While there is at present no adequate Life of Wagner, there is probably more biographical material available in connection with him than with any other artist who has ever lived; and on the basis of this material it seems justifiable now to attempt—what was impossible until the publication of Mein Leben in 1911—a complete and impartial psychological estimate of him. There has probably never been a more complex artist, and certainly never anything like so complex a musician. A soul and a character so multiform as this are an unending joy to the student of human nature. It has been Wagner's peculiar misfortune to have been taken, willy-nilly, under the protection of a number of worthy people who combine the maximum of good intentions with the minimum of critical insight. They have painted for us a Wagner so impeccable in all his dealings with men and women—especially women—a Wagner so invariably wise of speech, a Wagner so brutally sinned against and so pathetically incapable of sinning, that one needs not to have read a line of his at first hand to know that the portrait is a parody—that no such figure could ever have existed outside a stained-glass window, or, if it had, could ever have had the energy to impress itself upon the imagination of mankind even for a day. The real Wagner may be hard enough to disentangle from the complications and contradictions presented by his life, his letters, his prose works, his music, his autobiography, and the testimonies of his friends and enemies; but in the case of no man is the attempt better worth making. For the enduring interest of his character, with its perpetual challenge to constructive psychology, is in the manysidedness of it. The well-meaning thurifers who try to impose him upon us in a single formula as one of the greatest and best of mankind,[1] do but raise him to their own moral and reduce him to their own intellectual level, making their god in their own image, as is the way of primitive religious folk. The more interesting Wagner is the one who stands naked and unashamed before us in the documents of himself and others—equally capable of great virtues and of great vices, of heroic self-sacrifice and the meanest egoism, packed with a vitality too superabundant for the moral sense always to control it; now concentrating magnificently, now wasting himself tragically, but always believing in himself with the faith that moves mountains, and finally achieving a roundness and completeness of life and a mastery of mankind that make his record read more like romance than reality.

It is in keeping with the whole character of the man that he should have left us more copious documentary material concerning himself than any other artist has ever done. Publicity was as much a necessity to him as food and air. The most interesting person in the universe to him was always himself; and he took good care that the world should not suffer from any lack of knowledge of a phenomenon which he rightly held to be unique. It would be a sign of unwisdom to despise him for this. It has to be recognised that whatever criticism the contemporary moralist might have to pass upon this or that portion of Wagner's conduct with the outer world, he was always the soul of purity and steadfastness in the pursuit of his ideal. He believed he had come into the world to do a great and indispensable work; and if he occasionally sacrificed others to his ideal, it must be admitted that he never hesitated to sacrifice himself. Regarded purely as an artist, no man has ever kept his conscience more free from stain. And it is precisely this ever-present burning sense of the inherent greatness of his mission that accounts primarily for his constant pouring-out of himself, not only in music—his musical output, after all, was not a remarkably large one—but in twelve volumes of literary works and in innumerable letters. I say "primarily," because a second set of impulses obviously comes into play here and there. Wagner had the need that many men of immense vitality have felt—Mr. Gladstone was a notable example in our own day—of dominance for dominance' sake; there is something aquiline in them that makes it impossible for them to breathe anywhere but on the heights. Wagner felt the need of over-lordship as irresistibly as his own Wotan did. Had he been a soldier living in a time of warfare he would have become one of the world's rulers, with Alexander, Julius CÆsar, and Napoleon. Had he been a business man he would have controlled the commerce of a continent through the strength and the thoroughness of his organisations. Being an artist, a dealer in the things of the mind alone, his ends could be achieved only by example and argument. His voluminous letters and prose works are the outcome of the one great need of his life—to win the world to see everything as he saw it. The letters to Liszt, to Roeckel, to Uhlig, and others show how powerful was this desire in him; the least expression of disagreement, the least failure of comprehension, would call forth a whole pamphlet of eager explanations. He yearned to hunt out misunderstanding with regard to himself as Calvin yearned to hunt out heresy. Always there was the inability to conceive himself, Wilhelm Richard Wagner, except as the central sun of his universe; ideas and persons had to revolve round him or find orbits in another and smaller universe. Here again ethical commentary by way of either praise or blame would be the merest supererogation. One simply notes the phenomenon as one notes the colour of his eyes or the shape of his head; it was one of the things that made Wagner Wagner, as the lion's mane is one of the things that make him a lion.

