Minna

twenty-seven. At the altar, he says, he had the clearest of visions of

his life being dragged in different directions by two cross-currents;

but he accounts for the levity with which he chased away these thoughts

by the "really heart-felt affection" he had for this "truly exceptional

girl," who "gave herself so unhesitatingly to a young man without any

means of support."

Almost immediately after the marriage, whatever little idyll there had

been in it is shattered. In a few months new financial troubles have

accumulated. Minna cannot resign herself to them so easily as he does.

The less he is able to provide for the necessities of the household,

the more does she feel compelled to take upon herself the duty of

supplying them. This she does, to his "unbearable shame," by "making

the most of her personal popularity." He was unable to bring her to

see the matter from his point of view; and as usual, all attempts at

an understanding were frustrated, as he admits, by the bitterness and

violence of his words and manner.[130] What he means by "making the

most of her personal popularity" it is not easy to say. On the surface

it suggests infidelity to Wagner; but a letter of his to Minna of

18th May 1859 makes this hypothesis more than doubtful. Ultimately

there appears on the scene one Dietrich, a rich merchant, of whom

Wagner is obviously jealous. On the 31st May 1837 Minna leaves her

home while Wagner is at the theatre. She has fled to Dresden, Dietrich

accompanying her a small part of the way. Wagner half-recognises that

she has done no more than flee from a desperate situation, and he

reproaches himself for being the cause of her despair. He finds her on

the 3rd June under her parents' roof in Dresden; there she confesses

that she regarded herself as badly treated by him, and thought him

"blind and deaf" to the misery of her position.

Matters grow brighter for a time, but Dietrich turns up once more, and

Minna again disappears with him. In time she writes Wagner "a most

affecting letter," in which she confesses her infidelity, but pleads

that she had been driven to it by despair. She has been deceived in the

character of her seducer; now, again in despair, ill and wretched, she

begs Wagner's forgiveness, and assures him that she has only now become

truly conscious of her love for him. He writes back, taking on himself

the chief blame, and declares that there should never again be any

mention between them of what happened,--a pledge, he says, which he can

pride himself on having carried out to the letter.

He was unquestionably generous on this occasion;[131] no doubt his

conscience told him that he himself was largely answerable for the

distracted state of Minna's mind. Her flight was no romantic love

affair, but the mere willingness to accept any outstretched hand that

would help her to escape from her husband and the disillusionment the

marriage with him had brought her.

His own view of their early married life is further given in two

later letters to Minna. They are both instructive. We have to bear

in mind, in reading them, his inveterate tendency to dramatise and

idealise himself, and his actor's gift of plausible expression. Making

the necessary deductions on this account, the story in the letters

agrees with that told here. He brings passion to the marriage, Minna

brings merely sympathy,--which only makes her sacrifice of herself the

more remarkable. Both letters are much too long for quotation here, and

extracts can give only an imperfect idea of them. They must be read in

full. In the first letter, written, as we have already seen, as a sort

of farewell to her before going to the East with Madame Laussot, he

paints the picture of their early married life as _he_ saw it,--he all

pure, unquestioning love, she possessed merely with an ideal of duty.

"It was duty that bade you bear with me all the troubles we endured

in Paris." (It apparently did not strike him that it must have been a

remarkable sense of duty--hardly distinguishable in its effects from

love--that made his wife endure such torments for his sake.) The cue

of the more inflexible of the Wagner partisans has always been that

Minna was incapable of appreciating her husband's genius. She may not

have been able to follow the later flights of it; how many even of his

musical contemporaries could, for that matter? But there is evidence

enough that whatever doubts she may have had about him as a man,

she had a sincere admiration for his gifts as a composer. After the

Wesendonck catastrophe in 1858, when Minna was living apart from her

husband in Dresden, and had no reason to be particularly well-disposed

towards him, she wrote to a friend: "_Lohengrin_ was at last given on

the 6th of this month, at the Court Theatre in Dresden, for the first

time. I am very fond of this opera.... I have often to refresh and

strengthen myself with Richard's works, or else I could not write to

him in a friendly tone. He certainly has in me an ardent worshipper

of his earlier works. I have a feeling as if I had created them with

him, for during that time I looked after him and took all the household

cares on my own shoulders alone. How different it has been during the

last few years of our union!"[132] And in the grievous Paris days we

find her writing to Apel for help for her husband, and declaring her

willingness to bear her weary burdens cheerfully in order that his

genius might have a chance of coming into its own. "What to do now is

at the moment a chaos to me; but even if I had the means of leaving

Paris, I would never leave Richard in this position, for I know he has

not fallen into it through levity, but the noblest and most natural

aspiration of an artist has brought him where unfortunately every man

perhaps must come without special help." And the poor woman, whose

great desire in life is to live with bourgeois honesty, is reduced to

making a piteous appeal to Apel to rescue her husband by a further loan

of money. The same cry is wrung from her in a letter of three weeks

later. "I am perhaps better fitted than Richard to plead with you to

make a sacrifice on his behalf, as I speak for another rather than for

myself. I can put myself in the same category as you, for I too have

brought him sacrifices; I have given up my own peaceful, independent

lot in order to bind myself to his, for it seems to be appointed that

only through the most violent storms and trials will he reach his goal.

Therefore I am fulfilling now a holy duty; perhaps, indeed, I sacrifice

myself in writing to you again [for money, after Apel's declared

unwillingness to give any more]. You say in your letter to Richard that

it is impossible for you to do more for him than you have done. That

you have given this much shows your good and noble will; and I must

believe, since you assure me it is so, that without overstepping your

usual expenses it is impossible for you to make a greater sacrifice

for him. Let me, however, without any desire to boast, tell you what

I did as a girl for my brother, who perhaps in certain relationships

stood less closely to me than Richard to you. He was to have studied

in Leipzig, but my parents could not support him; so I undertook to

do so, at a time when, owing to the wretched state of the finances of

the theatre, I had not even four groschen for my dinner. I pawned my

ear-rings and such things--which were often indispensable to me at

the theatre--sent the money to my brother for his studies, and kept

for myself only three pfennigs for a bit of bread which I ate for my

dinner while out walking, having pretended to the hotel people that I

was invited out to dinner somewhere. Now should it be only the poor and

needy to make sacrifices of this kind?... In Richard there is a fine

talent to be rescued, that will be brought nigh to ruin, for already

he has nearly lost heart, and if that happens his higher destiny is

lost...."[133]

Surely here was a character of which one who was a poorer composer but

a better man might have made something finer than Wagner did. In the

light of these letters and the self-sacrifice they reveal, read now the

sublimely egoistic lines in which Wagner speaks of these Parisian days

in his letter to Minna of April 17, 1850:

"Since our reunion after the first disturbance of our married life

[_i.e._ the Dietrich affair] it was really only duty that controlled

your conduct towards me,--it was duty that made you bear with me

all the miseries we suffered in Paris, and even in your last letter

but one you only speak of duty in connection with those days,--not

love. Had you had real love for me in your heart then, you would not

be giving yourself credit now for enduring those miseries, but, in

your firm belief in me and what I am, you would have recognised in

them a necessity in which one acquiesces for the sake of something

higher; when one thinks only of this higher thing, and is happy in the

consciousness of it, he forgets lower sorrows."

This is the magnificent spirit that created Bayreuth; but it is hardly

the spirit for a happy married life, or the way in which to talk about

the hunger your wife has endured for you, the trinkets she pawned for

you, and the lodger's boots she has cleaned for you.[134]

So the letter runs on. Wagner reviews their life in Dresden,--always,

as it seems to me, pleading his case for posterity as much as stating

it to Minna, who probably listened to it with a melancholy curl of the

lip: how often before had she not had to listen to these panegyrics of

himself!

Let us be fair to him also, however. The business of criticism--at

any rate a generation after the actors in the drama have become

dust--is to try to see the case for each of them through his own

eyes. Occasionally one's anger or contempt may be stirred at some

particularly unpleasant manifestation of character; but on the

whole, as Oscar Wilde says, "Nobody with the true historical sense

ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius or censuring Cæsar

Borgia. These personages have become like the puppets of a play....

They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art

nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval." It is

quite true, as Wagner goes on to say, that everything he did in Dresden

was the inevitable outcome of his artistic nature; without being

untrue to his faith as an artist he could not have acted otherwise.

With her inartistic clearness of vision, Minna saw all along whither

his idealism was leading them both,--to poverty and a repetition of

the distress of the Paris days. He admits that she gave him "bodily

tending," but complains that what "a man of his inner excitability"

needed most--"mental tending"--was withheld from him. But before we

blame Minna for not fully understanding the Wagner of this period and

seeing the future ruler of musical Europe in him, let us ask how many

even of his musical associates were capable of that feat. After the

Dresden catastrophe everyone must have been of her opinion,--that he

was an excitable and ill-balanced man of genius, with a fatal gift

for making the worst of life, who had by his own folly sacrificed for

ever his chance of making an honourable livelihood. Nobody could judge

him fairly, because no such man as he--no man so possessed with the

idea that anything was permissible to the artist that was necessary

for his self-realisation--had ever come within the ken of any of them.

To the careful housewife, who had endured so much for him only to

see all the hardly-won comfort of the last few years imperilled for

ever, he could only appear an impossible wastrel to whom life could

never teach prudence. How deep was her anger with him is shown by her

long-continued refusal to go to him after his flight. She wrote to him

that "she would not join him till he could support her abroad by his

earnings." Evidently she had not his gift for living complacently on

charity or debts. It is impossible not to be moved by this letter of

Wagner's, however conscious we may be that it is merely a dexterous

piece of special pleading. The situation between them had evidently

become hopeless, yet neither realised that it was so. Minna's hope

was that he would again become the Wagner of the early Dresden days,

working patiently to provide an honourable livelihood for them both.

He had done with all this; henceforth nothing existed for him but his

dreams. We can now see that as an artist, he was, as usual, right; but

what wife, seeing her husband cease from musical composition for six

years and apparently waste his time in writing argumentative books that

few people read and fewer still understood, would have judged him and

their position otherwise than Minna did? It was his great grievance

against her at this time that she insisted on his doing all he could to

get a contract for a new opera for Paris[135]--a project that became

every day more distasteful to him. "You stand before me implacable,"

he cries bitterly: "you seek honour where I almost see disgrace, and

feel shame at what is to me most welcome." He apparently could not

realise that to Minna the thought of living on other women's bounty and

perpetually staving off hungry creditors was as horrible as the idea of

sinking back into the filth of the ordinary operatic world was to him.

The same note of eager self-justification is sounded again in the

interminable letter of 18th May 1859. There is the same inability to

see the problem from any angle but his own. He once more admits that

Minna has suffered greatly for him, especially in those ghastly years

in Paris. But she should regard her sufferings as part of the game.

_He_ was a man of genius, who had to follow his star or die. If _her_

path was not a happy one, she should regard it as "a necessity in which

one acquiesces for the sake of something higher."

Let us look a moment at this second letter, in which the clever actor

is even more apparent. Minna has taken offence at the passage in _Eine

Mittheilung an meine Freunde_ relating to their marriage; and he writes

very sensibly and tactfully on this point, doing all he can to soothe

the poor woman, who was by this time hopelessly ill both in body and

in mind, and, as even her enemies admit, not to be held answerable

for the suspicions by which she was obsessed. He discourses with his

customary wordiness upon the nature of love; like Wotan and some of his

other characters, he could never stop talking when once he had been

wound up on the subject of his wrongs. Like Wotan, Lohengrin and the

rest of them, he always has a grievance, and is always misunderstood;

hence the need for such lengthy explanations. But there is a touch of

meanness in his unnecessary reminder to Minna of her flight from him

in their early married days.[136] In _Mein Leben_ he is candid enough,

as we have seen, to admit that he was chiefly to blame for this lapse

on her part.[137] His thesis now is that she did not love him then, or

she would not have run away; whereas although he had behaved badly to

her, it was all out of the greatness of his love! The sophistry of it

all is too unconscious, too naïve, for us to do anything but smile at

it; but we may doubt whether Minna, with her keen eye for facts and her

impenetrability to words, admired the performance as much as he did.

Then he puts into her mouth a long imaginary description of her own

conduct and psychology, and the sort of plea he was always making for

himself and desirous that _she_ should make for him. He reminds us

irresistibly of his own Wotan:

"Wouldst thou, oh wife,

In the castle confine me,

As god this boon thou must grant me,--

Though in the fortress fettered,

Yet to my rule the whole world I must win.

Ranging and changing

All love who live;

This sport I cannot desist from."

So says the self-justifying god to his wife in the _Rhinegold_. And

again in the _Valkyrie_:

"Nought learnedst thou

When I would teach thee,

What ne'er thou canst comprehend

Till clear in daylight 'tis shown.

Only custom canst thou understand;

But what ne'er yet befell

Thereon fixed is my thought."

So would Wagner have poor Fricka-Minna regard him. He obligingly

writes out for her at length the confession he would like to hear her

recite:

"With Richard's individuality, that on the one hand qualified him for

the production of such important works and in the end for such unusual

successes, it was inevitable, on the other hand, that heavy shadows

should thereby fall on our life. I am not thinking of the constant

outward care and trouble, although they taxed my vital powers most

severely; it could not be otherwise than that his original artistic

nature, the peculiarly emotional and wildly moving quality of his

works, should keep him in the same state of excitation as they created

in others,--inevitably causing disturbances of my own repose. An

artist so significant as Richard, one perpetually at work with such

passionate artistic tools, retains all his life a certain youthfulness,

which must no doubt often cause anxiety to the wife at his side; and

whereas this wife remains close to him in the accustomed narrow circle

of the household as an old possession, which one often does not notice

any longer just because one is so sure of it and so intimate with it

from of old, from without there may present themselves new figures,

towards the effect of which the anxious wife will probably have to show

forbearance."[138]

Wotan, in fact, was to do all the ranging and changing. For Fricka the

cue was to be forbearance. Incidentally I may observe that this was

also to be the cue for the masculine heads of the households,--those

of Bülow, Wesendonck, and Laussot for example,--in which Wotan was to

indulge freely in the sport he could not desist from.

It was a simple and lucid philosophy of married life, granting

the premisses. Minna's misfortune was to dispute the premisses. The

egregious self-satisfaction of this letter, and its pose of the wronged

but forgiving husband, apparently provoked her not only into reminding

him of some of his own peccadilloes, but into letting him see, for the

first time, that she knew a little more of his escapades than he had

imagined; for it is in his next letter, dated 30th May, that we find

him raising his eyebrows in astonishment at the news that she had known

all along of the Laussot episode of nine years ago.[139] He, good man,

was no doubt honestly surprised at Minna's inability to see him just

as he saw himself, idealised by a vivid imagination. No man ever had a

higher ideal of duty--the duty of other people towards himself. Nothing

is more remarkable, among the many remarkable features of _Mein Leben_,

than the coolness of his references to the services that various

people had done him, or the total omission, in some cases, of any such

reference.[140] He took all sacrifices as a matter of course; he would

have liked a world full of trusting Elsas and faithful Kurvenals. "You

must let me have peace," he writes to Minna;[141] "take me as I am, and

let me do what I have joy and pleasure in: don't worry me into anything

I cannot and will not do: rest assured, on the other hand, that I shall

always be doing something that somehow gives joy to others and contents

my inner sense." This is apparently a justification of his refusal to

write an opera for Paris, or to do anything else that went against his

artistic conscience. For his determination not to be shaken from his

moral and artistic centre in such matters as this no one will blame

him; the difficulty only began when he imported the doctrine of his

own infallibility into domestic matters. Even his own Elsa, lymphatic

person as she was, had in the end to admit that there was a limit to

her capacity for trusting her husband blindly. Minna's capacity for

that kind of blind devotion was less than Elsa's; yet nothing short of

blind devotion would satisfy him. One hardly knows which is the more

magnificent in some of his letters--his disregard for himself where his

work and his destiny were concerned, or his disregard for the humble

being whom fate had flung upon his hearth. "See, poor wife," he writes

from Venice on 1st September 1858, "your destiny--which surely ought to

have been made easier and more uniform for you--was knit up with the

destiny of a man who, greatly though he longed for quiet happiness, yet

in every respect was appointed to so extraordinary a development that

at last he believes himself bound to renounce even his wishes simply

to fulfil his life-task. All I now seek is inward self-collection,

in order to be able to complete my works: fame has no longer any

effect on me: I even despair of succeeding in producing my works [the

_Ring_]: nothing--nothing--but work, the act of creation itself, keeps

me alive. It is natural that so extraordinary a destiny should also

inspire extraordinary sympathy; there are many people who have turned

to me with deep and ardent feelings. If _you_ must suffer for it, those

sufferings will some day be accounted to you also, and your reward must

be--my success, the success of my works."[142]

Who shall say that the artist's faith in himself was not a noble and

a holy thing? The misfortune was that this faith had too often to be

nourished in ways that the world cannot help calling ignoble. He saw

himself as we see him now, with the eyes of the historical sense; but

people who have no prospect of living in history, and for whom the

present is the only life they know, may be excused for feeling that

the ideals of other people are too dearly bought at the cost of their

own poverty and shame. When all is said, it remains true that Minna

would gladly have borne privation for him, as she did in Paris, in

order to further his genius, but that she could not reconcile herself

to her husband's easy-going attitude with regard to other people's

money and other people's wives. It is one thing to love your neighbour

as yourself; it is another thing to love your neighbour's wife as your

own--or even more.

The toughness of the problem that fate had given her to solve is

shown by Wagner's letters immediately after his flight from Dresden.

The seven years in that town must have been, until near the end, the

happiest of Minna's life. Here at last, it seemed, was a haven: her

husband was secure for life in a Court Kapellmeister's post, and he

had already made an enviable reputation as composer and conductor. She

was wiser than he in many of the simpler things of life, and clearly

foresaw the ruin to which his political activities were leading him.

The unrelenting harshness of her attitude towards him during his

flight, of which he makes so much in his letters and _Mein Leben_, was

no doubt the result of sheer despair at the extent of his folly, and

anger at the grown-up child who could apparently never be brought to

listen to reason. A letter of Minna's, published for the first time by

Julius Kapp, throws an interesting light on their relations at this

time.

"You will know what Wagner was when I married him,--a forlorn, poor,

unknown, unemployed musical director. As regards his intellectual

success, I am happy to think that all his works were created only in my

company: and that I understood him he proved to me by the fact that to

me alone he first read or played all his poems, all his compositions,

scene by scene as he sketched them and discussed them with me. Only I

could not follow his political doings. With my simple understanding

I saw that no good would come to him out of them, and the more he

departed from the path of art, the deeper became the sorrowful feeling

in me that he was breaking away from me also."[143]

His own view of their Dresden life may profitably be placed side by

side with this of Minna's:

"After my appointment in Dresden your growing discord with me came just

at the time and in the degree as, forgetting my personal advantage,

I could no longer, in the interest of my art and of my independence

as man and artist, accommodate myself to the deplorable managerial

relations of that art-establishment, and consequently revolted against

them." Anyone who loved him, he says, would have seen what was going

on within his soul and would have sympathised with him; but "when I

came home profoundly dispirited and agitated by some new annoyance,

some new mortification, some new disappointment, what did my wife give

me in lieu of consolation and uplifting sympathy? Reproaches, fresh

reproaches, nothing but reproaches! Fond of home as I was, I remained

in the house in spite of it all; but at last no longer able to express

myself, to communicate what was in me and be strengthened, but to keep

silence, let my grief eat into me, in order--to be _alone_!"

His makes, no doubt, the finer literary record now; but who would have

said in 1848 that Minna was the more in the wrong?

How hopelessly immiscible were their ideals of living becomes fully

apparent a very little while after their reunion in Switzerland in

1849. Incapable of his imaginative flights and his belief in the

future, she could see nothing but the misery and the humiliations of

the actual day. For him there was his star; with his eyes on that he

could forget his daily cares, or leave them to others; some raven or

other, he knew, would feed him. Nothing is more remarkable in his

letters of this period than the paradoxical sense of relief he felt at

being, so far as the everyday world was concerned, a ruined man. "Never

in all my life have I felt so happy and gay as in the summer of 1849

in glorious Switzerland.... I know that with the best I can do--and

must do, since I can--I cannot earn money, but only love, and that

from those who understand me, if they want to. So I am without a care

for money either, since I know that love is caring for me. So let good

Ottilie [his sister] and all the rest of you be easy in your mind about

me and take it that a great piece of luck--aye, the greatest that could

befall a man--has come to me."[144]

We can well believe him. On the whole his position was probably not

so distressing as it is generally held to have been. He was not rich,

of course; but he seemed to be assured of a livelihood, he had ample

leisure for thought and for quiet self-development[145] without the

necessity of wasting himself in inferior work--which is always the

greatest misery to artists who have to reconcile the claims of art

with those of life--and he was able to get a good deal of enjoyment

out of travel. On one point he was quite firm; he had no intention of

ever again competing in the arena with other men for a living. It was

the world's duty to provide him with food and shelter in return for

his work; how, as he pathetically put it, could he give the world the

best that was in him if he had to waste his energies on futile things?

Thousands of other men, it is needless to say, have felt the same

difficulty; probably nine brain workers out of ten have to squander

two-thirds of their best mental powers on futilities in order to win a

little time in which to exercise the other third in the way they like.

One thinks of George Meredith, for example, feeling his bent to be

mainly towards poetry, but compelled to boil the pot with novels, and

to purchase the pot itself by "reading" for a publisher. But Wagner,

in this as in every other relation of his life, was nothing if not

thorough; it was the secret, indeed, of all his successes and all

his failures. Other men might truckle to expediency, but not he. His

experiences in various opera houses had taught him how difficult it was

for a man like himself to reconcile his artistic ideals with the facts

of the theatre. There has probably never yet been a Kapellmeister with

a soul who has not felt precisely as Wagner did;[146] but he makes the

best of a bad bargain, is content with fifteen shillings if he cannot

get a sovereign, and uses all the tact he can command to smooth his

relations with his colleagues and to bend them to his will without

their suspecting their own compliance. Wagner had no tact where his

susceptibilities were hurt, and compromise was always hateful to him.

Like the singer who was out of tune with the orchestra and expected

it to tune to him when he gave it his A, Wagner blandly took his own

course in everything and called upon the world to follow him. The

call was often heroic and the response magnificent, as in the case of

Bayreuth. But occasionally the call was unreasonable, and the singer

and someone in the orchestra inevitably came to blows.

We see, in a letter of Minna's of about 1851,[147] the clashing of

his ideas and Minna's on the subject of whether it is more honourable

to earn your living by work you do not like or to live--and compel

your wife to live--on charity. "The director [of the Zürich theatre]

had offered Wagner 200 francs a month if he would accept the post

of first Kapellmeister in the theatre; but he thinks it beneath his

dignity to earn money, and prefers to live on charity or on borrowed

money. You can understand, with one of my way of thinking, with what

disesteem--to say nothing of what has already happened--I, as no doubt

any other woman, must regard this. What will become of me--of us--on

such principles as these? I often cry my eyes out, and am quite worn

out with the worry my husband causes me."[148]

It is customary to censure Minna solemnly for not having a better

insight into the genius of her husband, and for not having been willing

to sacrifice the last vestige of her happiness and self-respect in

order that he might be undisturbed in his inner world. It must be

remembered, however, that in time a great many of the friends who had

been most generous to him came round to something like Minna's point

of view. Everyone knows the letter of 25th June 1870 to Frau Wille, in

which Wagner speaks of his happiness in his retreat with Cosima who,

he said, had showed that he "_could_ be helped," and "that the axiom

of so many of my friends, that I could not be helped, was false."[149]

The last phrase hints at earlier disagreements between him and his

friends on the question of finance. In _Mein Leben_ he tells us how

coldly some of them received his entreaties for help in the desperate

days before King Ludwig came to his rescue. Perhaps they had not met

with the gratitude they would have liked. When Madame Kalergis, in

1860, gives him 10,000 francs to wipe off the debt he had incurred in

connection with his concerts in Paris, his only comment is, "I felt

as if something were merely being fulfilled that I had always been

entitled to expect."[150] It is hardly to be wondered at that ideas

on finance so expansive as these did not always appeal with the same

force to those who were expected to find the money as they did to

him. Even the Wesendoncks declined to help him in his dire need in

1863.[151] Later on a request to Otto Wesendonck to harbour him met

with a point-blank refusal,[152] though Wesendonck knew that Wagner was

fleeing from his Vienna creditors, and that he was in serious danger

from the law. Hornstein, as we have seen, refused to open his purse to

him; other people repulsed him still more roughly. At his wits' end to

raise money, he thinks of divorcing Minna in order to marry some rich

woman. "As everything seemed to me expedient and nothing inexpedient,

I actually wrote to my sister Luise Brockhaus, asking her if she could

not have a sensible talk with Minna, and persuade her to be satisfied

in future with her yearly allowance, without making any claims on my

person. In her reply she advised me, with deep feeling, first of all to

think of establishing my good name and of obtaining undisputed credit

by a new work, which would probably help me without my taking any

eccentric step; in any case I should do well to apply for the vacant

Kapellmeister's post in Darmstadt."[153]

Ultimately (23rd March 1864) he fled to Frau Wille at Mariafeld

(Zürich). Wille himself had, as Wagner admits, become cool in his

friendship. But at that time the master of the house was away in

Constantinople. When he returned he was "uneasy" at the guest who had

settled there in his absence. "He probably feared that I might count

on his help also," says Wagner. He might well be alarmed, for Wagner,

untaught by experience, was as convinced as ever that it was the

world's duty to provide for him, and as resolved as ever not to take up

any work of the ordinary kind. Frau Wille has given us an interesting

picture of him brooding over his wrongs and crying in the face of

heaven against mankind:

"I had got together a number of books out of my husband's library

and placed them in Wagner's room--works on Napoleon, on Frederick

the Great, works of the German mystics, who were of significance to

Wagner, while he had turned his back on Feuerbach and Strauss as dry

men of learning. What I could I gave him in happy impartiality for the

best: but cheer him up I could not. I still see him sitting in his

chair at my window (it is still there), and impatiently listening as I

spoke to him one evening of the splendour of the future that would yet

certainly be his.... Wagner said: 'What is the use of talking about

the future, when my manuscripts are locked up in a drawer? Who can

produce the art-work that I, only I, helped by good dæmons, can bring

into being, that all the world may know _so_ it is, _so_ has the master

conceived and willed his work?' He walked agitatedly up and down the

room. Suddenly he stopped in front of me and said, 'I am differently

organised; I have excitable nerves; I must have beauty, brilliancy,

light! The world ought to give me what I need. I cannot live in a

wretched organist's post like your Meister Bach. Is it an unheard-of

demand if I hold that the little luxury I like is my due? I, who am

procuring enjoyment to the world and to thousands?"[154]

It was this unshakable belief in the rightness of whatever ministered

to his own comfort for the time being that accounts in large measure

for the hopelessness of the misunderstanding between him and Minna

on the question of Frau Wesendonck. As this romantic episode had the

deepest bearing on his life and his art, and his attitude during it

gives us the best possible illustration of the dual nature of the man,

it is worth while studying it with some closeness.

As we have seen--as he himself indeed admits--he was always extremely

susceptible to the charm of women. In October 1852 he writes from

Zürich to his niece Franziska: "I cannot endure men, and would like

to have nothing to do with them. No one is worth a toss unless he

can really be loved by a woman. The stupid asses can't even love

now: if they have any talent they tipple, or as a rule are satisfied

with cigar-smoking. Only on the women do I count for anything now.

If there were only more of them!"[155] His ideal of women then and

before and for many a day after was the submissive, unquestioning Elsa.

