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.

RICHARD AND COSIMA WAGNER.

WAGNER
AS MAN & ARTIST

BY

ERNEST NEWMAN

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

ILLUSTRATIONS

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]

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 [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]

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: