  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. IIThe 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, mother 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 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." IIIWe 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; 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 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. 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." 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. IVOf 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 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 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. 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." 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. VMinna 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. 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)." 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." 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. It only needs to be added that although Fips had been given to Richard and Minna by Frau Wesendonck, it had always been Minna's dog rather than Wagner's. "A special bond of understanding," he says, "had been formed between them [Minna and Mathilde] by the gift from the Wesendoncks of a very friendly little dog to be the successor of my good Peps. He was such a sweet and ingratiating animal that it very soon gained the tender affection of my wife: I too was always much attached to him. This time I left the choice of a name to my wife, and she invented—apparently as a pendant to the name Peps—the name Fips, which I was willing he should have. But he was always in reality my wife's friend, for ... on the whole I never again established with them [i.e. any later animals] the intimate relations I had had with Peps [a previous dog] and Papo [a parrot]." 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. VIThe 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. 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. VIIHe 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. 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 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." 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. 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 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. 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 There is certainly something inaccurate in the sequence of events as given in Mein Leben. 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. 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. 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 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. 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." The Laussots had left Bordeaux when he arrived; so he obtains admission to the flat, 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 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." 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 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. VIIIThat 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 "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." 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. 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." 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." 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." 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 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. 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)." 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, 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." 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 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." 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." "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." 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, "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." 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 "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)." 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." 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. IXIn 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. 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; 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 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 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. 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 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 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, So says the self-justifying god to his wife in the Rhinegold. And again in the Valkyrie: "Nought learnedst thou So would Wagner have poor Fricka-Minna regard him. He "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." 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 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 "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." 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." 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 We see, in a letter of Minna's of about 1851, 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." 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 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!" XIt 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." 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." 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. "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, 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 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." "You must come to me quickly. I am at the end of a conflict 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. 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 "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." 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, "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 Minna goes away to her cure, and returns unappeased. There 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 comparison of Minna's letter with that of Wagner's concerning Leaving the psychology of the case, let us take up again the thread of the external facts. Minna's account of what happened during and after her interview with Mathilde runs thus: "Frau Wesendonck was very grateful and friendly to me, accompanied me hand-in-hand to the steps, and everything was Minna's heart trouble had been greatly aggravated by these emotional storms. To do Wagner justice, he was always making allowance in his correspondence for her conduct on the score of her ill-health, She returns to the "Asyl," but every day the impossibility of an understanding between them becomes more evident. Their letters, read side by side, are pathetic. Wagner is convinced that the purity of his relations with Frau Wesendonck ought to absolve him in everyone's eyes, and reconcile Minna to a more accommodating attitude towards him and his ways. (According to his own account, he invariably reasons with her patiently and from the serene height of his superior wisdom. This is not always borne out by Minna's testimony.) Minna, on the other hand, was resolved not to tolerate a situation that seemed to her to be beyond all reason. "It grieves me," she writes to a lady friend on 2nd August 1858, So on the 17th August 1858 Wagner leaves the "Asyl" and goes to Venice (vi Geneva) with Karl Ritter, while Minna takes refuge with her friends in Dresden. Wagner continues to write to Mathilde, but his letters are returned to him unopened. Each of the lovers, however, makes a confidante of Frau Wille, and each of them keeps a diary. These diaries are exchanged in the autumn. That of Wagner is in the form of letters to Mathilde. These are full of the most ardent protestations of love. His declaration in Mein Leben that his relations with Frau Wesendonck were "merely friendly" reads rather curiously after such outbursts as these: "When I have thought of you, never have parents or children or duties come into my mind; I only knew that you loved me, and that everything noble in this world must be unhappy." (7th Sept.) "That you loved me I know well: you are, as always, good, profound and sensible.... Our love is superior to all impediments, and every check to it makes us richer, brighter, nobler, and ever more intent upon the substance and the essence of our love, ever more indifferent towards the inessential." (13th Sept.) "It always remained clear to me that your love was my highest possession, and without it my existence must be a contradiction of itself." (18th Sept.) "The course of my life till the time when I found you, and you at last became mine, lies plain before you." (12th Oct.) "Once more,—that you could plunge into every conceivable sorrow of the world, to say to me 'I love you,'—that has redeemed me, and was for me that holy hour of calm that has given my life another meaning." (12th October.) XINothing shows more instructively the fundamental dualism of his nature than a comparison of these letters to Mathilde with those he was writing at the same time to Minna. Every thought of Mathilde is a dream, an intoxication; to Minna he is the practical man, discussing the ordinary little things of life in the most prosaic fashion. Their parting was not intended to be a permanent one: each of them was to "go his own way for a while in peace and reconciliation" in order to "win calmness and new strength for life." His whole spiritual life is centred in Mathilde: but his physical man also needs caring for, and who is so well qualified for this as Minna? A wandering life will not suit him in the long run, he tells his wife; at bottom he loves a permanent abode. He means to finish Tristan, and has hopes of being amnestied, "How happy could I be with either," was the sigh of the old poet. "How happy could I be with both," says Wagner in effect. Even more than in most artists the inner and the outer life in him were separate and distinct. Into Mathilde's ear he could pour his dreams and his longings, while Minna's ear would be open to receive his less spiritual but equally sincere confidences upon the more material things of life. He looks at the stars over the Lido and thinks of Mathilde: "I have absolutely no hope, no future," he writes to her. This is the genuine artist, amorous of his own sorrows, lapping luxuriously the bitter-sweet water He keeps his dual psychological life going with perfect honesty and absolute unconsciousness. How easy it was for him to adopt a different attitude upon the same question, according to which of his correspondents he was addressing, is shown by his letters of 28th September 1858 to Minna and the 1st October to Mathilde. In each of them he discusses the nature and attributes of joy and grief. He had witnessed the killing of a hen at a poulterer's stall a day or two before; the sufferings of the poor creature had stirred his sympathetic soul to its depths, and set him thinking of the general problem of suffering and pity. To Minna he writes thus: "You are wrong to make light of compassion. Perhaps it is only because you have a false idea of it. All our relations with others have only one ground,—sympathy or decided antipathy. The essence of love consists in community of grief and of joy: but community of joy is most illusory, for in this world there is little ground for joy, and our sympathy only has real durability when it is directed to another's grief." To Mathilde he sings a different song. For her he can feel nothing but "community of joy, reverence, worship.... So do Yet it is to this "commoner nature" that he desires to return and settle down in some quiet corner of Germany for the rest of his life. "Only keep up your courage, my dear good Minna," he writes to her from Venice on 14th November 1858. "Overcome, and believe firmly in the perfect sincerity with which I now aspire to nothing—nothing on this earth—but to make up for what has been inflicted on you, to support and guard you, preserve you in loyalty and love, so that your suffering state may also improve, that you may once more feel joy in your life, and we may enjoy the evening of our days together as cheerfully and uncloudedly as possible,"—with a break, presumably, to permit of his dying in Mathilde's arms. And again in a second letter on the evening of the same day: "Think of nothing but our reunion: and to make that thoroughly good and enduring and beneficial for both of us, simply attend to nothing now but your health. For this you can do nothing, nothing in the world, but—cultivate tranquillity of mind." To do this she is to forget the Wesendonck episode; he insists on her never saying a word about it again to anyone. At ZÜrich "we were far too buried and thrown too much on our own resources; that was bound in time to be injurious and to set us bickering. When once we are in a large town again, where I can have performances to look after, and you can tend me when I am exhausted, and rejoice with me over their success,—it will be to you a dream that we were ever packed into a little den like that.... Well, well! All that will be altered, and a quite new life will begin, full of fame, honours and recognition, as much as I shall desire; so get in good Thirteen days previously he had written thus to Mathilde: "Help me to tend the unfortunate woman. He talked to Minna, on his own showing, much as one talks to a child, without meaning all one says, one's only object being to comfort it in its grief. He meant to be kind, for Minna's sufferings undoubtedly rent his heart. He could be sympathetic with her at a distance. The difficulties always arose when they set up house again together, for then the impossibility of his giving up anything he really desired, even for an ailing wife's sake, became manifest. He was, as usual, hypnotised by his own eloquence. On paper he could easily settle every question that arose between Minna and himself: it was merely in practical domestic matters that he was a failure. It probably never occurred to him to ask how he was going to square the problem of living for the remainder of his days with Minna with the problem of dying in Mathilde's arms, or indeed the general problem of maintaining his passionate intercourse with his "Muse" and at the same time of resuming relations with the commonplace wife he