The need for mastery over everything and everybody that came within his orbit extended from art to life. All accounts agree that with people who loved and looked up to him he was the most charming of men;[2] while not only the testimony of his associates but his own words and conduct show with what difficulty he accommodated himself to the natural desire of others to take life in their own way. Read, for example, his naÏf account of his anger with Tausig and Cornelius for not coming to him when he wanted them:

"Cornelius and Tausig had again been to see me. Both had first of all to bear the brunt of my real ill-temper for their behaviour during the previous summer [1862]. Having had the idea of bringing the BÜlows and the Schnorrs to me at Biebrich, my cordial interest in these two young friends of mine decided me to invite them too. Cornelius accepted immediately, and so I was all the more astonished when one day I received a letter from him from Geneva, whither Tausig, who suddenly seemed to have money at his disposal, had taken him on a summer excursion—no doubt of a more important and more agreeable nature. Without the slightest expression of regret at not being able to meet me this summer, I was simply told that they had just gaily 'smoked a splendid cigar to my health.' When I met them again in Vienna, I could not refrain from pointing out to them the offensiveness of their conduct; but they did not seem to understand that I could have had any objection to their preferring the beautiful tour in French Switzerland to visiting me at Biebrich. They obviously thought me a tyrant." [3]

All through the correspondence and the autobiography we see the same spirit of unconscious egoism. His conviction that he was always in the right naturally led to a passionate desire that those who differed from him should hear every word he had to say on his own behalf. Hence the frequent and lengthy plaidoyers in the letters; hence too the autobiography. His lust for dominance looked even beyond the grave; thirty years after his death the world should read a document which should be his final, and, he hoped, successful effort at self-justification. We cannot, I think, understand Wagner fully unless we recognise that, however honest he was in intention, this consuming desire to prove himself always in the right should make us chary of accepting everything he says at its face value. No man is a perfectly unprejudiced witness on his own behalf, in his own suit; and in Wagner's case the very vehemence of his pleading lets us see how earnestly he desired to impress his own reading of himself upon the world, and is therefore a warning that he may often have seen things as he desired them to be rather than as they were. It is pretty clear that at an early age he realised that he was destined to be a great man, and took care that the world should not suffer from any lack of materials for the writing of his life.[4] The autobiography is simply the last and longest speech of a thousand long speeches for the defence. We need not consider at present the particular opinions upon his friends and associates and enemies that Wagner expresses there. The only question for the moment is as to the general trustworthiness of the book. That he has been exceedingly, even embarrassingly, candid on some points all the world now knows. Whether he always saw things at the correct angle is a different matter. It is obviously impossible to check him throughout, even where one suspects him to be unconsciously distorting the truth;[5] but there are several instances in which he is obviously not telling quite the truth or all the truth, and in more than one instance he can certainly be convicted of manipulating the facts to suit his own purpose.

I shall try to show later that the account he gives of the episode with Madame Laussot in 1850 does not square at every point with his letters to Minna. He deliberately tries to mislead the reader with regard to his relations with Frau Wesendonck; everyone who has read Wagner's ardent letters to her must have gasped with astonishment to find him in Mein Leben glossing over that long and passionate love-dream, and actually speaking of "Minna's coarse misunderstanding of my real relations—friendly relations—with the young wife, who was continually concerned for my repose and my well-being."[6] That is not an actual untruth, but it is considerably less than the truth. In the preface to Mein Leben Wagner tells us that the only justification of the volumes was their "unadorned veracity." Perhaps he found "unadorned veracity" at this point a trifle embarrassing; perhaps he forgot his letters to Mathilde, or had never considered the possibility of their being published. But the fact remains that his own letters show the account he gives of his relations with Mathilde Wesendonck to be quite unreliable. What warrant have we, then, for believing him implicitly in other cases in which it may have been to his interest to suppress or distort the truth?