"Lohengrin," he says, "sought the woman who should _believe_ in him;

who should not ask who he was and whence he came, but love him as he

was, and because he was just as he appeared to himself.[156] He sought

the woman to whom there was no necessity to explain or justify himself,

but who would love him unconditionally."[157] In another place he gives

us his notion of the ideal woman in still more explicit terms, this

time _à propos_ of Senta. "Like Ahasuerus, he [the Dutchman] longs for

death to end his sufferings; but this redemption, denied to the undying

Jew, the Dutchman can win through--_a woman_, who shall sacrifice

herself for him for love. The longing for death drives him on to seek

this woman; but she is no longer the home-tending Penelope, wooed by

Odysseus of old, but woman in general (_das Weib überhaupt_)--the as

yet non-existent, the longed-for, the dreamt-of, infinitely womanly

woman,--in a word, _the Woman of the Future_."[158] This was the kind

of devotion he expected from men and women. I have already pointed out

how, in _Mein Leben_, it is this or that person's "boundless devotion"

to him that stirs his admiration. It is thus he writes of Cosima in

a letter to Clara Wolfram of 1870; she had shown him "an unexampled

devotion and self-sacrifice."[159]

X

It was not very long after he had been disappointed in Jessie Laussot,

and at a time when Minna had ceased to minister to his mental life,

that he made the acquaintance of Mathilde Wesendonck. They first met

in February 1852. The young wife was fascinated by the man of genius,

and woman-wise pitied his evidently forlorn state. He, for his part,

found in her the mental and moral sunlight his work needed at the time.

Their affection for each other deepened month by month. Writing to his

sister Clara on 20th August 1858, he speaks of having been "for six

years supported, comforted and strengthened to remain by Minna's side,

in spite of enormous differences between our characters and natures, by

the love of that young woman, who drew close to me [_mir sich näherte_]

at first and for a long time timidly, hesitatingly, and shyly, then

more and more decidedly and surely."[160]

In the summer of 1854 he sketched the _Valkyrie_ prelude, placing

on the manuscript the letters "G.......s...M.......," which Frau

Wesendonck afterwards declared to represent "Gesegnet sei Mathilde"

(Blest be Mathilde!). Hornstein, who saw a good deal of Wagner and his

household in 1855, speaks of him as having "long ceased to love his

wife" and being "consumed with passion for another."[161] By September

1856 Mathilde is apparently sufficiently conscious of her love to be

distressed at the idea of Wagner settling in Weimar; so she persuades

her husband to lodge the composer in a house near them. He takes up his

residence in the "Asyl," adjoining the Wesendonck's house, the "Green

Hill," in April 1857.[162] Otto and Mathilde themselves move into their

now completed villa on 22nd August. "Not one of Wagner's brief notes

before that date suggests the faintest shadow of a passion shewn,"

says Mr. Ellis. On 18th September 1858, however,--_i.e._ _after_

the catastrophe that made it impossible for Wagner to accept Otto's

hospitality any longer--he writes to Mathilde that exactly a year ago

he had finished and brought to her the poem of _Tristan_. Then, he

explicitly says, she confessed her love to him.[163] Are we to suppose,

then, that their "passion" had grown up in three weeks--from 22nd

August to 18th September? Mr. Ellis pontifically declares that "we may

dismiss F. Praeger's observation 'during my stay I saw Minna's jealousy

of another' ... as on a par with his usual unreliability." Why? Is

not Hornstein's evidence conclusive as to what was happening under

everybody's eyes as early as 1855?[164] A letter of Wagner's own to

his sister Clara, however, (20th August 1858), puts it beyond question

that there was something going on in the Wesendonck household to which

the friends of the pair could hardly be blind. "His wife's frankness

could have no other effect than soon plunging Wesendonck in increasing

jealousy. Her greatness consisted in this, that she constantly kept

her husband informed of what was going on in her heart, and gradually

brought him to the fullest resignation as regards herself. It can be

imagined what sacrifices and combats it took to bring this about:

her success was only rendered possible by the depth and grandeur of

her attachment (in which there was no trace of self-seeking), which

gave her the power to exhibit herself in such strength (_in solcher

Bedeutung_) to her husband that the latter must stand aside from her

even if she should threaten her own death, and prove his unshakeable

love for her by upholding her in her care for me. It became a matter

of preserving the mother of his children, and for their sakes--who,

indeed, formed an insuperable barrier between us twain--he resigned

himself to his rôle of renunciation. Thus, while he was consumed with

jealousy, she succeeded in again interesting him in me to such an

extent that he often came to my support; and when at length it became

a question of providing me with the little house and garden I desired,

it was she who, by dint of the most unheard-of struggles, persuaded him

to buy for me the lovely piece of land adjoining his own estate. The

most wonderful thing, however, is that I actually never had a notion

of these combats that she endured for me: for her sake her husband

had always to appear friendly and easy towards me: not a frown was

to enlighten me, not a hair of my head was to be touched: serene and

cloudless were the heavens to be above me, smooth and soft was my path

to be. So unheard-of a success had this glorious love of the pure and

noble wife."[165]

It all rings very false. Wagner is simply writing what the French

contemptuously call "literature." He can see nobody in the universe

but himself. He pours out his spurious commendations upon Wesendonck

for his "renunciation,"--a word that obsessed Wagner at that time: but

it never occurred to him to practise a little renunciation on his own

side, and to refrain from driving a wedge between the young husband and

wife.[166] In any case, one would have at least expected him to speak

kindly of the man who had made such unexampled sacrifices for him. This

is how he deals with Wesendonck in _Mein Leben_:

"I had often noticed that Wesendonck, in the honest openness of his

nature, was disturbed at my making myself so much at home in his house:

in many things, such as the heating, the lighting and the hours for

meals, consideration was shown me which seemed to him to encroach on

his rights as master of the house." That is clear enough: what follows

is less clear. "It needed a few confidential talks on the matter

to establish a half-silent, half-expressed agreement, which in the

course of time assumed a doubtful significance in the eyes of others.

Thus there arose with regard to our now so close relations a certain

circumspection [_Rücksicht_] which occasionally afforded amusement to

the two initiated parties." This passage, with its apparently designed

obscurity, tells the practised student of Wagner nothing more than that

he is deliberately concealing more than he is revealing. This suspicion

is strengthened by the sentence that follows: "Curiously enough, the

epoch of this close association with my neighbours coincided with the

beginning of the working out of my poem _Tristan and Isolde_."[167]

The "curiously enough" is a stroke of genius, the splendour of which

will be appreciated by everyone who has read his ardent correspondence

with Mathilde, and knows how inseparable she and the new opera were

in his mind. Only once again did he achieve such a masterpiece of

trail-covering,--when he spoke of Minna's "coarse misunderstanding of

my _merely friendly_ relations" with Frau Wesendonck.[168] And _Mein

Leben_ really would have served to cover up his tracks in more than

one critical place, had he not been imprudent enough to leave so many

letters behind him.

How he repaid Otto's kindness to him, once he was settled in the

"Asyl," may be guessed from other passages in _Mein Leben_. At the

beginning of 1858 he was very melancholy. He attributes his condition

to overwork on _Tristan_: but we may reasonably assume that his

passion for Mathilde had something to do with it. "Even the immediate

and apparently so agreeable proximity of the Wesendonck family only

increased my discomfort, for it became really intolerable to me to

give up whole evenings to conversations and entertainments in which

my good friend Otto Wesendonck thought himself bound to take part at

least as much as myself and others. His anxiety lest, as he imagined,

everything in his house would soon go my way rather than his gave him

moreover that peculiar burdensomeness [_Wucht_] with which a man who

thinks himself slighted throws himself into every conversation in his

presence, something like an extinguisher on a candle."[169] That at any

rate is candid, and gives us a hint of the delicacy of his behaviour

to the husband who had shown him so many kindnesses, and with whose

wife he was openly in love. But what a way to speak of the generous and

unhappy man who had done and suffered so much for him! Wagner could

remember everything, apparently, but the necessity for gratitude.

The crisis in his "merely friendly relations" with Mathilde had

come, as we have seen, three or four months earlier,--on that day in

September 1857 when he had brought her the last act of the poem of

_Tristan_, and she had placed her arms around him, and "dedicated

herself to death that she might give him life."[170] Apparently there

was trouble between Minna and Mathilde about this time. Kapp quotes

from a letter of Minna's in which she says, "I had to say what was in

my heart once more to young Frau Wesendonck. She all at once became

very haughty and absurd, so that I refused her invitations, but she

again asked my pardon, and now I am again friendly for Richard's

sake."[171] Evidently the situation was an intolerable one for

Minna,--her husband openly calling Frau Wesendonck his "Muse," thinking

of nobody but her, and running across the garden every few hours to

sun himself in her presence. And it is equally evident that Wagner

himself was in despair. We have seen him confessing, in _Mein Leben_,

to being woefully out of tune in the winter of 1857-58, though he does

not tell the reader the real cause. There is no reason to suppose

that his relations with Mathilde had been anything else but ideal. At

this juncture, however, he seems to have felt the impossibility of an

indefinite continuance of these "merely friendly relations." Early in

January 1858 he wrote a feverish, despairing letter to Liszt:

"You must come to me quickly. I am at the end of a conflict in which

everything that can be holy to a man is involved. I must decide, and

every choice that I see before me is so terrible that when I decide I

must have by my side the friend who alone has given me heaven."[172]

Liszt, however is not to come to Zürich but to meet him in Paris. He

follows this letter up by another on the 13th,[173] in which he again

speaks of his need of a temporary absence from Zürich. "I have not lost

my head, and my heart is still sound. Nothing will help me but patience

and endurance."[174] That Liszt understood is evident from his reply

of the 15th: "Write me soon, saying what is in your mind and what you

intend to do. Does your wife remain in Zürich? Are you thinking of

returning later? Where is Madame W----?"[175]

Wagner goes to Paris, and at a distance from Mathilde becomes resigned

to the impossibility of possessing her. He sends Liszt a fantasia on

his favourite theme of resignation.[176] He reads Calderon, finds

supreme inward peace, and asks Liszt for some more money.

The end, however, was nearer than he thought. He returned to Zürich

at the beginning of February, and apparently the unlucky pair drifted

helplessly into the coils of circumstance again. The crash came in

April, when Minna intercepted a letter from her husband to Mathilde.

The true story of the catastrophe and the events that led up to it has

hitherto been only imperfectly known: we have had to construct them

as best we could out of the incomplete Wesendonck correspondence and

Wagner's own letters: and needless to say he is not to be accepted as

the most detached of witnesses when addressing the court in his own

defence. Further light has recently been thrown on the history of this

period by Kapp, who is able to quote from a number of Minna's letters

that had hitherto been unknown.

"Madame Wesendonck," Minna writes, "visited my husband secretly, as

he did her, and forbade my servant, when he opened the door for her,

to tell me that she was above. [Minna occupied the ground floor of the

house, Wagner the first floor.] I let it all go on calmly. Men often

have an affair; why should not I tolerate it in the case of my husband?

I did not know jealousy. Only the meannesses, these humiliations, might

have been spared me, and my ludicrously vain husband must conceal it

from me."[177] In another letter of the 30th April 1858 she refers to

the gossip of the place that had come to her ears, which at first she

did not believe. But it struck her that Wagner "went over too often

when the good man [Wesendonck] was not at home," and she was annoyed at

the daily exchange of correspondence between the "Green Hill" and the

"Asyl," and the secret visits. "On the 6th they were both with us. On

the 7th I noticed that Richard was strangely restless:[178] at every

ring he came out; he had a big roll of papers in his hand [sketches for

Act I. of _Tristan_], which he wanted to send to Frau Wesendonck: but

he would not part with it when I wanted to look after it for him, and

he hid it awkwardly. All this astonished me a little. When he could

wait no longer, he called our servant. I was there by chance when the

latter passed, and I asked him for the roll of music. I undid it, and

took out the thick letter that was enclosed in it, opened it, and read

the most jealous love letter, from which I will give you a couple of

passages. After a wild night of love that he had had, he writes to

her: 'Thus it went on the whole night through. In the morning I was

rational again, and from the depth of my heart could pray to my angel,

and this prayer is love! Love! Deepest soul's joy on this love, the

source of my redemption. Then came the day with its evil weather, the

joy of seeing you was denied me, my work would not go at all. Thus my

whole day was a struggle between melancholy and longing for you,' &c.

The letter ended in this way: 'Be good to me: the weather seems mild:

to-day I will come again to your garden as soon as I see you. I hope

to find you undisturbed for a moment. Now my whole soul to the morning

greeting. R. W.' What do you say to that? At mid-day I told my husband

that I had opened and read his fine letter; he was rather alarmed,

but I said I would not suffer this deception towards the poor man: I

would go away, but he must call this woman his own for ever. Richard

wanted to justify himself with his wonderful gift of the gab,[179] but

I would not have it.... Richard tried to force me to be silent, and to

persuade me of the purity of his relations. How ridiculous! I abide by

my conviction."[180]

Now let us look at the letter in which Wagner gives his sister Clara

_his_ version of the catastrophe. After narrating the sacrifices Otto

had made for him,[181] and declaring that although he and Mathilde

loved each other they had been forced to recognise the necessity of

resignation, he continues:

"My wife seemed, with shrewd feminine instinct, to understand what was

going on: certainly she often showed jealousy, and was scoffing and

disparaging: but she tolerated our intercourse, which never violated

morals, but simply aimed at the possibility of knowledge of each

other's presence. Therefore I assumed that Minna would be sensible and

understand that there was really nothing for her to fear, since there

could be no question of a union between us, and that therefore the

most advisable and best thing for her to do was to be indulgent. I had

to learn that I had probably deceived myself in that respect: chatter

reached my ears, and she at last so far lost her senses as to intercept

a letter of mine and--open it. This letter, if she had been at all

able to understand it, would really have been able to give her all the

pacification she could have desired, for the theme of it too was our

resignation. However, she fastened simply on the intimate expressions

in it, and lost her head. She came to me in a fury, and I was compelled

to explain to her calmly and explicitly how things stood, that she had

brought misfortune on herself by opening such a letter, and that if

she did not know how to contain herself we must part. On this point we

were agreed, I tranquilly, she passionately. Next day, however, I was

sorry for her: I went to her and said, 'Minna, you are very ill.'[182]

We arranged the plan of a cure (_Kur_) for her: she seemed to become

composed again. The day for her departure to the _Kurort_ drew near. At

first she absolutely insisted on speaking to Frau Wesendonck. I firmly

forbade her to do so. Everything depended on my gradually making Minna

acquainted with the character of my relations with Frau Wesendonck,

and thus convincing her that there was nothing at all to be feared

for the continuance of our wedded life, wherefore she had only to be

wise, prudent and noble, abjure all foolish ideas of vengeance, and

avoid any sort of sensation. In the end she promised me this. She could

not keep quiet, however. She went over [to the Green Hill] behind my

back, and--no doubt without realising it herself--wounded the gentle

lady most grossly. After she had told her: 'If I were an ordinary

woman I should go to your husband with this letter,' there was nothing

for Frau Wesendonck--who was conscious of never having had a secret

from her husband (which a woman like Minna cannot understand!)--but

to inform him at once of the scene and its cause.--Herewith, then,

had the delicacy and purity of our relations been broken in upon in a

coarse and vulgar way, and many things must now alter. Not till some

time after did I make it clear to my friend [Mathilde] that it would

never be possible to make a nature like my wife's comprehend relations

so lofty and unselfish as ours: for I had to endure her grave and deep

reproach that I had omitted this, whereas her husband had always been

her confidant."