had quarrelled with so desperately over this very "Muse." With this dualism of soul and this blindness in the face of facts it was inevitable that the catastrophe of 1858 should have befallen him,—inevitable also that any renewal of his relations with Mathilde should lead to another catastrophe of the same kind. The renewal took place in April 1859, Wesendonck having once more invited Wagner to visit him, apparently in order to give a dÉmenti to ZÜrich gossip. Later on Wagner seems to have realised that Minna's stay in Dresden was doing her little good, either bodily or mentally: so he resolved to set up house with her once more in Paris. In Mein Leben he tells us that "under these circumstances [i.e. the difficulties he was finding in the way of his giving some concerts in Paris] I could only regard it as a most singular intervention of fate that Minna should announce her readiness to join me in Paris and that I was to expect her arrival shortly." But it is clear from letters of his to Minna of 19th and 25th September 1859, and to Dr. Anton Pusinelli of 3rd October, No doubt he meant it all,—on paper. XIIMinna joined him in Paris on the 17th November 1859. Their relations were soon as embittered as usual. Wagner was playing for high stakes, living feverishly and expensively, entertaining largely, giving disastrous concerts, accumulating new and heavy debts. The clear-sighted and careful Minna was appalled at the prospect of the ruin that was threatening them once more: and Wagner made the mistake of not confiding in her. She felt herself shut out from his inner life. Apparently he was also giving her fresh cause for jealousy, the lady this time, it is said, being Liszt's eldest daughter Blandine, the wife of the Paris lawyer Ollivier. After the disastrous TannhÄuser performances in March 1861, Wagner fluctuated for a while between Paris, Karlsruhe and Vienna, at length settling down on the 14th August in the last-named city, where it was proposed to produce Tristan. Minna had gone to Soden for a cure on the 10th July: from there she went on to Dresden once more. wagner Standhartner having returned to Vienna at the end of September, Wagner had to leave his comfortable quarters, and as there seemed no prospect of an early performance of Tristan, and life at a hotel was expensive, he accepted an invitation from the Wesendoncks to meet them in Venice. He remained there only four days—"four miserable days" he calls them. So matters drifted on in the old way until Wagner had settled down in Biebrich (end of February 1862), after yet another visit to Paris. He took with him the furniture that had been in their Paris house. Minna came to help in the unpacking and arranging. She remained with him a week. According to the account he gives in Mein Leben "the old scenes were soon renewed," Minna being angry at his having removed from the custom-house the articles he required for his new home, without awaiting for her arrival. Biebrich remained his home until the autumn. He was Meanwhile his relations with Friederike Meyer—a lively actress-temperament—had become more and more friendly. When he left Biebrich for Vienna in November 1862, he was accompanied by Friederike, who had surrendered her engagement at the Frankfort theatre for his sake. We get a little light on the pair in an entry in the diary of Peter Cornelius under date 20th November 1862: "We were at Wagner's. He gave a musical evening for his FrÄulein Friederike M.... Her chambermaid was there as duenna. Friederike isn't so bad as they made out in Mainz; she isn't amiss as far as appearances go. She is intelligent, without making any attempt to thrust herself forward. She is not very pretty, but her face is animated. Wagner behaved very properly and decently in her presence. If he really must have a liaison of this sort, it looks as if he would get on quite tolerably with this one." The liaison seems to have been in one way at least a harmful one for Wagner. Frau Dustmann was so angered at Friederike's association with him and at her attempt to procure an engagement at the Burg theatre that she cooled towards Tristan. This, says Kapp, was the real cause of the failure to produce the opera in Vienna, not, as has hitherto been supposed, the difficulty the singers found with the work. Friederike soon passed out of his life. With his liking for women's society, however, it was impossible for him to live alone for long. We may believe him when he tells Minna (December 27, 1862), "I am living an utterly wretched life, daily, hourly—and am never, never happy." Feminine society was an absolute necessity to him at all times, and now, perhaps, more than ever, for his life was a round of anxieties and his health was wretched. His lonely abode was brightened for a time by "a maiden of seventeen years, of an irreproachable family." According to his account, Whether the purveyors of gossip were addle-brained or not, gossip there certainly was: and apparently there was some fire to account for the smoke. That this second serving maiden,
This, it need hardly be said, is scarcely the sort of letter one writes to a servant who is no more than a servant. In July 1863 he gives two concerts in Pesth, where he seems to have been smitten by the charms of a young Hungarian singer who greatly pleased him by her renderings of some of Elsa's music, and still more by her evident incandescence for himself. There is no mention of this young lady in Mein Leben, but Wagner tells Mathilde about her in the same letter (3rd August 1863) in which he speaks of the engagement of Marie as successor to her sister. "I was quite touched at meeting with something so pure and unspoiled for my music; and the good child, on her side, seemed so moved by myself and my music that for the first time in her life she really felt. The expression of these feelings was indescribably charming and touching, and many might have thought that the maiden had conceived an ardent love for me: XIIIAll this while the understanding between himself and von BÜlow's wife had evidently been quietly ripening. Reading between the lines of his earlier accounts of Cosima, it is easy to see that there had been for some time a tentative if unavowed rapprochement between them. In 1861, when taking leave of Cosima at Reichenhall, she gave him, he says, "an almost timid look of enquiry," By the following summer, matters had evidently matured a little. "The increasing and often excessive ill-humour of poor Hans, who seemed to be always in torment, had sometimes drawn a helpless sigh from me. On the other hand Cosima appeared to have lost the timidity (Scheu) towards me that I had noticed during my visit to Reichenhall in the previous year; she was now more friendly. One day, after I had sung 'Wotan's Farewell' to my friends in my own way, I noticed on Cosima's face the same expression that, to my astonishment, I had seen there when bidding her good-bye at ZÜrich; only now the ecstasy of He visits the BÜlows both before and after his Russian concerts (March 1863), and again in November of the year, after the concerts at Budapest, Prague and elsewhere. BÜlow being busy on the latter occasion with preparations for a concert of his own, Wagner went for a drive with Cosima. "This