Let us take one of the most striking cases of this suppression and distortion. One of the friends of the middle period of Wagner's life was a certain Baron Robert von Hornstein. In 1862 Wagner—who was at that time in Paris—was, as frequently happened with him, looking for someone who would undertake the burden of keeping a home above his head. He tried two or three people, but without success; then he thought of the young Baron von Hornstein. This is the account he gives of the matter in Mein Leben:

"Finally I bethought me of looking for a quiet abode in the neighbourhood of Mainz, under the financial protection of Schott. He had spoken to me of a pretty estate of the young Baron von Hornstein in that region. I thought I was really conferring an honour upon the latter when I wrote to him, at Munich, asking permission to seek shelter for a time at his place in the Rhine district; and I was greatly perplexed at receiving an answer that only expressed terror at my request."[7]

On the face of it this seems candid and credible enough. Von Hornstein's son, Ferdinand von Hornstein, has, however, thrown another light on the affair. When Baron Ferdinand published a memoir of his father in 1908, he omitted certain letters, he tells us, "out of consideration for Wagner and his family." The wounding allusions to Baron Robert in Mein Leben, and the evident animus displayed against him there, unlocked, however, the son's lips. He resents Wagner's description of his (Hornstein's) father—the friend of Schopenhauer, Paul Heyse, Hermann Lingg and others—as a "young booby,"[8] and proceeds to explain "why Wagner has misrepresented my father's character."

On an earlier page (627) of Mein Leben Wagner tells us that during their stay together at ZÜrich in the winter of 1855-6 Hornstein declared himself to be so "nervous" that he could not bear to touch the piano—that his mother had died insane, and that he himself was greatly afraid of losing his reason. "Although," says Wagner, "this made him to some extent interesting, there was blended so much weakness of character with all his intellectual gifts that we soon came to the conclusion that he was pretty hopeless, and were not inconsolable when he suddenly left ZÜrich."[9] The impression conveyed—and obviously intended to be conveyed—is that the young man's departure was a piece of half-mad caprice.

As it happens, however, Hornstein at his death had left among his papers an account of the affair that puts a different complexion on it. Wagner's own eccentricities had been making the relations of the little circle none too pleasant.[10] And Hornstein, so far from leaving ZÜrich in obedience to a sudden impulse, had actually made arrangements at his lodgings under which he could leave at any time when the "scenes" with Wagner became intolerable. He often expressed to Karl Ritter and the latter's mother[11] his regret that he was not in a position to "take his revenge" for the invitations he received to Wagner's table. Their reply always was: "Wagner does not at all expect this now. He knows your circumstances, and is sure to follow you up later. He is waiting for a more favourable moment." When he voiced his regret that there should be anything but ordinary friendly feeling to account for Wagner's attentions to him, his friends replied, "Oh, there is no doubt Wagner likes you and prizes your talents greatly; but these calculations (Hintergedanken) are too much second nature with him for him to be able to make an exception." "This," says Hornstein, "was to become still clearer to me." He learned that Wagner's guests were expected to bring bottles of wine with them—a point on which Hornstein, as a young man of breeding,[12] evidently felt some delicacy. On his birthday the great man entertained Hornstein and Baumgartner at dinner. "During the dessert, Wagner asked his sister-in-law—it came like a pistol shot—to bring him the wine-list from a neighbouring restaurant. She hesitatingly carried out this unexpected commission. The card comes. Wagner runs down the list of the champagnes and their prices, and orders a bottle of a medium quality to be brought. Everyone felt uncomfortable. The bottle having been emptied, Wagner turned to his two guests with a sneering smile, and said loudly, 'Shall I now present another thaler to each of these two gentlemen?' His wife and his sister-in-law fled in horror, like the ladies in the Wartburg scene in TannhÄuser. Baumgartner and I were stunned; we looked at one another, and each of us probably had an impulse to throw a glass at the head of our dear host." Instead of doing so, they burst into laughter, thanked him, and took their leave. Baumgartner declared to Hornstein that he would never accept another invitation from Wagner, "and I, for my part," says Hornstein, "was firm in my resolve to leave ZÜrich as soon as possible." Afterwards Wagner, as was no doubt his wont, came and excused himself to Hornstein and Karl Ritter.[13] He had not meant them, he said, but "the German Princes" who performed his operas and raved about him, but gave him nothing: "it does not occur to them to send me a hamper of wine"; and so on. The young men, however, were not to be so easily appeased, and Wagner "had to listen to many things that he would rather not have heard." An outward reconciliation was effected, but the sting remained; Hornstein delayed his departure for a few weeks, and still visited Wagner's house, though less frequently than before. "I had," he writes, "to tell this distressing story, as it gives the key to my later conduct when, soon after my father's death, Wagner tried to borrow so heavily from me. The correspondence connected with this attempt led to a permanent separation from Wagner."[14]