Minna goes away to her cure, and returns unappeased. There are violent

scenes between her and Wagner: the situation becomes quite impossible

for everybody, and there is nothing for it but for the Wagners to quit

the "Asyl." He can endure the bickering no longer, he tells Clara,

if he is to fulfil his life's task. "Whoever has observed me closely

must have been surprised from of old at my patience, kindness, aye,

weakness; and if I am now condemned by superficial judges, I have

become insensitive to that kind of thing. But never had Minna such

an occasion to show herself worthy to be my wife as here, when it

was a question of preserving for me the highest and dearest: it lay

within her hand to prove if she really loved me. But she does not even

understand what such true love is, and her rage runs away with her." He

excuses her on the score of her ill-health, but is resolved not to live

with her again. "She really is unfortunate: she would have been happier

with a lesser man. And so take pity on her with me."[183]

Well might Minna be driven to distraction by his "vortreffliche

Suade." Who, with no knowledge of the facts beyond what he could derive

from this letter, would not think that Wagner had been at once the

most perfect and the most ill-used of men? Here we have the actor--the

self-deluding actor--marching and counter-marching across the stage in

his full panoply. He is, as usual, dramatising himself: he is painting

the picture of himself that he desires his friends and posterity to

see. He is at work on _Tristan_. Frau Wesendonck is necessary to him

if he is to maintain the artistic mood that the poem and the music

require. Everything and everybody must therefore give way to his great

need. He is utterly and honestly unable to see the situation through

either Otto's eyes or Minna's. The former he dramatised also; of the

grief the good man must have felt at seeing his wife's infatuation

for a man who calmly took possession not only of the wife but of the

whole household, he had plainly no conception. He allots Otto _his_

part in the play: they are all playing parts, and the title of the

tragi-comedy is "The Three Renunciators." Wagner and Mathilde may talk

as they like about their "renunciation" and "resignation": these words

are only literary symbols with them, a subtle self-flattery, an extra

and rather delicious flavouring in their cup. But the cup itself was

a sweet one. Poor Otto had _his_ part thrust upon him willy-nilly:

he was dragged on the scene, against his will, to act in a play for

which he had no fancy, dressed up as Third Renunciator, and primed to

speak the lines the author of the piece put in his mouth. But there

was no delight in _his_ cup: and probably he could not, like Wagner,

drug himself with words. As for Minna, she simply was not in the play

at all. Her business was merely to attend to the costumes and sweep

out the dressing-room of the principal comedian, and generally to keep

the stage clear for him and the leading lady. So colossal was Wagner's

egoism that he could not realise the bare possibility of the affair

taking on in other people's eyes any aspect but that it had in his own.

He evidently thought in all sincerity that it was Otto's and Minna's

duty to step aside in favour of himself and Mathilde, and that Minna in

particular ought to prove that she really loved him by turning a blind

eye to everything that wounded her as woman and as wife. And in the act

of demanding these impossible renunciations from other people in order

that _he_ might have his way, he appealed volubly to God and man to

witness the extent of _his_ renunciation and to have compassion on him!

It is easy enough to follow your star if other people will do the rough

work of cutting out your path for you: it is easy enough to live in a

world of ideal emotional freedom if the real people around you will be

content to become mere feeders for your own inward life. The only weak

spot in Wagner's position was his forgetfulness of the fact that Minna

was a human being like himself. How he and Mathilde appeared in eyes

that saw things as they were, without any haze of romance about them,

may be guessed from Minna's description of Mathilde as "that cold woman

spoilt by happiness," and Frau Herwegh's incisive description of Wagner

as "this pocket edition of a man, this folio of vanity, heartlessness,

and egoism."[184]

A comparison of Minna's letter with that of Wagner's concerning the

incident that led to the rupture with the Wesendoncks will suggest

how little he is ever to be relied upon for full and strict accuracy

when he is stating his own case. We may acquit him, as a rule, of any

wilful intention to deceive; but he is so incapable of seeing the

matter from any other angle than his own that he unconsciously distorts

or re-arranges the picture. Like the artist he is, he sees only the

inside of the Mathilde affair. Minna sees only the outside of it: but

precisely for that reason she is more likely to have given us the

outward facts as they were. These facts could never be gathered from

Wagner's letter alone. That letter shows us an angelic, patient and

greatly misunderstood man, worshipping his "Muse" as one might worship

a saint in a shrine, and astonished and disgusted when coarser souls

declined to see either a saint in her or an angel in him. As usual, he

does not photograph the scene: he lets his imagination paint a fancy

picture of it. It is from Minna's prosaic photograph that we get the

facts and details,--the secret visits on both sides, the deceptions

and evasions, the trickery with the servants, and all the other petty

irritations. Once more, sympathetic as we may feel towards him,--and

we are bound to sympathise with this eager, hungry, suffering soul,

so wise in art, so foolish in life,--can we deny that Minna merely

acted as any other woman in the world would have done in the same

circumstances? To be kept by his side for her value as a domestic

animal,[185] yet be shut out from her husband's inner life while

another woman was admitted to it under her very eyes, and to be living

all the while in a home provided for them by this very rival,--that was

surely more than any woman with a spirit above that of a poodle could

be expected to suffer quietly.

Leaving the psychology of the case, let us take up again the thread of

the external facts. Minna's account of what happened during and after

her interview with Mathilde runs thus:

"Frau Wesendonck was very grateful and friendly to me, accompanied me

hand-in-hand to the steps, and everything was settled in a friendly

way. Afterwards, however, she thought differently of it: she told her

husband that I had insulted her frightfully, but without telling him

the real truth as to the relations. She cried out to Richard how deeply

and horribly I had offended her,--in spite of the fact that I had been

delicate enough not to show her the fatal letter, which I had in my

pocket. But this is the way with common little natures. They can do

nothing but tittle-tattle and stir up mischief."[186]

Minna's heart trouble had been greatly aggravated by these emotional

storms. To do Wagner justice, he was always making allowance in his

correspondence for her conduct on the score of her ill-health,[187]

but, needless to say, it never occurred to him to help to restore her

health by refraining from his pursuit of his "Muse" at the Green Hill,

or by making any other "renunciation" of the things he liked.[188]

"My good husband," writes Minna to Frau Herwegh on 14th June 1858

from Brestenberg, where she had been undergoing a "cure," "could be

good and assuage my pains[189] if he would not let himself be dragged

about by certain people: his heart is good but very weak! So it comes

about that he often writes me really good, dear, comforting letters,

but still more often throws the wickedest and vulgarest things at me

in them, cracks other people up to the skies, and levels me to the

earth. This, my dear Emma, eats away my heart. I can seldom weep over

these vulgarities, and that is very bad for me: but the heart in my

body chokes as if it were being twisted about. On Sunday, a week ago,

I was at home, but only for twenty-three hours, so that I had no time

to visit you. I wish I had not gone: the dear Richard vented his spleen

on me till two in the morning"[190]--by way, presumably, of exercising

himself in "renunciation" and "resignation."

She returns to the "Asyl," but every day the impossibility of an

understanding between them becomes more evident. Their letters, read

side by side, are pathetic. Wagner is convinced that the purity of his

relations with Frau Wesendonck ought to absolve him in everyone's eyes,

and reconcile Minna to a more accommodating attitude towards him and

his ways. (According to his own account, he invariably reasons with

her patiently and from the serene height of his superior wisdom. This

is not always borne out by Minna's testimony.) Minna, on the other

hand, was resolved not to tolerate a situation that seemed to her to be

beyond all reason.

"It grieves me," she writes to a lady friend on 2nd August 1858,[191]

"to hear you talk as if I alone were the cause of my separating from

my husband. You know only too well, if you question yourself closely,

how hard for me even a short separation has always been, especially

now when it is uncertain whether and when I shall see him again. It is

no small thing when a separation faces one after twenty-two years of

marriage. I at any rate cannot take it lightly. If it rested with me,

I assure you it would certainly not happen. As regards forbearance for

men I am likewise enlightened, and have already overlooked a good many

things, like other women. I have besides gone on being blind a good six

years. It is simply impossible, for the sake of Richard's honour, to

remain here, since her husband,--I don't know how--has also learned of

the relation. When I returned I was violently assailed and threatened

by my husband, with the object of getting me to associate again with

that woman. I yielded, was willing to go this great length: that is

really all that it is possible for a wife in my position to do: but

the husband and in the end this woman herself will not: she is--so my

husband himself shouted at me--raging, beside herself, at my being

there, and out of jealousy will not suffer me to remain: only Richard

shall live here, which, however, he cannot do. Richard has two natures;

he is ensnared on the other side, and clings to me from habit, that is

all. My resolve now is, since this woman will not endure it, to remain

with my husband; and he is weak enough to fall in with her wishes that

he should live by turns in Dresden, Berlin and Weimar, until either

Richard or God calls me away. My health does not improve under these

circumstances; all the waters in the world are no use when the mind is

assailed by upsets of this kind."[192]

So on the 17th August 1858 Wagner leaves the "Asyl" and goes to Venice

(_viâ_ Geneva) with Karl Ritter, while Minna takes refuge with her

friends in Dresden. Wagner continues to write to Mathilde, but his

letters are returned to him unopened. Each of the lovers, however,

makes a confidante of Frau Wille, and each of them keeps a diary. These

diaries are exchanged in the autumn. That of Wagner is in the form of

letters to Mathilde. These are full of the most ardent protestations

of love. His declaration in _Mein Leben_ that his relations with Frau

Wesendonck were "merely friendly" reads rather curiously after such

outbursts as these:

"When I have thought of you, never have parents or children or duties

come into my mind; I only knew that you loved me, and that everything

noble in this world must be unhappy." (7th Sept.)

"That you loved me I know well: you are, as always, good, profound and

sensible.... Our love is superior to all impediments, and every check

to it makes us richer, brighter, nobler, and ever more intent upon the

substance and the essence of our love, ever more indifferent towards

the inessential." (13th Sept.)

"It always remained clear to me that your love was my highest

possession, and without it my existence must be a contradiction of

itself." (18th Sept.)

"The course of my life till the time when I found you, and you at last

became mine, lies plain before you." (12th Oct.)[193]

"Once more,--that you could plunge into every conceivable sorrow of

the world, to say to me 'I love you,'--that has redeemed me, and was

for me that holy hour of calm that has given my life another meaning."

(12th October.)

XI

Nothing shows more instructively the fundamental dualism of his

nature than a comparison of these letters to Mathilde with those he

was writing at the same time to Minna. Every thought of Mathilde is a

dream, an intoxication; to Minna he is the practical man, discussing

the ordinary little things of life in the most prosaic fashion. Their

parting was not intended to be a permanent one: each of them was to

"go his own way for a while in peace and reconciliation" in order to

"win calmness and new strength for life."[194] As is often the case

when he is away from her, he sees their relationship in something

like its true aspect. He admits that she "has a hard time" with him,

on account of his "indifference and recklessness towards the outer

relations of life." She is to enjoy herself in Dresden, and to try to

win self-control and strength to bear her trial. But an understanding

was plainly impossible between two people one of whom persisted in

regarding his extra-domestic love affairs as special dispensations of

Providence to assist him in his work as an artist, while the other

as persistently looked upon them as a selfish seeking of his own

gratification at her expense. Wagner sums it all up very appositely

in a letter of 25th August 1858: "Your letter showed me that it will

probably be always impossible for you to see correctly and clearly.

With you, a definite blame must always be attached to a definite

person: you do not comprehend the nature of things and Fate, but simply

think that if this person or that thing had never been, everything

would have happened differently."[195] To his dual nature it did not

seem in the least an impossible thing for him to retain Mathilde as

his "Muse" and Minna as his housekeeper--a very competent housekeeper,

as he frequently lets us see--if only Minna would be sensible enough

to consent to this _ménage à trois_. On the 3rd September he tells

Mathilde that he hopes to get well for her sake. "To save you for

me means to save myself for my art. With it,--to live to be your

consolation, that is my mission, this accords with my nature, my fate,

my will,--my love. Thus am I yours: you too shall get well through

me. Here will _Tristan_ be completed--a defiance to all the raging of

the world. And with this work, if I may, I will return to see you, to

comfort you, to make you happy. This is my holiest, loveliest wish."

But while he intends returning to Mathilde he also counts on returning

to Minna, to whom he writes on the 14th September, advising her to

select carefully her future home; "thither I would come to you as often

as I needed a home: and for the rest, quite apart from my personal need

of habitation, it would be _your_ peaceful retreat to which I also

could withdraw when all the storms of life were weathered, there at

last to find enduring repose beneath your care."