time all our jocularity gave way to silence; we gazed into each other's eyes without speaking, and a passionate longing for an avowal of the truth overpowered us and brought us to a confession—which needed no words—of the infinite unhappiness that weighed upon us. It gave us relief. Profoundly appeased, we won sufficient cheerfulness to go to the concert without feeling oppressed.... After the concert we had to go to a supper at my friend Weitzmann's, the length of which reduced us, yearning as we were for the profoundest soul's peace, to almost frantic despair. But at last the day came to an end, and after a night spent under BÜlow's roof I resumed my journey. Our farewell so strongly reminded me of that first wonderfully affecting parting from Cosima at ZÜrich, that all the intervening years vanished from me like a wild dream between two days of the highest life's significance. If on that first occasion our presentiment of something not yet understood constrained us to silence, it was no less impossible to give voice to what we now recognised but did not utter." The ZÜrich leave-taking to which he refers can only be that of the 16th August 1858, the day before he was compelled to leave the "Asyl" as a result of the Mathilde catastrophe. His account of the farewell in Mein Leben, however, does not suggest any Knowing him as well as we do, and knowing his trick of explaining every unpleasantness in other people's conduct towards him in a way that lays the blame with them rather than with himself, we can hardly accept his own account of the affair as the last possible word on the subject. It would be interesting to have Frau von Bissing's version of it. But if he has given us the events in their true sequence, Kapp's theory is untenable, for the rupture with Frau von Bissing must have taken place before the Mariafeld conversation on the subject of a divorce. It is not impossible, however, that he is anticipating the story of the severance from Frau von Bissing by a page or two. In May 1864 came his dramatic rescue by King Ludwig. His financial troubles were, for a time, at an end. And now the stage was clear for the last act of the drama in which he and Cosima were the principal actors. As the autobiography ends with the summons to Munich by King Ludwig, we are henceforth without any guidance from Wagner himself. We can imagine, however, that for a man of his temperament the necessity for feminine companionship soon became urgent. Minna was now out of the question; his other flames—Mathilde Wesendonck, Friederike Meyer, Mathilde Maier, Henriette von Bissing—had one by one died out. Only Cosima remained; and for the man who, with the turn of his fiftieth year, began to love with his In October Wagner settled in the Munich house placed at his disposal by the King, and the BÜlows took up their residence in the capital in the following month. Cosima constituted herself Wagner's secretary and general woman of affairs, two rooms being provided for her in his house, where she worked for several hours each day. On the 10th April 1865, a daughter, Isolde, was born to Cosima. BÜlow believed the child to be his own, On the 25th January 1866 Minna died in Dresden. As soon as In April 1867 King Ludwig appointed BÜlow Court Kapellmeister. At the same time the King asked Wagner to superintend some projected performances of Lohengrin and TannhÄuser, which necessitated his frequent visits to Munich. Apparently to save appearances, Cosima took up her abode for a time with BÜlow at his house in the Arcostrasse, where two rooms were always ready for Wagner's use. But gossip and calumny only raged all the more fiercely, both in the town and in the press. It was openly said of BÜlow that he owed his appointment at the Court "to his complaisance as a husband"; and at the end there was nothing for it but for Wagner and Cosima to retire together to Tribschen, and cut the last traces that bound them to Munich and convention. Deeply wounded, BÜlow found it impossible to continue his work in the town: he resigned his appointment in June 1869, sent his own two children to Cosima, and went out alone into the world. The conduct of Wagner and Cosima led to a long estrangement between them and Liszt, and a cooling of other friendships; the King, too, pointedly showed his displeasure. Wagner, in his Tribschen retreat, turned his back angrily upon everyone who disapproved of him, and immersed himself in Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods. On the 6th June 1869 the birth of a son, Siegfried, sent him into the seventh heaven of delight. Cosima's marriage was dissolved, on BÜlow's suit, on 18th July 1870; and on the 25th of the following month she was married to Wagner. It is a thousand pities that Wagner himself has left us no account of the BÜlow-Cosima affair. No one who has followed him thus far with me can doubt that he would have made himself, as usual, the suffering hero of the piece, that his intentions and his acts would have been strictly honourable from first to last, and that BÜlow would somehow or other have been put in the wrong, as all the other friends and enemies were who happened to cross his path. The interesting thing would have been to see how he managed this. I have given the erotic history of Wagner in such detail not only because of the enormous part the erotic played in his life and in the shaping of his character, but because to know him thoroughly from this side is to have the key to his whole nature. Nowhere and at no time was a middle course possible for him. It was all or nothing. To that extent he was consistent: yet viewed in detail he was a bundle of inconsistencies,—at once a voluptuary and an ascetic, a hero and a rogue, a saint and a sinner, always longing for death, yet always fighting lustily for his life, despising the public and pining for seclusion, yet unable to live anywhere except in the very centre of the stage and the full glare of the limelight. Frau Wesendonck once reproached him very gravely and wisely with his inconsistency in this last regard: "The He knew no law of life except the full realisation, of himself at the moment. He was by turns Christian and Freethinker and Christian again, republican and royalist, lover of Germany and despiser of Germany, anti-Semite (in theory), and pro-Semite (in practice); The many contradictions of his character have of course made him the easy butt of the satirists. The man, in truth, who wrote with such a comic rage against the rich and their luxury, was himself the most luxurious of mankind. He may have admired the Spartan virtues of the poor, but he had not the least wish to practise them himself. He could not exist without a certain amount of pampering both of body and of soul, even in the days when, unable to make both ends meet, he was living on the charity of certain friends and borrowing at every opportunity from others. "It is with genuine desperation that I always pick up art again," he writes to Liszt on the 15th January 1854; "if I am to do this, if I am once more to renounce reality,—if I am to plunge again into the woes of artistic fancy in order to find tranquillity in the world of imagination, my fancy must at least be helped, my imaginative faculty supported. I cannot live like a dog; I cannot sleep on straw and refresh myself with bad liquor. My excitable, delicate, ardently craving and uncommonly soft and tender sensibility must be coaxed in some ways if my mind is to accomplish the horribly difficult task of creating a non-existent world." He grew more and more luxurious in middle age. The scale of expenditure revealed in the Putzmacherin letters, and a stray piece of information or two from other quarters, give us a hint With tastes and habits of this kind it is no wonder that he accumulated enormous debts, and came to be regarded by all his friends as perfectly hopeless on the financial side. King Ludwig gave him, as we have seen, 15,000 gulden with which to return to BÜlow once confessed to Weissheimer that he could not make out how Wagner managed to get through so much money. The secret apparently was that he had to indulge himself liberally in luxuries in order to put into practice his doctrine of renunciation. Here is an instance given us by Weissheimer himself from the dark days of 1862. Through the non-performance of Tristan at Vienna, Wagner had been disappointed of the expected honorarium, which, as was usual with him, had been squandered in advance. He had been in the habit of giving splendid dinners after the concerts to his friends and the chief performers; and his hotel-keeper had a two months' bill against him for food and lodging. "One evening when Tausig and I were with him, he bemoaned and lamented his wretched condition. We listened to him sympathetically, and sat miserably on the sofa, while he paced up and down in nervous haste. Suddenly he stopped and said, 'Here, I know what I need,' ran to the door, and rang vigorously. Tausig whispered to me, 'What's he up to? He looks just like Wotan after he has come to some great resolution.' The waiter came in sight slowly and hesitatingly—these people soon see how the wind is blowing—and was no less astonished than we when Wagner said, 'Bring me at once two bottles of champagne on ice!' 'Heavens above—in this state!' we said when the waiter had gone out. But Wagner gave us a fervid dissertation on the indispensability of champagne precisely when a situation was desperate: only this could help us over the painfulness of it." Glasenapp tells how in the very last years of his life he could not work unless surrounded by soft lines and colours and perfumes. His almost morbid sensitivity multiplied enormously the ordinary pleasant or unpleasant sensations of touch and of sight. When in a difficulty with his composition he would stroke the folds of a soft curtain or table-cover till the right mood came. Not only the fabrics but the lines about him had to be melting, indefinite: he could not endure even books in the room he was working in, or bear to let his eyes follow the garden paths; "they suggested the outer world too definitely and prevented concentration." Among scents he particularly loved attar of roses, which he used to get direct from Paris—sent to him, however, under the fictitious name and address of "Mr. Bernard Schnappauf, Ochsengasse, Bayreuth," his barber obtaining delivery of it for him. XVAt once a Spartan and a voluptuary in body, ready to endure many miseries rather than live any kind of life but the one he desired to live, yet unable to deny himself all sorts of luxuries even when he had not the money to pay for them, he was both a Spartan and a voluptuary in the things of the mind. He cut himself adrift uncompromisingly, even with rudeness, from people he disliked, even though they for their part were not ill-disposed towards him and might have been useful to him. But to his friends he clung with the same hungry passion as to his silks and satins and perfumes, and, it must be confessed, for the same reasons,—because they warmed and refreshed and soothed him. He loved his friends, but for his own sake, not for theirs. This may seem a harsh judgment of him, but his letters and his record admit of no other reading. With his lust for domination, he could never endure independence in anyone round about him. This was Nietzsche's great offence, that he dared to think his own way through life, instead of falling into the ranks and becoming simply the instrument of Wagner's will. The unique correspondence with Liszt thrills us in its better moments even to-day; yet it can hardly be doubted that he loved Liszt selfishly, for the intellectual and emotional warmth his colleague brought into his life. He needs Liszt, we can see, in order that he may talk about and realise himself. After the Wesendonck rupture, in 1858, he goes to Venice. In September Liszt is in the Tyrol with the Princess von Wittgenstein and her daughter. Wagner writes him on the 12th September, asking him, as he is so near, to come to him at Venice, Liszt having been unable to accept a previous invitation to visit him at ZÜrich, owing to his having to attend the Jena University Jubilee celebrations. There had been some misunderstanding over another proposed meeting-place, and Liszt did not go to Venice. Thereupon Wagner becomes very angry, as usual, and actually writes to this man, to whom he owed such infinite benefactions, in the same half-grieved, half-accusing tone that he adopted towards Tausig. "Your letter of 23rd ult. ... awoke in me the hope that I should soon be able to see you and speak to you. But I doubt whether my letter to you to that effect, addressed to you at the HÔtel de BaviÈre, Munich, reached you in time, for I have neither seen you nor had an answer from you. I now fear that my desire to tell you of many things by word of mouth will not be realised; so I write, as I feel I owe you an explanation with regard to certain points that have not been clear to you. Altogether it cannot amount to much; in conversation it might have been more. "I will not enlarge upon the moral necessities for my departure from ZÜrich; they must be known to you, and perhaps I may assume that Cosima or Hans has told you enough about them. To remain in ZÜrich under the previous conditions was not to be thought of; I had to carry out without any further delay a resolution made some months before. Each new day brought with "You had to attend to University celebrations, &c., which, pardon me for saying so, appeared incredibly trivial to me in the mood I was in then. I did not press you any more, and was angry with BÜlow for pressing you; but I must confess that when at last I received the news of your coming on the 20th, I had already become indifferent (unempfindlich) about it." In short, he was in trouble, thought that Liszt would be able to console him, and was angry with him for not coming to him at the instant he needed him. Liszt, always long-suffering and courteous, chides him gently in his reply of the 9th October. "Another point in your letter, dearest Richard, has almost hurt me, though I can quite understand that you, in the midst of the griefs and agitations that embittered your last days in ZÜrich, should think the official impediments in the way of my coming to ZÜrich 'trivial,' and that you should not attach sufficient importance to the Jena University Jubilee and to the many considerations which I have to observe with regard to the Grand