All this, it will be seen, puts the ZÜrich episode in a new light. There is not the least reason for doubting Hornstein's veracity. What he says is quite consistent with the accounts of Wagner's behaviour that we get from other sources, private and public. Moreover, Hornstein's reminiscences simply take the form of a note left among his personal papers. He could not have anticipated the misleading version that was to appear in Mein Leben many years after his death,[15] and, as has been said, his own version would probably have remained unpublished for ever, but for the provocation given to his son by the autobiography.

Baron Ferdinand von Hornstein gives further evidence of the pettiness of Wagner's rancour against this young man from whom, notwithstanding his disparagement of him, he was willing to borrow money. For now comes the full record of the incident to which Wagner alludes so airily in the passage from Mein Leben quoted on page 6. Here is the actual letter, dated, "19, Quai Voltaire, Paris, 12th December 1861," in which Wagner, according to his account, simply asked permission to stay for a time at Hornstein's place in the Rhine district.

"DEAR HORNSTEIN,—I hear that you have become rich. In what a wretched state I myself am you can easily guess from my failures.[16] I am trying to retrieve myself by seclusion and a new work. In order to make possible this way to my preservation—that is to say, to lift me above the most distressing obligations, cares, and needs that rob me of all freedom of mind—I require an immediate loan of ten thousand francs. With this I can again put my life in order, and again do productive work.

"It will be rather hard for you to provide me with this sum; but it will be possible if you WISH it, and do not shrink from a sacrifice. This, however, I desire, and I ask it of you against my promise to endeavour to repay you in three years out of my receipts.

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

"If you prove to be such for me,—and why should not this be expected of some one some day?—the assistance you give me will bring you into very close touch with me, and next summer you must be pleased to let me come to you for three months at one of your estates, preferably in the Rhine district.

"I will say no more just now. Only as regards the proposed loan I may say that it would be a great relief to me if you could place even six thousand francs at my disposal immediately; I hope then to be able to arrange to do without the other four thousand francs until March. But nothing but the immediate provision of the whole sum can give me the help which I so need in my present state of mind.

"Let us see, then, and hope that the sun will for once shine a little on me. What I need now is a success; otherwise—I can probably do nothing more!—Yours,

RICHARD WAGNER."