His whole spiritual life is centred in Mathilde: but his physical man

also needs caring for, and who is so well qualified for this as Minna?

A wandering life will not suit him in the long run, he tells his wife;

at bottom he loves a permanent abode. He means to finish _Tristan_, and

has hopes of being amnestied,[196] so that he can return to Germany

and settle down in some town of his choice. "You can thus count with

certainty on seeing me again next Easter, and--God willing--we shall

then have no difficulty in finding the place where you can pitch the

abiding tent for this wandering life of mine."

"How happy could I be with either," was the sigh of the old poet.

"How happy could I be with both," says Wagner in effect. Even more

than in most artists the inner and the outer life in him were separate

and distinct. Into Mathilde's ear he could pour his dreams and his

longings, while Minna's ear would be open to receive his less spiritual

but equally sincere confidences upon the more material things of

life. He looks at the stars over the Lido and thinks of Mathilde: "I

have absolutely no hope, no future," he writes to her. This is the

genuine artist, amorous of his own sorrows, lapping luxuriously the

bitter-sweet water of his dreams. For the real man we have to turn to

his letter of the preceding day (28th September) to Minna, from which

it appears that although he is absolutely without a future and without

hope, he is trying all he can "to use the great success of _Rienzi_ in

Dresden" to "get profits out of the work elsewhere"; accordingly he has

been inviting all the theatres with which he has friendly relations

to acquire the opera quickly. He describes the material side of his

life in Venice in detail. The world-weary one seems to be enjoying

his existence, working each day until four in the afternoon, crossing

the canal, walking up the St. Mark Piazza, dining with Karl Ritter

"well but dear (even without wine I can never get off under four to

five francs)"; then in a gondola to the Public Garden, where he has a

promenade; then a glass of ice at the pavilion on the Molo, and so home

to bed. "So I have been living for four weeks now, and am not tired of

it yet, even without real absorbing work. The secret of the enduring

charm of it all is" so-and-so and so-and-so.

He keeps his dual psychological life going with perfect honesty

and absolute unconsciousness. How easy it was for him to adopt a

different attitude upon the same question, according to which of his

correspondents he was addressing, is shown by his letters of 28th

September 1858 to Minna and the 1st October to Mathilde. In each of

them he discusses the nature and attributes of joy and grief. He had

witnessed the killing of a hen at a poulterer's stall a day or two

before; the sufferings of the poor creature had stirred his sympathetic

soul to its depths, and set him thinking of the general problem of

suffering and pity. To Minna he writes thus:

"You are wrong to make light of compassion. Perhaps it is only because

you have a false idea of it. All our relations with others have only

one ground,--sympathy or decided antipathy. The essence of love

consists in community of grief and of joy: but _community of joy is

most illusory, for in this world there is little ground for joy, and

our sympathy only has real durability when it is directed to another's

grief_."[197]

To Mathilde he sings a different song. For her he can feel nothing

but "community of joy, reverence, worship.... So do not contemn my

pity where you see me exercise it, for to yourself I can now pour out

nothing but community of joy. Oh, this is the sublimest: it can appear

only in conjunction with the fullest sympathy. From the commoner nature

to which I gave pity I must quickly turn away as soon as it demands

community of joy of me. This was the cause of the last discord with my

wife. The unhappy woman had understood in her own way my resolve not to

enter your house again, and conceived it as a rupture with you: and she

imagined that on her return, comfort and intimacy would necessarily be

re-established between us. How fearfully I had to undeceive her!"

Yet it is to this "commoner nature" that he desires to return and

settle down in some quiet corner of Germany for the rest of his life.

"Only keep up your courage, my dear good Minna," he writes to her from

Venice on 14th November 1858. "Overcome, and believe firmly in the

perfect sincerity with which I now aspire to nothing--nothing on this

earth--but to make up for what has been inflicted on you, to support

and guard you, preserve you in loyalty and love, so that your suffering

state may also improve, that you may once more feel joy in your life,

and we may enjoy the evening of our days together as cheerfully and

uncloudedly as possible,"--with a break, presumably, to permit of his

dying in Mathilde's arms. And again in a second letter on the evening

of the same day: "Think of nothing but our reunion: and to make that

thoroughly good and enduring and beneficial for both of us, simply

attend to nothing now but your health. For this you can do nothing,

nothing in the world, but--cultivate tranquillity of mind." To do this

she is to forget the Wesendonck episode; he insists on her never saying

a word about it again to anyone. At Zürich "we were far too buried and

thrown too much on our own resources; that was bound in time to be

injurious and to set us bickering. When once we are in a large town

again, where I can have performances to look after, and you can tend

me when I am exhausted, and rejoice with me over their success,--it

will be to you a dream that we were ever packed into a little den like

that.... Well, well! All that will be altered, and a quite new life

will begin, full of fame, honours and recognition, as much as I shall

desire; so get in good trim to enjoy that harvest with me after a long

and painful seed-time."

Thirteen days previously he had written thus to Mathilde:

"Help me to tend the unfortunate woman.[198] Probably I can do it only

from a distance, for I myself must regard remoteness from her as most

apt for this purpose. When I am near her I become incapable of it:

only from a distance can I tranquillise her, as then I can choose the

time and the mood for my communications, so as to be always mindful

of my task towards her.[199] But I cannot do even that unless--you

help me. I must not know that _your_ heart is bleeding," &c., &c. "You

know that I am yours, and that only you dispose of my actions, deeds,

thoughts and resolutions." The night before he had stood on the balcony

of his house, and looking into the black waters of the canal below him

the thought of suicide had flashed upon him. But he withdrew his hand

from the rail as he thought of Mathilde: "Now I know that it still is

granted to me to die in your arms."

He talked to Minna, on his own showing, much as one talks to a child,

without meaning all one says, one's only object being to comfort it

in its grief. He meant to be kind, for Minna's sufferings undoubtedly

rent his heart. He could be sympathetic with her at a distance. The

difficulties always arose when they set up house again together, for

then the impossibility of his giving up anything he really desired,

even for an ailing wife's sake, became manifest. He was, as usual,

hypnotised by his own eloquence. On paper he could easily settle

every question that arose between Minna and himself: it was merely in

practical domestic matters that he was a failure. It probably never

occurred to him to ask how he was going to square the problem of

living for the remainder of his days with Minna with the problem of

dying in Mathilde's arms, or indeed the general problem of maintaining

his passionate intercourse with his "Muse" and at the same time of

resuming relations with the commonplace wife he had quarrelled with so

desperately over this very "Muse."

With this dualism of soul and this blindness in the face of facts

it was inevitable that the catastrophe of 1858 should have befallen

him,--inevitable also that any renewal of his relations with Mathilde

should lead to another catastrophe of the same kind. The renewal took

place in April 1859, Wesendonck having once more invited Wagner to

visit him, apparently in order to give a _démenti_ to Zürich gossip.

Later on Wagner seems to have realised that Minna's stay in Dresden was

doing her little good, either bodily or mentally: so he resolved to set

up house with her once more in Paris.[200]

In _Mein Leben_ he tells us that "under these circumstances [_i.e._ the

difficulties he was finding in the way of his giving some concerts in

Paris] I could only regard it as a most singular intervention of fate

that Minna should announce her readiness to join me in Paris and that I

was to expect her arrival shortly." But it is clear from letters of his

to Minna of 19th and 25th September 1859, and to Dr. Anton Pusinelli

of 3rd October,[201] that it was _his own suggestion_ that she should

come to Paris to take charge of his new household. He needed her, and

he argued eagerly against the objections which Pusinelli had evidently

put forward. He was going to live very quietly: Minna would be in ideal

surroundings for her health of body and peace of mind; and all would

again be for the best in the best of all possible worlds. "So I beg

you not to advance any objections against her coming to Paris: have

faith in my reasons!... A decided medical treatment was indispensable

for my wife: finally, however, notwithstanding all the art and care

of the physician, moral influences are the weightiest with patients

of this kind; and in this respect--I know it--the life and death of

my wife depend solely upon myself. I can destroy her or preserve her:

consequently, since I know her fate to be given into my hands, my

future conduct towards her is prescribed with the greatest certainty.

Trust me!"

No doubt he meant it all,--on paper.

XII

Minna joined him in Paris on the 17th November 1859. Their relations

were soon as embittered as usual. Wagner was playing for high

stakes, living feverishly and expensively, entertaining largely,

giving disastrous concerts, accumulating new and heavy debts. The

clear-sighted and careful Minna was appalled at the prospect of the

ruin that was threatening them once more: and Wagner made the mistake

of not confiding in her. She felt herself shut out from his inner life.

Apparently he was also giving her fresh cause for jealousy, the lady

this time, it is said, being Liszt's eldest daughter Blandine, the wife

of the Paris lawyer Ollivier.[202]

After the disastrous _Tannhäuser_ performances in March 1861, Wagner

fluctuated for a while between Paris, Karlsruhe and Vienna, at length

settling down on the 14th August in the last-named city, where it was

proposed to produce _Tristan_. Minna had gone to Soden for a cure on

the 10th July: from there she went on to Dresden once more.[203] In

Vienna Wagner had the loan of Dr. Standhartner's house for some weeks

during the physician's absence. His wants were attended to by a "pretty

niece" of Standhartner's.[204] This pretty niece was one Seraphine

Mauro. According to Kapp,[205] "Wagner was not insensible to so much

beauty in his daily surroundings, and his 'dear little doll' [_Puppe_],

as he always called Seraphine, did not let him sigh in vain.... The

suffering in this affair of Wagner's fell upon his friend Peter

Cornelius, who ... had lost his heart to the beautiful Seraphine some

time before."

[Illustration]

Standhartner having returned to Vienna at the end of September,

Wagner had to leave his comfortable quarters, and as there seemed no

prospect of an early performance of _Tristan_, and life at a hotel was

expensive, he accepted an invitation from the Wesendoncks to meet them

in Venice. He remained there only four days--"four miserable days" he

calls them.[206] How unbridgeable was the gulf made between him and

Minna by the memory of the Mathilde affair of three years before may

be estimated from his letters to his wife of 19th October and 13th

November 1861. The first is sensible and tender; he is full of pity for

the poor suffering woman, and will gladly do anything in his power to

alleviate her misery,--anything, that is, but give up the Wesendonck

acquaintance. He still has plans for a reunion, and a quiet old age

to be spent together. But as a preliminary to any _rapprochement_

he insists, as he had always done on her consenting never again to

mention the name of Mathilde, for whom, he declares, his passion has

from beginning to end been absolutely pure. Of all the tragedies of

Wagner's life this surely is the greatest, that his one truly noble

love, the one that was so necessary to him as an artist, to which we

owe _Tristan_ and many of the finest moods of the _Meistersinger_ and

_Parsifal_, should have been the one to embitter his existence and his

wife's beyond all hope of remedy while his less worthy attachments were

either unknown to Minna or counted for little with her. With Wagner

obstinately resolved not to give up the Wesendonck acquaintance, and

Minna--blind to the ideal nature of the attachment, and seeing it, in

all probability, merely as another Laussot affair[207]--as obstinately

bent on making the cessation of this acquaintance a condition of a

full reconciliation with her husband, it was impossible that the

breach between the two tortured and self-torturing souls should ever

be healed. That Wagner dreaded giving Minna any cause to be reminded

of Mathilde's name is evident from the sophisticated version he gives

her of his Venice excursion, in his letter of 13th November 1861:

we can only regard as a piece of well-meant fiction his story that

Dr. Standhartner, having been summoned in haste, as deputy physician

in ordinary, to attend the Empress of Austria in Venice, pressingly

insisted upon Wagner accompanying him for his health's sake. "I

returned early this morning. I hope it has done me good; at least I had

no talking to do for several days, but only to go sight-seeing, which

really benefited me." Not a word, it will be observed, as to having

gone to Venice at the request of the Wesendoncks, or even as to their

being in Venice at that time.

So matters drifted on in the old way until Wagner had settled down in

Biebrich (end of February 1862), after yet another visit to Paris.

He took with him the furniture that had been in their Paris house.

Minna came to help in the unpacking and arranging. She remained

with him a week. According to the account he gives in _Mein Leben_

"the old scenes were soon renewed," Minna being angry at his having

removed from the custom-house the articles he required for his new

home, without awaiting for her arrival.[208] The real reason of their

quarrel, however--concealed from us, as usual, in _Mein Leben_--was

once more Frau Wesendonck. By a most unlucky coincidence a letter and

a box arrived from Mathilde on the second and third days of Minna's

visit. They were quite harmless,[209] but Minna would not listen to

reason; she was more than ever convinced that her husband was carrying

on another intrigue with Mathilde behind her back. It was enough, as

poor Wagner says, to drive him out of his senses--the same scenes as

four years before, the same invective, word for word. Yet in spite of

it all, once more the wretched pair began making plans for a home in

common, Minna's importunities among the Dresden Government officials

having made it possible for Wagner to obtain an amnesty by a formal

petition to the King.

Biebrich remained his home until the autumn. He was working at the

music of the _Meistersinger_, and perhaps, on the whole, not unhappy.

He made several new friends, among them the actress Friederike

Meyer--the sister of the Frau Dustmann who was to have "created"

the part of Isolde in the Vienna production of _Tristan_--and a

pretty and intelligent young girl, Mathilde Maier, the daughter of a

deceased lawyer. The fire of his passion for Frau Wesendonck having

already cooled, he fell in love with the gentle Mathilde Maier. Kapp

conjectures that rumours of their "friendly relations" had come to

Minna's ears, and that the renewed bitterness of her letters at this

time decided Wagner to take the step that had long been urged upon

him by his friends, and obtain a divorce from Minna. He commissioned

his Dresden friend Dr. Pusinelli to sound Minna on the subject; she

declined to oblige him.[210] His desire to marry Mathilde Maier,

however, says Kapp, found a new and insurmountable obstacle. She was

threatened with hereditary deafness; this, she thought, would unfit

her to be the wife of a musician. "The full significance of this

tragic love in Wagner's life cannot be estimated yet," says Kapp,

"since the autobiography preserves complete silence on this matter,

out of consideration for Cosima, and the large and carefully guarded

collection of intimate documents from Wagner's hands that Mathilde left

behind her will not be published during Cosima's life-time."[211]

Meanwhile his relations with Friederike Meyer--a lively

actress-temperament--had become more and more friendly. When he left

Biebrich for Vienna in November 1862, he was accompanied by Friederike,

who had surrendered her engagement at the Frankfort theatre for his

sake.[212] He soon became involved, as he tells us, in disagreements

with his Isolde, Frau Dustmann, Friederike's sister. "It was

impossible," he says, "to make her see how matters really stood; she

regarded her sister as being involved in a liaison, and cast out by her

family,[213] so that Friederike's settling in Vienna was compromising

for _her_."

We get a little light on the pair in an entry in the diary of Peter

Cornelius under date 20th November 1862:

"We were at Wagner's. He gave a musical evening for his Fräulein

Friederike M.... Her chambermaid was there as duenna. Friederike isn't

so bad as they made out in Mainz; she isn't amiss as far as appearances

go. She is intelligent, without making any attempt to thrust herself

forward. She is not very pretty, but her face is animated. Wagner

behaved very properly and decently in her presence. If he really must

have a liaison of this sort, it looks as if he would get on quite

tolerably with this one."[214]

The liaison seems to have been in one way at least a harmful one for

Wagner. Frau Dustmann was so angered at Friederike's association with

him and at her attempt to procure an engagement at the Burg theatre

that she cooled towards _Tristan_. This, says Kapp, was the real cause

of the failure to produce the opera in Vienna, not, as has hitherto

been supposed, the difficulty the singers found with the work.

Friederike soon passed out of his life. With his liking for women's

society, however, it was impossible for him to live alone for long.

We may believe him when he tells Minna (December 27, 1862), "I

am living an utterly wretched life, daily, hourly--and am never,

never happy."[215] He is busy with concerts and with the _Tristan_

rehearsals; but he is getting no sleep, has palpitations of the heart,

and is "completely knocked to pieces." After his Russian concert tour

he settles in Penzing, a suburb of Vienna (May 12, 1863), in order

to continue work at the _Meistersinger_. He has apparently given up

all idea of a reunion with Minna. He tells us that about this time

he suffered a great deal of trouble on her account: "she reproached

me bitterly for everything I did."[216] He kept, he says, to his

resolution of the previous year; he wrote instead to Minna's daughter

Nathalie, who was still living with her, and still under the impression

that she was Minna's sister.[217] The idea occurred to him of getting

Mathilde Maier to take charge of his Penzing household. Apparently

the proposal created some commotion in the Maier circle. Mathilde, he

had thought, "would be sensible enough to take my meaning correctly,

without being shocked. No doubt I was right in that supposition; but

I had not taken sufficient account of her mother and her bourgeois

surroundings in general. She seemed to have been thrown into the

utmost excitement by my invitation; and her friend Luise Wagner, with

bourgeois sense and precision, gave me the good advice first of all to

obtain a divorce from my wife, and then everything else would easily

be arranged. Greatly shocked at this, I at once withdrew my invitation

as having been made without proper consideration."[218] Perhaps he

really was shocked, though we have to remember that these memoirs were

dictated to Cosima, and he would probably be disposed to paint himself

in the most favourable colours. But the whole passage, ambiguous as

it is, in a way that the student of _Mein Leben_ becomes accustomed

to, points quite clearly to the belief in the Maier circle that his

relations with Mathilde were very intimate.

Feminine society was an absolute necessity to him at all times, and

now, perhaps, more than ever, for his life was a round of anxieties

and his health was wretched. His lonely abode was brightened for a

time by "a maiden of seventeen years, of an irreproachable family."

According to his account,[219] she was bored and wanted to get back to

the town again. He got rid of her with as much regard for her feelings

as possible, and her place was taken by an elder sister. "She is more

experienced," he tells Frau Wesendonck, "staid (_gemessen_), seems

gentle, and is not unagreeable." "Eccentric as the episode may seem in

itself," says Mr. Ashton Ellis,[220] "it disposes of the ridiculous

legend--founded on a Viennese dressmaker's bills--that the writer

used to dress himself in female garments. Long ago I had been struck

by the 'we' in one of the crumbs of that correspondence flaunted by

addle-brained purveyors of gossip, and felt more inclined to credit

Hanslick's story of 'a pretty ballet-dancer'; but the amazing innocence

of the whole arrangement is proved alike by its narration to Elisabeth

and her unrebuking answer."

Whether the purveyors of gossip were addle-brained or not, gossip

there certainly was: and apparently there was some fire to account for

the smoke. That this second serving maiden, says Kapp, "had a better

understanding [than her sister] of the position she was intended for,

and gave Wagner thorough satisfaction," is evident from the following

love letter, addressed to her after he had been away from Penzing some

time on a concert tour:

"DEAR LITTLE MARIE,--I shall be home again next Wednesday. I shall be

at the Northern station in Vienna at half-past seven in the evening.

Franz [his man servant] must be there punctually with the carriage,

and he must also have what is necessary for the trunk. Now, my best

sweetheart, have everything in the house very nice, so that I can get

a cosy rest, which I very much need. Everything must be quite tidy,

and--well warmed. See that everything is very nice in the lovely

study; if it is hot, open it a little, so that the study may be warm;

_and perfume it nicely: buy the best bottles of scent, so as to give

it a nice odour_. Ach Gott! how delighted I am to be able to rest

again with you there. (_I hope the rose-coloured pants are ready?_)

Aye, aye! You must be very pretty and charming; I deserve to have

a thoroughly good time once more. At Christmas I will arrange the

Christmas tree: and then, my sweetheart, you will get all sorts of

presents. My arrival need not be made known to everybody; but Franz

must tell the barber and the hairdresser to come at half-past nine

on Thursday morning. So: _Wednesday_ evening at half-past seven in

Vienna, and soon after in Penzing. I leave it wholly to yourself as to

whether you will meet me at the station. Perhaps it will be nicer if

you meet me first in the house, in the warm rooms. I shall probably

need only the _coupée_. Kind greetings to Franz and Anna [Franz's

wife]. Tell them to have everything thoroughly nice. Many kisses to my

sweetheart. _Au revoir!_"[221]

This, it need hardly be said, is scarcely the sort of letter one writes

to a servant who is no more than a servant.

In July 1863 he gives two concerts in Pesth, where he seems to have

been smitten by the charms of a young Hungarian singer who greatly

pleased him by her renderings of some of Elsa's music, and still more

by her evident incandescence for himself.

There is no mention of this young lady in _Mein Leben_, but Wagner

tells Mathilde about her in the same letter (3rd August 1863) in which

he speaks of the engagement of Marie as successor to her sister. "I

was quite touched at meeting with something so pure and unspoiled

for my music; and the good child, on her side, seemed so moved by

myself and my music that for the first time in her life she really

felt. The expression of these feelings was indescribably charming and

touching, and many might have thought that the maiden had conceived an

ardent love for me:[222] so now I have to 'write' to her as well." He

evidently takes a sort of impish pleasure in thus piquing the curiosity

of his old love and "Muse." He adds "See, I am telling you all the good

I can; but I really don't know of anything more, and I am not even sure

whether you will credit this last tale to me as something 'good.'"

XIII

All this while the understanding between himself and von Bülow's wife

had evidently been quietly ripening. Reading between the lines of his

earlier accounts of Cosima, it is easy to see that there had been for

some time a tentative if unavowed _rapprochement_ between them. In

1861, when taking leave of Cosima at Reichenhall, she gave him, he

says, "an almost timid look of enquiry,"[223]--which strikes the old

Wagnerian hand as one of those phrases in which the composer conceals

more than he discloses.

By the following summer, matters had evidently matured a little. "The

increasing and often excessive ill-humour of poor Hans, who seemed to

be always in torment, had sometimes drawn a helpless sigh from me. On

the other hand Cosima appeared to have lost the timidity (_Scheu_)

towards me that I had noticed during my visit to Reichenhall in the

previous year; she was now more friendly. One day, after I had sung

'Wotan's Farewell' to my friends in my own way, I noticed on Cosima's

face the same expression that, to my astonishment, I had seen there

when bidding her good-bye at Zürich; only now the ecstasy of it was

raised to a serene transfiguration. There was silence and mystery

over everything now; but the belief that she was mine took hold of me

with such certainty, that in moments of more than normal excitement I

behaved in the most extravagantly riotous way."[224]

He visits the Bülows both before and after his Russian concerts

(March 1863), and again in November of the year, after the concerts

at Budapest, Prague and elsewhere. Bülow being busy on the latter

occasion with preparations for a concert of his own, Wagner went for a

drive with Cosima. "This time all our jocularity gave way to silence;

we gazed into each other's eyes without speaking, and a passionate

longing for an avowal of the truth overpowered us and brought us to

a confession--which needed no words--of the infinite unhappiness

that weighed upon us. It gave us relief. Profoundly appeased, we

won sufficient cheerfulness to go to the concert without feeling

oppressed.... After the concert we had to go to a supper at my friend

Weitzmann's, the length of which reduced us, yearning as we were for

the profoundest soul's peace, to almost frantic despair. But at last

the day came to an end, and after a night spent under Bülow's roof

I resumed my journey. Our farewell so strongly reminded me of that

first wonderfully affecting parting from Cosima at Zürich, that all

the intervening years vanished from me like a wild dream between two

days of the highest life's significance. If on that first occasion our

presentiment of something not yet understood constrained us to silence,

it was no less impossible to give voice to what we now recognised but

did not utter."[225] Here again, anyone familiar with Wagner's literary

manner must feel instinctively that there is a great deal more beneath

these words than appears on the surface of them. This is the last

reference to Cosima in _Mein Leben_: the further story of the pair has

to be derived from other sources.

The Zürich leave-taking to which he refers can only be that of the

16th August 1858, the day before he was compelled to leave the "Asyl"

as a result of the Mathilde catastrophe. His account of the farewell

in _Mein Leben_, however, does not suggest any special community of

feeling between himself and Cosima; all that he says is that "on the

16th August the Bülows left; Hans was dissolved in tears, Cosima

was gloomy and silent." If it were not for the tragedy of it, the

situation would be decidedly piquant: Wagner, on the very eve of

his severance from one man's wife, finding some consolation in the

look that another man's wife gives him, and assuring us,--or was it

simply Cosima, his unofficial wife and amanuensis of the hour, that

he was assuring?--that all the passion he poured out so eloquently

to Mathilde in the days that followed the separation vanished from

him, in 1863, "like a wild dream" at another look from Cosima. One

could understand the elevated affection he felt for this remarkable

woman ousting the smokier memories of Friederike Meyer and Blandine

Ollivier and the maid-servant Marie, but hardly the luminous figure

of Mathilde Wesendonck. Could he really forget so easily, or did he

only imagine he forgot, or did he simply wish Cosima to believe he had

forgotten? But alas, he forgot Cosima too when she was away from him.

As we have seen, during his stay at Frau Wille's at Mariafeld, after

his flight from his Vienna creditors (March 1864) he had it in his mind

to restore his broken finances by means of a rich marriage.[226] Kapp

conjectures that the lady he had in view was Henriette von Bissing,

the sister of Frau Wille. (She had recently been left a widow, with

a considerable fortune.) It is certain that Frau von Bissing and he

had been drawn very close together at the end of 1863. When he went

to Breslau in November, he tells us, she put up at the same hotel,

listened sympathetically to his story of his woes and his financial

difficulties, and dissuaded him from his projected Russian tour,

promising to give him "the not inconsiderable sum necessary to maintain

me in independence for some time to come."[227] But she found some

difficulty in getting the needful funds from her family, "from whom she

was meeting with the most violent opposition, apparently spiced with

calumnies against myself." Plunged more and more deeply into debt, he

at last appeals point blank to the lady for "a clear declaration not

as to whether she _could_ help me at once, but whether she _would_,

as I could no longer stave off ruin." "She must," he says, "have been

very deeply wounded by something that had been told her of which I

knew nothing, for her to be able to bring herself to answer somewhat

to this effect--'You want to know finally whether I will or will not?

Well then, in God's name, No!'" He accounts for this answer afterwards,

as might be expected, by "the weakness of her not very independent

character," particulars of which he had had from Frau Wille.[228]

Knowing him as well as we do, and knowing his trick of explaining every

unpleasantness in other people's conduct towards him in a way that lays

the blame with them rather than with himself, we can hardly accept his

own account of the affair as the last possible word on the subject.

It would be interesting to have Frau von Bissing's version of it. But

if he has given us the events in their true sequence, Kapp's theory

is untenable, for the rupture with Frau von Bissing must have taken

place before the Mariafeld conversation on the subject of a divorce. It

is not impossible, however, that he is anticipating the story of the

severance from Frau von Bissing by a page or two.[229]

In May 1864 came his dramatic rescue by King Ludwig. His financial

troubles were, for a time, at an end. And now the stage was clear for

the last act of the drama in which he and Cosima were the principal

actors. As the autobiography ends with the summons to Munich by King

Ludwig, we are henceforth without any guidance from Wagner himself. We

can imagine, however, that for a man of his temperament the necessity

for feminine companionship soon became urgent. Minna was now out of

the question; his other flames--Mathilde Wesendonck, Friederike Meyer,

Mathilde Maier, Henriette von Bissing--had one by one died out. Only

Cosima remained; and for the man who, with the turn of his fiftieth

year, began to love with his reason more than with his senses, the

masterful Cosima was obviously the one woman in the world for him. She

had apparently never loved Bülow, nor he her; we are told that his

marriage with her was an act of chivalry on his part, due to the desire

to legitimise in the eyes of the world the illegitimate daughter of

the Liszt whom he so admired and loved. The truth seems to have slowly

dawned on Cosima that it was her mission in life to tend the buffeted

composer of genius. He must have admired her both for her insight and

her indomitable will; and no admirer of Wagner would grudge him the

splendid instrument for his purposes that came to him in Cosima after

so many years of delusion and disappointment. But it is tolerably clear

that the pair, in the egoism of their devotion to each other, acted

with a total lack of regard either for Bülow's feelings or for his

position in the eyes of the world. In 1864, Bülow, at Wagner's request,

sent Cosima and his own child to keep the lonely musician company in

his Starnberg villa; and apparently at this time all barriers between

the two were broken down, though their love for each other was still

concealed from Bülow, who came to them in July at Wagner's request.