Duke,—were it only in order that I may be useful to you now and then in small matters. In a calmer mood, however, you will easily understand that I cannot and ought not to leave Weimar at every moment, and you will certainly feel that the delay of my journey to ZÜrich was not motived by any sort of 'triviality.' When I wrote that I should be with you on the 20th August I took "Enough of this, dearest Richard; we shall remain what we are,—inseparable, true friends, and such another pair will not be found soon." But Wagner was unappeasable. He does indeed write back to Liszt in cordial terms—"Thanks, dear friend! After the profoundest solace through the noblest, tenderest love that fell to my lot [i.e. Mathilde Wesendonck], your beautiful friendship alone can make any impression on me." A year later he is sending Liszt congratulations on his birthday, and talking very beautifully about friendship. It soon becomes clear, however, that he is using the word in a sense of his own. "Your friendship is an absolute necessity for me; I hold on to it with my last vital strength. When shall I see you at last? Have you any idea of the position I am in,—what miracles of love and fidelity I need in order to win ever new courage and patience? Ponder upon this yourself, so that I need not say it to you! You must know me sufficiently now to be able to say it to yourself, although we have not lived much together." To this Liszt evidently replied that he could not come to Paris just then for any length of time, but that he would be glad to meet Wagner in Strassburg for a couple of days. This proposal Wagner curtly rejects. "What will be the use, to me, of these Strassburg days? I have nothing hurried to say to you, nothing that makes a discussion necessary. I want to enjoy you, to live with you for a while, as we have hitherto lived so little with each other.... My poor deserted life makes me incapable of understanding an existence that has the whole world in view at every step. You must pardon me, but I decline the Strassburg meeting, greatly as I value the sacrifice you thereby offer me; it is just this sacrifice that seems to me too great at the price of a few hurried days in a Strassburg hotel." That is to say, he loved Liszt, and valued his friendship above everything else in the world; but he must have Liszt on his own terms and at his own time or not at all. He claimed the right to live his own life in his own way, while his friends were to stand by with their sympathies, their purses, their wives and daughters ready. Always hungering for the love and self-sacrifice of others, he never sacrificed for their sakes a single desire of his heart. And always there was the same honest, childlike inability to That this interpretation of his conduct and his psychology is not a strained one will be evident when the story of his dealings with Peter Cornelius is put beside the Liszt episode I have lately narrated. In the mad Paris and Vienna time of the early 'sixties he had become deeply attached to Cornelius; Liszt, the generous, kind Liszt, had apparently passed out of his life. He writes to Cornelius from Paris on 9th January 1862 in the strain that is now so familiar to us: he is tired of his wanderings and his buffetings; he must settle in some cosy nest if he is to go on with his work. But he needs a sympathetic friend near him. "Heavens! how glad I should be to have the poor 'Doll' (Puppe) When Wagner is settled at Starnberg under the protection of King Ludwig, Cornelius is again to come to live with him and be his love. They are to live in the same house,—Cornelius can bring his piano, and there is a box of cigars awaiting him—yet each is to maintain his own independence. "Exactly two years ago I ardently expected you in Biebrich: for a long time I had no news of you, and then I suddenly learned from a third person that you Cornelius hesitated, as well he might, to give himself up body and soul to this devouring flame of a man; he knew Wagner, and knew what sacrifices a friendship of his kind meant for the friend. Wagner was very angry with him for not accepting the invitation at once. He came to Vienna to liquidate his debts with the 15,000 gulden placed at his disposal for that purpose by the King, and generally to put his affairs in order. Asked by Seraphine Mauro the object of his visit to the city, he curtly replied, "To quarrel with my friends." Heinrich Porges and his brother had called upon Wagner, but Cornelius did not go. "There were such scenes," he writes to his brother Carl on 15th June, "and tears of rage and despair over my conduct: no answer to his letter—my Cid had 'miscarried,'—he could put everything in order, go through it all cordially and calmly with me—at Starnberg, &c., &c., pianoforte ready—a box full of cigars—Peter as man Cornelius writes at the same time to Reinhold KÖhler on the 24th: "A row with Wagner.... I was simply to be a Kurvenal. Wagner does not understand that though I have many qualifications for that,—even to a dog-like fidelity,—I have unfortunately just a little too much independence of character and talent to be this cipher behind his unit." And on the same day to his sister Susanne: "Unfortunately we have separated, perhaps for ever. He wrote me: Come to Starnberg—come for ever—or I will have absolutely nothing more to do with you.—I could not consent to that,—for the Cid has haunted me all the time since February, and is now coming to life,—and if I were with Wagner I should not write a note.... I should be no more than a piece of spiritual furniture for him, as it were, without influence on his deeper life. I send you his letter. Tell me if any man ought to put such an 'Or' to a friend: either everything, skin and hair,—or nothing at all. I have never forced myself on Wagner. I rejoiced sincerely in his friendship, and was truly devoted to him in word and deed. But to share his life,—that entices me not." Wagner apparently got over his petulance, and still had hopes of inducing Cornelius to come to Munich, where he could have a post either at the Conservatoire or under the King. "But if he is really well disposed towards me," Cornelius writes to his brother on 4th September 1864, "let him interest himself actively in the Cid. Everything depends on that now. But salvation will not come to me the way; Wagner never for a moment thinks seriously of anyone but himself." That is the conclusion to which the study of Wagner's life and letters so often lead us. XVIIn Mein Leben he half-humorously admits another little failing of his—a passion for reading his own works to his friends. This mania for reading to his friends increased as he grew older; in the last years at Bayreuth he would read not only his own works, but anything he was interested in at the moment. But at Wahnfried he had a carefully selected audience of worshippers, who indulged him to the full in his little vanities and weaknesses. The Erinnerungen of Hans von Wolzogen and the sixth volume of Glasenapp are full of his obiter dicta on these occasions. Like the bulk of the philosophising in his prose works, they do not strike us as showing any particular insight into the problems he is handling; but he dearly loved the sound of his own voice. In 1879 he makes everyone listen night after night to a reading of the thirty-years-old Opera and Drama; while to his little daughters he reads, on successive evenings, the Pilgrimage to Beethoven and The End of a Musician in Paris. His nature was all extremes; he either loved intensely or hated furiously, was either delirious with happiness, or in the darkest depths of woe. His chequered life, so full of dazzling fortunes and incredible misfortunes, of dramatic changes from intoxicating hope to blind despair, had bred in him the conviction that he was born under a peculiarly powerful and maleficent star. "Each man has his dÆmon," he said to Edouard SchurÉ one day in 1865, Edouard SchurÉ also saw something of him in those Tristan days. To him too Wagner exhibited both poles of his temperament. "To look at him was to see turn by turn in the same visage the front face of Faust and the profile of Mephistopheles.... His manner was no less surprising then his physiognomy. It varied between absolute reserve, absolute coldness, and complete familiarity and sans-gÊne.... When he showed himself he broke out as a whole, like a torrent bursting its dikes. One stood dazzled before that exuberant and protean nature, ardent, personal, excessive in everything, yet marvellously equilibrated by the predominance of a devouring intellect. The frankness and extreme audacity with which he showed his nature, the qualities and defects of which were exhibited without concealment, acted on some people like a charm, while others were repelled by it.... His gaiety flowed over in a joyous foam of facetious fancies and extravagant pleasantries; but the least contradiction provoked him to incredible anger. Then he would leap like a tiger, roar like a stag. He paced the room like a caged lion, his voice became hoarse and the words came out like screams; his speech slashed about at random. He seemed at these times like some elemental Liszt describes him thus to the Princess Wittgenstein in 1853: "Wagner has sometimes in his voice a sort of shriek of a young eagle. When he saw me he wept, laughed and ranted for joy for at least a quarter of an hour.... A great and overwhelming nature, a sort of Vesuvius, which, when it is in eruption, scatters sheaves of fire and at the same time bunches of rose and elder.... It is his habit to look down on people from the heights, even on those who are eager to show themselves submissive to him. He decidedly has the style and the ways of a ruler, and he has no consideration for anyone, or at least only the most obvious. He makes a complete exception, however, in my case." Turn where we will we find the same testimony. "He talked incredibly much and rapidly," says Hanslick.... "He talked continuously, and always of himself, of his works, his reforms, his plans. If he happened to mention the name of another composer, it was certain to be in a tone of disdain." He apparently could not even accommodate himself to such small courtesies of life as a sympathetic interest in other men's music. We have seen how chilled Cornelius was by his attitude towards the Cid. Weissheimer tells us that BÜlow once played a composition of his own to Wagner, and was much hurt by the older man's reception of it. He said to Weissheimer afterwards: "It is really astonishing how little interest he takes in other people; I shall never play him anything of my own again." Weissheimer tells us of an experience of his own of the same kind. "Once when I began to play my opera to BÜlow alone at his wish (without Wagner), the servant came immediately to say that we were to stop our music, as the Meister wanted to sleep! It was then eleven in the morning! BÜlow banged the lid of the piano down, and sprang up in agitation with the words, So he goes through life, luxuriant, petulant, egoistic, improvident, extreme in everything, roaring, shrieking, weeping, laughing, never doubting himself, never doubting that whoever opposed him, or did not do all for him that he expected, was a monster of iniquity—Wagner contra mundum, he always right, the world always wrong. He ended his stormy course with hardly a single friend of the old type; followers he had in the last days, parasites he had in plenty; but no friends whose names rang through Europe as the old names had done. One by one he had used them all for his own purposes, one by one he had lost them by his unreasonableness and his egoism. Even where they maintained the semblance of friendship with him, as Liszt did, the old bloom had vanished, the old fire had died out. Yet it is impossible not to be thrilled by this life, by the superb vitality that radiates from that little body at every stage of its career, by the dazzling light that emanates from him and gives a noontide glory to the smallest person who comes within its range. There was not one of his friends who did not sorrowfully recognise, at some time or other, how much there was of clay in this idol to which they all had made sacrifice after sacrifice. Turn by turn they left him or were driven away from him, hopelessly disillusioned. Yet none of them could escape the magnetic attraction of the man, even after he had wounded and disappointed them. BÜlow, as we have seen, worked nobly for him and for Bayreuth after the cruel Munich experiences. Nietzsche, after pouring out his sparkling malice upon the man and the musician who had once been for him a very beacon light of civilisation and culture, sings his praises in the end in a passage that is full of a strange lyrism and a strange pathos. "As I am speaking here of the recreations of my life, I feel I must express a word or two of gratitude for that which has refreshed me by far the most heartily and most profoundly. This, without the slightest doubt, was my relationship with Richard Wagner. All my other relationships with men I treat quite lightly; but I would not have the days I spent at Tribschen—those days of confidence, of cheerfulness, of sublime flashes, and of profound There is something titanic in the man who can inspire such hatred and such love, and such love to overpower the hatred in the end. Into whatever man's life he came, he rang through it for ever after like a strain of great music. With his passionate need for feeling himself always in the right it was hard for him to bow that proud and obstinate head of his even when he must have felt, in his inmost heart, that some at least of the blame of parting lay with him. But when he did unbend, how graciously and nobly human he could be! There is no finer letter in the whole of his correspondence than the one he wrote to Liszt to beg his old friend and benefactor to end their long estrangement by coming to him at Bayreuth in the hour of his triumph, for the laying of the foundation stone of the new theatre on his fifty-ninth birthday.
The old egoistic note is there—it is he of course who has borne most and suffered most and is prepared to be most forgiving—but his heart must have been more than usually full when he wrote this. It must have cost his proud soul many an inward struggle to bring himself to take this first step towards a rapprochement. But the stupendous power and the inexhaustible vitality of the man are shown in nothing more clearly than in the sacrifices every one made for him and the tyrannies they endured from him. Even those who rebelled against him were none the less conscious of a unique quality in him that made it inevitable that he should rule and others obey. "He exercised," says his enemy Hanslick, "an incomprehensible magic in order to make friends, and to retain them; friends who sacrificed themselves for him, and, A remark of Draeseke's to Weissheimer gives us another hint of the same imperious fascination: "At present it is not exactly agreeable to have relations with him. Later, however, in another thirty or forty years, we [who knew him] shall be envied by all the world, for a phenomenon like him is something so gigantic that after his death it will become ever greater and greater, particularly as then the great image of the man will no longer be disfigured by any unpleasant traits [durch nichts Widerhaariges]." He was indeed, in the mixture of elements he contained, like nothing else that has been seen on earth. His life itself is a romance. In constant danger of shipwreck as he was, it seems to us now as if some ironic but kindly Fate were deliberately putting him to every kind of trial, but with the certain promise of haven at the end. The most wonderful thing in all his career, to me, is not his rescue by King Ludwig, not even the creation of Bayreuth, but his ceasing work upon the second Act of Siegfried in 1857, and not resuming it till 1869. Here was a gigantic drama upon which he had been engaged since 1848; no theatre in Europe, he knew, was fit to produce it,—for that he would have to realise his dream of a theatre of his own. After incredible vicissitudes he had completed two of the great sections of the work and half of the third. The writing of the remainder, and the production of it, one would have thought, would have been sufficient for the further life energies of any man. To any one else, the thought of dying with such a work unfinished would have been an intolerable, maddening agony. It would have been to him, had the possibility of such a happening ever seriously occurred to him. But he knew it was impossible—impossible that he, Richard Wagner, ill and poor and homeless and disappointed as He lived, indeed, to see himself victor everywhere, in possession of everything for which he had struggled his whole feverish life through. He completed, and saw upon the stage, every one of the great works he had planned. He found the one woman in the world who was fitted to share his throne with him when alive and to govern his kingdom after his death with something of his own overbearing, inconsiderate strength. He achieved the miracle of building in a tiny Bavarian town a theatre to which, for more than a generation after his death, musicians still flock from all the ends of the earth. After all its dangers and its buffetings, the great ship at last sailed into haven with every timber sound, and with what a store of incomparable merchandise within! FOOTNOTES: WILHELM RICHARD WAGNER (1813-83) Helferich Siegfried Richard Wagner, born 6th June 1869. It will be seen that the date of Wagner's marriage with Cosima, which must have been perfectly well known to Glasenapp, is deliberately omitted; nor is there any mention of the two daughters Cosima bore Wagner while she was still von BÜlow's wife, or indeed of the fact that she had previously been married to von BÜlow. It is interesting to recall the fact that Ferdinand Praeger, whose Wagner as I Knew Him is anathema to the Wagnerians—and to some extent rightly so—has a story that is evidently a muddled version of the Laussot affair. "At Bordeaux," says Praeger, "an episode occurred similar to one which happened later at ZÜrich [Frau Wesendonck?], about which the press of the day made a good deal of unnecessary commotion and ungenerous comment. I mention the incident to show the man as he was. The opposition have not spared his failings, and over the ZÜrich incident were hypercritically censorious. The Bordeaux story I am alluding to is, that the wife of a friend, Mrs. H——, having followed Wagner to the south, called on him at his hotel, and throwing herself at his feet, passionately told of her affection. Wagner's action in the matter was to telegraph to the husband to come and take his wife home. On telling me the story, Wagner jocosely remarked that poor Beethoven, so full of love, never had his affection returned, and lived and died, so it is said, a hermit" (p. 196). There is plainly an enormous admixture of fiction here; but equally plainly the basis of the story is the Laussot episode. Had there really been an affair of the kind narrated by Praeger, in which Wagner had shone so brilliantly, we may be sure we should have been told all about it in Mein Leben. It looks as if Wagner had been indiscreetly confidential to Praeger, and had told the story with embellishments, or that Praeger had heard it from another source—perhaps someone in Minna's entourage—and the story had been decorated and transformed in its transit from one mouth to another. The novellettish touch about telegraphing for the husband, however, is more likely to have come from the Wagnerian side than from that of the "opposition." Whatever may be the explanation, however, the fact remains that Praeger, whom it has become the fashion to despise as a mere Munchausen, did actually know of a "Bordeaux episode" of some sort; and that though he had hold of the wrong end of the stick, that there was a stick of some sort has now been proved by Wagner himself. The passage I have just quoted from Wagner's letter to his sister Clara has been suppressed in the German edition of the Familienbriefe (p. 218). Mr. Ashton Ellis, in his English version (Family Letters of Richard Wagner, p. 215), opines that Glasenapp, the German editor of the Familienbriefe, omitted the passage in compliance "with Wahnfried wishes." It is one more evidence of the utter untrustworthiness of the Wahnfried coterie. The letter was originally published in the Deutsche Rundschau in 1902. A complete English version of it will be found in the opening of Mr. Ellis' translation of the Wagner-Wesendonck correspondence. The German of the passage quoted above is given in Kapp's Richard Wagner und die Frauen, pp. 116, 117. Minna was of course a hopeless wreck by this time. She died in Dresden on the 25th January 1866. The last of Wagner's published letters to her is dated 8th November 1863. "Dear and noble Friend,—I am too deeply moved by your letter to be able to thank you in words. But from the depths of my heart I hope that every shadow of a circumstance that could hold me fettered may disappear, and that soon we may see each other again. Then shall you see in perfect clearness how inseparable is my soul from you both, and how intimately I live again in that 'second' and higher life of yours in which you are able to accomplish what you could never have accomplished alone. Herein is heaven's pardon for me: God's blessing on you both, and all my love." These are the first letters that appear in the correspondence between the two since 7th July 1861. Briefwechsel, ii. 307-8. The two letters are given in a slightly different form in Liszt's Briefe, vi. 350. |
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