Wagner persuaded the King to appoint Bülow his Court pianist--his

avowed object being to rescue Hans from his unpleasant artistic

surroundings in Berlin, the real object, as Kapp says, being "to keep

the beloved woman near him."

In October Wagner settled in the Munich house placed at his disposal

by the King, and the Bülows took up their residence in the capital in

the following month. Cosima constituted herself Wagner's secretary

and general woman of affairs, two rooms being provided for her in his

house, where she worked for several hours each day. On the 10th April

1865, a daughter, Isolde, was born to Cosima. Bülow believed the child

to be his own,[230] and Wagner became its godfather. In reality the

child was Wagner's own. (A second child, Eva, was born to them 18th

February 1867 at Tribschen; Siegfried was born 6th June 1869.)

On the 25th January 1866 Minna died in Dresden. As soon as Cosima

heard of it, Cornelius tells us, she telegraphed to Wagner, who was in

Geneva at the time, asking whether she should come at once to him; he

advised her to wait. But while Bülow was on a concert tour in March she

went to Geneva and stayed three weeks with Wagner. His unpopularity in

Munich had made it imperative for the King, however unwillingly, to

request him to leave the city. He and Cosima now looked out for a Swiss

refuge, and at the end of March found the ideal retreat in Tribschen,

near Lucerne. There Cosima joined him, with her children, on the 12th

May 1866. A letter from Wagner to her arrived in Munich after she had

left. "It was opened by Bülow, who thought it might contain something

that it would be necessary to telegraph to his wife; it revealed to

him the whole bitter truth."[231] His position was an unenviable one,

Munich gossip already making very free with his name. He went to

Tribschen, and learned that Cosima was resolved not to return to him.

He agreed to a dissolution of the marriage, but stipulated that, out

of regard for himself, and to give pause to the malice of the world,

Cosima should not be united to Wagner for another two years, which

time she was to spend with her father in Rome. She refused him this

concession; and Bülow, after remaining in the house two months, in the

hope of giving a _démenti_ to Munich tittle-tattle, retired to Basle,

leaving his family with Wagner.

In April 1867 King Ludwig appointed Bülow Court Kapellmeister. At

the same time the King asked Wagner to superintend some projected

performances of _Lohengrin_ and _Tannhäuser_, which necessitated his

frequent visits to Munich. Apparently to save appearances, Cosima took

up her abode for a time with Bülow at his house in the Arcostrasse,

where two rooms were always ready for Wagner's use. But gossip and

calumny only raged all the more fiercely, both in the town and in the

press. It was openly said of Bülow that he owed his appointment at

the Court "to his complaisance as a husband"; and at the end there

was nothing for it but for Wagner and Cosima to retire together to

Tribschen, and cut the last traces that bound them to Munich and

convention. Deeply wounded, Bülow found it impossible to continue his

work in the town: he resigned his appointment in June 1869, sent his

own two children to Cosima, and went out alone into the world.[232]

The conduct of Wagner and Cosima led to a long estrangement between

them and Liszt, and a cooling of other friendships; the King, too,

pointedly showed his displeasure. Wagner, in his Tribschen retreat,

turned his back angrily upon everyone who disapproved of him, and

immersed himself in _Siegfried_ and _The Twilight of the Gods_. On the

6th June 1869 the birth of a son, Siegfried, sent him into the seventh

heaven of delight. Cosima's marriage was dissolved, on Bülow's suit, on

18th July 1870; and on the 25th of the following month she was married

to Wagner.

It is a thousand pities that Wagner himself has left us no account of

the Bülow-Cosima affair. No one who has followed him thus far with me

can doubt that he would have made himself, as usual, the suffering hero

of the piece, that his intentions and his acts would have been strictly

honourable from first to last, and that Bülow would somehow or other

have been put in the wrong, as all the other friends and enemies were

who happened to cross his path. The interesting thing would have been

to see how he managed this.

XIV

I have given the erotic history of Wagner in such detail not only

because of the enormous part the erotic played in his life and in the

shaping of his character, but because to know him thoroughly from

this side is to have the key to his whole nature. Nowhere and at no

time was a middle course possible for him. It was all or nothing. To

that extent he was consistent: yet viewed in detail he was a bundle

of inconsistencies,--at once a voluptuary and an ascetic, a hero and

a rogue, a saint and a sinner, always longing for death, yet always

fighting lustily for his life, despising the public and pining for

seclusion, yet unable to live anywhere except in the very centre of

the stage and the full glare of the limelight. Frau Wesendonck once

reproached him very gravely and wisely with his inconsistency in this

last regard: "The wretchedness of your state of mind froze my blood.

I felt I could do nothing. I was to tell myself that all the gifts of

nature, even the most glorious, are wasted if they are not crowned by

empty external success; that they are futile in and for themselves,

and he who has them above others possesses only the right to be more

wretched than they! It made me almost bitter to think you would have

me believe that.... It is quite incomprehensible to me how anyone can

at once despise and seek mere success, _i.e._ applause. It seems to

me that only the sage, who asks nothing of the world, may despise it;

the man who uses it becomes its accomplice by mere contact with it,

and can no longer be its judge. You are at once a knower (_Wissender_)

and accomplice in the last degree. You hurriedly grasp at every new

deception, apparently to wipe out from your breast the disappointment

of previous deceptions; and yet no one knows better than yourself that

it never can or will be. Friend, how is this to end? Are fifty years'

experience not enough, and should the moment not come at last when you

are wholly at one with yourself?"[233]

He knew no law of life except the full realisation, of himself at the

moment. He was by turns Christian and Freethinker and Christian again,

republican and royalist, lover of Germany and despiser of Germany,

anti-Semite (in theory), and pro-Semite (in practice);[234] but in each

of his many metamorphoses he was sincerely convinced that he was not

only right as against all the world, but right as against the Wagner

of earlier years. Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Hafiz, and heaven knows who

besides, were in turn the one great philosopher the world has known. In

later life he becomes a vegetarian: it therefore went without saying

that all mankind should forthwith abjure meat. He has the sense to

recognise that a flesh diet is imperative for most people in a climate

like that of Northern Europe. But a little difficulty of this kind does

not daunt him; all that European humanity has to do, he tells us, is to

migrate into other parts of the world.[235] He gives us, in 1851 and

1856, two divergent interpretations of the philosophies that underlie

_Tannhäuser_ and the _Ring_. He of course explains it all by the fact

that in his "intellectual ideas" he was at first working in opposition

to his "intuitive ideal." The truth is that in 1851 he was still

something of an optimist, while in 1856 he had become a pessimist with

Schopenhauer.[236]

The many contradictions of his character have of course made him the

easy butt of the satirists.[237] In 1877 there were published in the

Vienna _Neue Freie Presse_[238] a series of letters of his to the

milliner Bertha, who made him his wonderful lace shirts and satin

trousers[239] and dressing-gowns, and decorated his Penzing rooms

(and later his house at Tribschen) with the soft luxurious stuffs and

colours he so loved. The witty editor of the Letters, Daniel Spitzer,

twitted him on the inconsistency between his acts and his opinions,

between his art and his life. Who would believe, he asks, that the man

who indulged in these effeminacies was the same man who used to sneer

in his books at the seductions of Paris: who, in his _Opera and Drama_,

reproached Rossini with "living in the lap of luxury," called him the

"luxurious son of Italy," and even, in a moment of towering virtue,

styled him an "ausgestochene Courtisane"; or that the Wagner who, in

the deplorable squib he wrote upon the French nation after its downfall

in 1871, sneered at the French for their passion for bouquets, was

himself ordering bouquets and rose garlands of the most extravagant

kind from the Putzmacherin?

The man, in truth, who wrote with such a comic rage against the rich

and their luxury, was himself the most luxurious of mankind. He may

have admired the Spartan virtues of the poor, but he had not the least

wish to practise them himself. He could not exist without a certain

amount of pampering both of body and of soul, even in the days when,

unable to make both ends meet, he was living on the charity of certain

friends and borrowing at every opportunity from others. "It is with

genuine desperation that I always pick up art again," he writes to

Liszt on the 15th January 1854; "if I am to do this, if I am once more

to renounce reality,--if I am to plunge again into the woes of artistic

fancy in order to find tranquillity in the world of imagination, my

fancy must at least be helped, my imaginative faculty supported. I

cannot live like a dog; I cannot sleep on straw and refresh myself with

bad liquor. My excitable, delicate, ardently craving and uncommonly

soft and tender sensibility must be coaxed in some ways if my mind is

to accomplish the horribly difficult task of creating a non-existent

world."[240] A few days after it is the same story; he must have money

by hook or by crook. Liszt will understand him,--though it will be

"impossible for a Philistine to comprehend the exuberance[241] of my

nature, which in these and those moods of my life drove me to satisfy

a colossal inner desire by such external means as must seem to him

questionable,[242] and at all events unsympathetic. No one knows the

needs of men like us: I myself am often surprised at regarding so many

'useless' things as indispensable."[243]

He grew more and more luxurious in middle age. The scale of

expenditure revealed in the _Putzmacherin_ letters, and a stray piece

of information or two from other quarters, give us a hint of his

recklessness in the early 'sixties,--a recklessness that brought him

so near the verge of absolute ruin that it is terrible to think what

might have happened to him had not King Ludwig come to his rescue.

For the Christmas of 1863 he had, as is usual in Germany, a Christmas

tree loaded with gifts for his friends. For a man without any income

to speak of, very dubious prospects, and a grievous load of debt,

his presents were magnificent. "The mad Wagner," says Cornelius in a

letter to his sister Susanne (Vienna, 11th January, 1864), "had a great

Christmas tree, with a royally rich table beneath it for me. Just

imagine: a marvellous heavy overcoat--an elegant grey dressing-gown--a

red scarf, a blue cigar-case and tinder-box--lovely silk handkerchiefs,

splendid gold shirt studs--the _Struwelpeter_--elegant pen-wipers

with gold mottoes--fine cravats, a meerschaum cigar-holder with

his initials--in short, all sorts of things that only an Oriental

imagination could think of. It made my heart heavy, and the next day I

gave away half of them, and only then was I happy,--to Seraphine the

gold studs, to Ernestine a lovely purse with a silver thaler, to Gustav

Schönaich a sash, to young Ruben the cigar-holder, to Fritz Porges the

pen-wiper, something to each of my house people, a yellow handkerchief

to Marie, a red one to Frau Müller, ... to Herr Müller the tinder-box,

to Karl Müller a new waistcoat from myself, in place of which I kept

the one from Wagner."[244] All this was for Cornelius alone; no doubt

his other guests were treated in equally generous fashion. We happen

to have his own account of this affair; it is delightful. "Having very

little ready money, but solid hopes,[245] I could now greet my few

friends with tolerable good humour.... On Christmas Eve I invited them

all to my house, had the Christmas tree lighted up, and gave each of

them an appropriate trifle."[246]

With tastes and habits of this kind it is no wonder that he

accumulated enormous debts, and came to be regarded by all his friends

as perfectly hopeless on the financial side. King Ludwig gave him, as

we have seen, 15,000 gulden with which to return to Vienna, to satisfy

the more pressing of his creditors and to make arrangements with the

others. He took up his Munich residence in the Briennerstrasse (No.

21), in October 1864, and sent for the _Putzmacherin_ Bertha to drape

and decorate it for him according to his liking, and to provide him

with the satin dressing-gowns, trousers, &c., &c., that he loved,

paying her, of course, now and then when funds were more than usually

plentiful.[247] His manner of living in Munich may be guessed from the

fact that he was threatened with a writ on the day of the projected

first performance of _Tristan_ (15th May 1865);[248] while in October

of the same year he was compelled to borrow another 40,000 gulden of

the King.[249] He soon earned in Munich the reputation of a reckless

spendthrift, a reputation that has never left him. It is sometimes

said that the standard of domestic comfort was so low among the good

Müncheners of that epoch that a very modest expenditure upon fineries

may have seemed to them a Capuan indulgence in luxury.[250] But the

details of the fitting-up of one of his rooms in the Briennerstrasse

are proof enough that he was giving full rein to his sybaritic tastes.

"In the middle of the first floor was a large room containing Wagner's

grand piano. On the right a door led into the so-called Grail or

Satin Room, which was about 3½ m. high, 4½ broad, and 5 deep

[roughly 11½ feet by 14½ feet by 1½ feet]. The walls were

covered with fine yellow satin, which was finished off above with

yellow vallances of the same material. The two blunt corners of the

long wall that faced Count von Schack's house were broken by iron

galleries, making artificial recesses. These, about 70 cm. deep (about

28 inches), were covered with rose-coloured satin in folds. Each of

the iron galleries was covered with two wings of white silk tulle,

trimmed with lace. The white curtains and the draperies were also

adorned with delicate artificial roses. The room was lighted by a

window at the small side at the left of the entrance. The curtains of

this window were of rose-coloured satin, garnished with interlaced

red and white satin draperies.... The top of the window curtain, the

frame of the mirror [on one of the walls], and that of the picture

[on another wall], were draped with rose-coloured satin, tied back

with white satin bows. The ceiling was entirely covered with richly

festooned white satin, then divided diagonally from one corner to the

other with ruches of pearl grey satin of about 14 cm. wide (about 6

inches). The ceiling was also bordered on all four sides with similar

pearl grey ruches; these were sown with artificial roses. The middle

of the ceiling was decorated with a rosette of white satin, about 30

cm. (12 inches) in circumference and 25 cm. (10 inches) deep, trimmed

with narrow silk lace and with roses like the others on the ceiling.

The ground was covered with a soft Smyrna carpet. In the middle of

the room was a soft and elastically upholstered couch, covered with a

white flowered moire."[251] Satin, I believe, was much more expensive

in the 'sixties than it is now; but any lady reader will be able to

make an approximate estimate of the expense of fitting up such a room.

No one to-day, of course, will presume to pass moral censure upon him

for his love of luxury. Every sensible man surrounds himself with all

the luxury he can procure. The remarkable features in Wagner's case

are the uncontrollable nature of the desires that urged him to their

gratification at anyone's or everyone's expense, and the dualism of

soul that permitted him equally to evoke primeval heroes and to expound

the doctrine of renunciation from the centre of a bower of satin.

Bülow once confessed to Weissheimer that he could not make out how

Wagner managed to get through so much money. The secret apparently was

that he had to indulge himself liberally in luxuries in order to put

into practice his doctrine of renunciation. Here is an instance given

us by Weissheimer himself from the dark days of 1862. Through the

non-performance of _Tristan_ at Vienna, Wagner had been disappointed

of the expected honorarium, which, as was usual with him, had been

squandered in advance.

He had been in the habit of giving splendid dinners after the concerts

to his friends and the chief performers; and his hotel-keeper had a

two months' bill against him for food and lodging. "One evening when

Tausig and I were with him, he bemoaned and lamented his wretched

condition. We listened to him sympathetically, and sat miserably on

the sofa, while he paced up and down in nervous haste. Suddenly he

stopped and said, 'Here, I know what I need,' ran to the door, and rang

vigorously. Tausig whispered to me, 'What's he up to? He looks just

like Wotan after he has come to some great resolution.' The waiter

came in sight slowly and hesitatingly--these people soon see how the

wind is blowing--and was no less astonished than we when Wagner said,

'Bring me at once two bottles of champagne on ice!' 'Heavens above--in

this state!' we said when the waiter had gone out. But Wagner gave us

a fervid dissertation on the indispensability of champagne precisely

when a situation was desperate: only _this_ could help us over the

painfulness of it."[252]

Glasenapp tells how in the very last years of his life he could

not work unless surrounded by soft lines and colours and perfumes.

His almost morbid sensitivity multiplied enormously the ordinary

pleasant or unpleasant sensations of touch and of sight. When in a

difficulty with his composition he would stroke the folds of a soft

curtain or table-cover till the right mood came. Not only the fabrics

but the lines about him had to be melting, indefinite: he could not

endure even books in the room he was working in, or bear to let his

eyes follow the garden paths; "they suggested the outer world too

definitely and prevented concentration." Among scents he particularly

loved attar of roses, which he used to get direct from Paris--sent to

him, however, under the fictitious name and address of "Mr. Bernard

Schnappauf, Ochsengasse, Bayreuth," his barber obtaining delivery of

it for him.[253] Such was the creator of the heroic, athletic boy

Siegfried,--this poor little sickly, supersensitive, self-indulgent

being who could hardly deny himself the smallest of his innocent little

voluptuousnesses. The antinomy would be unresolvable did we not know

from a hundred other cases that art is not life, and that the artist

may be very different from his art. The Grand Duke of Baden once

wounded Wagner deeply by declaring that he "could distinguish between

the work and the man."[254] We have often to make that distinction with

Wagner.

XV

At once a Spartan and a voluptuary in body, ready to endure many

miseries rather than live any kind of life but the one he desired to

live, yet unable to deny himself all sorts of luxuries even when he had

not the money to pay for them, he was both a Spartan and a voluptuary

in the things of the mind. He cut himself adrift uncompromisingly, even

with rudeness, from people he disliked, even though they for their

part were not ill-disposed towards him and might have been useful to

him. But to his friends he clung with the same hungry passion as to

his silks and satins and perfumes, and, it must be confessed, for the

same reasons,--because they warmed and refreshed and soothed him. He

loved his friends, but for his own sake, not for theirs. This may seem

a harsh judgment of him, but his letters and his record admit of no

other reading. With his lust for domination, he could never endure

independence in anyone round about him. This was Nietzsche's great

offence, that he dared to think his own way through life, instead of

falling into the ranks and becoming simply the instrument of Wagner's

will.[255] We have seen Wagner commending this person and that for

their "devotion," their "fidelity" to himself, and becoming pettishly

angry with Cornelius and Tausig for not coming to him the moment

he wanted them. In his old age he was as insistent as ever that no

one in his circle should follow a desire of his own if it clashed

with his. In the later Wahnfried days he used to go through Bach's

preludes and fugues in the evenings, expatiating upon each of them

to an admiring company. One night he was deeply displeased at young

Kellermann for having absented himself from Wahnfried, having preferred

to go to some concert in the town; Wagner "got violently excited over

it, and regretted afterwards that he could not 'give it to' anyone

quietly and calmly, on which account he would rather avoid doing so

altogether. On this day it was a long time before we could get to the

'Forty-eight.'"[256]

The unique correspondence with Liszt thrills us in its better moments

even to-day; yet it can hardly be doubted that he loved Liszt

selfishly, for the intellectual and emotional warmth his colleague

brought into his life. He needs Liszt, we can see, in order that he

may talk about and realise himself. After the Wesendonck rupture,

in 1858, he goes to Venice. In September Liszt is in the Tyrol with

the Princess von Wittgenstein and her daughter. Wagner writes him on

the 12th September, asking him, as he is so near, to come to him at

Venice, Liszt having been unable to accept a previous invitation to

visit him at Zürich, owing to his having to attend the Jena University

Jubilee celebrations. There had been some misunderstanding over another

proposed meeting-place, and Liszt did not go to Venice. Thereupon

Wagner becomes very angry, as usual, and actually writes to this man,

to whom he owed such infinite benefactions, in the same half-grieved,

half-accusing tone that he adopted towards Tausig. "Your letter of 23rd

ult. ... awoke in me the hope that I should soon be able to see you

and speak to you. But I doubt whether my letter to you to that effect,

addressed to you at the Hôtel de Bavière, Munich, reached you in time,

for I have neither seen you nor had an answer from you. I now fear

that my desire to tell you of many things by word of mouth will not be

realised; so I write, as I feel I owe you an explanation with regard to

certain points that have not been clear to you. Altogether it cannot

amount to much; in conversation it might have been more.

"I will not enlarge upon the moral necessities for my departure from

Zürich; they must be known to you, and perhaps I may assume that Cosima

or Hans has told you enough about them. To remain in Zürich under

the previous conditions was not to be thought of; I had to carry out

without any further delay a resolution made some months before. Each

new day brought with it new and intolerable torments; only my departure

could end them. From day to day I had to postpone this, however, for

lack of the necessary means; I had to provide my wife with money,

and make our definitive departure from Zürich possible by settling

accounts, &c., that otherwise I should not have had to settle until

the New Year. It was an unspeakable agony to go through day after

day hoping in vain for money to arrive, and to see the troubles and

torments that were the cause of my delay increasing. For you to have

come to me suddenly at this time would have been a heavenly consolation

for me and everyone involved in the conflict.

"You had to attend to University celebrations, &c., which, pardon me

for saying so, appeared incredibly trivial to me in the mood I was

in then. I did not press you any more, and was angry with Bülow for

pressing you; but I must confess that when at last I received the

news of your coming on the 20th, I had already become indifferent

(_unempfindlich_) about it."[257]

In short, he was in trouble, thought that Liszt would be able to

console him, and was angry with him for not coming to him at the

instant he needed him. Liszt, always long-suffering and courteous,

chides him gently in his reply of the 9th October.

"Another point in your letter, dearest Richard, has almost hurt me,

though I can quite understand that you, in the midst of the griefs and

agitations that embittered your last days in Zürich, should think the

official impediments in the way of my coming to Zürich 'trivial,' and

that you should not attach sufficient importance to the Jena University

Jubilee and to the many considerations which I have to observe with

regard to the Grand Duke,--were it only in order that I may be useful

to you now and then in small matters. In a calmer mood, however, you

will easily understand that I cannot and ought not to leave Weimar at

every moment, and you will certainly feel that the delay of my journey

to Zürich was not motived by any sort of 'triviality.' When I wrote

that I should be with you on the 20th August I took it for certain

that even in case of your earlier departure from Zürich you would

appoint some other place. Lucerne or Geneva, for our meeting. I came to

the conclusion which, however, I gladly put aside on your assurance,

although, as I told you a little while ago, for years I have had to

endure many incredible and deeply wounding things from the Countess

d'Agoult.

"Enough of this, dearest Richard; we shall remain what we

are,--inseparable, true friends, and such another pair will not be

found soon."[258]

But Wagner was unappeasable. He does indeed write back to Liszt in

cordial terms--"Thanks, dear friend! After the profoundest solace

through the noblest, tenderest love that fell to my lot [_i.e._

Mathilde Wesendonck], your beautiful friendship alone can make any

impression on me."[259] But that he still cherished some rancour

against Liszt is evident from the account he gives of the episode in

_Mein Leben_, written some years later. Liszt had carefully explained

that he could not come to Zürich just at the time Wagner wanted him.

That is not sufficient for Richard. Liszt had no right to have other

engagements or other wishes when _he_ had need of his society; when

_he_ was in tears, was it not the duty of the heavens themselves to

weep with him? "It seemed to me that there must be one human being

specially qualified to bring light and solace, or at all events

tolerable order, into the confusion that enveloped us all. Liszt had

promised us a visit; he stood so fortunately outside these dreadful

relations and conditions, knew the world so well, and had in such a

high degree what is called '_aplomb_' of personality, that I could

not help feeling he was just the man to approach these discords in a

rational spirit.[260] I was almost inclined to make my last resolutions

depend on the effect of his expected visit. In vain we urged him to

hasten his journey: he gave me a rendezvous for a month later at the

Lake of Geneva"![261] It is clear that he thought Liszt still in the

wrong in not setting everything aside in order to fly to _him_ at once.

A year later he is sending Liszt congratulations on his birthday, and

talking very beautifully about friendship. It soon becomes clear,

however, that he is using the word in a sense of his own. "Your

friendship is an absolute necessity for me; I hold on to it with my

last vital strength. When shall I see you at last? Have you any idea

of the position I am in,--what miracles of love and fidelity I need in

order to win ever new courage and patience? Ponder upon this yourself,

so that I need not say it to you! You _must_ know me sufficiently now

to be able to say it to yourself, although we have not lived much

together."[262]

To this Liszt evidently replied that he could not come to Paris just

then for any length of time, but that he would be glad to meet Wagner

in Strassburg for a couple of days. This proposal Wagner curtly

rejects. "What will be the use, to me, of these Strassburg days? I

have nothing hurried to say to you, nothing that makes a discussion

necessary. I want to enjoy you, to live with you for a while, as we

have hitherto lived so little with each other.... My poor deserted life

makes me incapable of understanding an existence that has the whole

world in view at every step. You must pardon me, but I decline the

Strassburg meeting, greatly as I value the sacrifice you thereby offer

me; it is just this sacrifice that seems to me too great at the price

of a few hurried days in a Strassburg hotel."[263]

That is to say, he loved Liszt, and valued his friendship above

everything else in the world; but he must have Liszt on his own terms

and at his own time or not at all. He claimed the right to live his

own life in his own way, while his friends were to stand by with

their sympathies, their purses, their wives and daughters ready.

Always hungering for the love and self-sacrifice of others, he never

sacrificed for their sakes a single desire of his heart. And always

there was the same honest, childlike inability to comprehend how

people could be so cruel as to refuse him whatever he wanted. He was

generous and honourable enough in his own way; he supported Minna's

parents, for instance, and would never let Minna be without money if

he could provide it. But his good qualities were those of a benevolent

despot. He could be kind where kindness was compatible with power; but

he could never be just to a personality too independent to be drawn

into his orbit, nor could he ever understand other people's desire

for independence as against himself. With a nature so self-centred as

his, it was inevitable that at one time or other friend after friend

should find it necessary to part company from him. No man ever had

such friends; no man ever lost such friends; and he lost them all by

placing too great a strain on their friendship, their finances, their

rights or their independence. Cornelius once cut him to the quick with

the remark that "he let his old friends drop,"--"whereas," says the

faithful Glasenapp with unconscious humour, "he himself had the sad

consciousness that _they_ had given _him_ up as soon as he had tried

to lift them above the narrow confines of their 'independence,' and

demanded of them more than they were capable of performing,--Herwegh,

for example, and Baumgartner, and Cornelius, and Weissheimer, and Karl

Ritter and others."[264] But these were not all,--there were also

Liszt, King Ludwig, Bülow, the Wesendoncks, Wille, Madame Laussot, and

many another besides from whom he was estranged permanently or for

a time. All his life through he insisted on being the centre of his

own universe. He saw and felt himself with exaggerated sensibilities;

whatever happened to him was either a bliss or a woe above anything

that could happen to ordinary mortals. Like Strindberg he imagines at

one time that the whole world exists simply to hurt him; at another, it

is a portent of happiness for the whole world because _he_ is happy.

He cannot go through so simple an experience as becoming a father

without feeling that an event of this kind happening to him is a vastly

different thing from the superficially similar events that happen to

ordinary people. He must call the child "Siegfried,"--the name of the

ideal hero of his life's work. He must write a serenade for the wife

who has conferred this dazzling wonder upon an astonished cosmos. Even

the serenade is not enough; it must be accompanied by a poem in which

the importance of the event for him and for music shall be made clear

to everyone.[265] He dropped into verse at the slightest provocation;

never could he repress his inborn impulse to pour himself out copiously

upon any and every subject under the sun. Our old English poets used

to write "Poems Upon Several Occasions." Wagner wrote poems upon every

occasion. He could not even build himself a house without conferring a

portentously symbolical title on it, and engraving a couple of lines of

pompous doggerel over the lintel.