"I must confess," says Hornstein, "that the largeness of the amount and the tone of the letter made a refusal easier to me. What made it easier still was my knowledge that I had to do with a bottomless cask,—that while ten thousand francs were a great deal for me, they were simply nothing to him. I knew that Napoleon, Princess Metternich, Morny, and Erlanger had been bled of large sums that were simply like drops of water falling on a hot stone." Hornstein was particularly grieved at the remark that the loan would draw him nearer to Wagner. "Was I not near to him, then," he asks, "before I gave him money? Was the intimate intercourse with him at the Lake of Geneva, on the Seelisberg, in ZÜrich, intended only to prepare the way for the borrowings he had in view when my father should die?"[17] So he replied to Wagner in these terms:

"DEAR HERR WAGNER,—You seem to have a false idea of my riches. I have a modest (hÜbsch) fortune on which I can live in plain and decent style with my wife and child. You must therefore turn to really rich people, of whom you have plenty among your patrons and patronesses all over Europe. I regret that I cannot be of service to you.

"As for your long visit to 'one of my estates,' at present I cannot contrive a long visit; if it should become possible later I will let you know.

"I have read in the papers with great regret that the production of Tristan and Isolde will not take place this winter. I hope that it is only a question of time, and that we shall yet hear the work. Greetings to you and your wife.—From yours,

ROBERT VON HORNSTEIN."

To which Wagner replied thus:

"PARIS, 27th December, 1861.

"Dear Herr von Hornstein,—It would be wrong of me to pass over without censure an answer such as you have given me. Though it will probably not happen again that a man like me (ein Mann meines Gleichen) will apply to you, yet a perception of the impropriety of your letter ought of itself to be a good thing for you.

"You should not have presumed to advise me in any way, even as to who is really rich; and you should have left it to myself to decide why I do not apply to the patrons and patronesses to whom you refer.

"If you are not prepared to have me at one of your estates, you could have seized the signal opportunity I offered you of making the necessary arrangements for receiving me in some place of my choice. It is consequently offensive of you to say that you will let me know when you will be prepared to have me.

"You should have omitted the wish you express with regard to my Tristan; your answer could only pass muster on the assumption that you are totally ignorant of my works.

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

RICHARD WAGNER." [18]

I have given this episode in such detail because, as Ferdinand von Hornstein caustically remarks, it enables us to test the value of Wagner's claim for the "unadorned veracity" of his memoirs. He is plainly guilty of serious sins both of omission and of commission in his account of his dealings with Hornstein. What guarantee have we that he was any more scrupulous in his record of other matters in which his reputation or his amour propre were concerned? Let us check him in one or two other cases.

How unreliable the autobiography is, with what caution we have to accept Wagner's opinions of men in the absence of confirmatory testimony, may be seen from a survey of his dealings with Franz Lachner.[19]

The first reference to Lachner in Mein Leben is under the date 1842. Wagner had written two articles in Paris À propos of HalÉvy's opera, La Reine de Chypre.[20] In the article published in the Dresden Abendzeitung, he says, "I made particularly merry over a mischance that had befallen Kapellmeister Lachner." KÜstner, the Munich director, had commissioned a libretto for Lachner from St. Georges, of Paris (the librettist of La Reine de Chypre). After the production of the latter opera, it turned out that this book and that of the Lachner opera were virtually identical. In reply to KÜstner's angry protests, St. Georges "expressed his astonishment that the former should have imagined that for the paltry price offered in the German commission he would supply a text intended only for the German stage. As I had already formed my own opinion as to this French opera-text-business, and nothing in the world would have induced me to set to music even the most effective piece of Scribe or St. Georges, I was greatly delighted at this occurrence, and in the best of spirits I let myself go on the subject for the benefit of the readers of the Abendzeitung, who, it is to be hoped, did not include my future 'friend' Lachner."[21] Evidently he did not love Lachner.

The next reference to him in Mein Leben is in 1855. Wagner had returned to ZÜrich after his London concerts. There he learned that Dingelstedt, at that time Intendant of the Munich Court Theatre, wished to give TannhÄuser there, "although," says Wagner, "thanks to Lachner's influence," the place was not particularly well disposed towards him.[22]

The third reference to Lachner is in 1858, just before Wagner's departure from the "Asyl"; there was a "national vocal festival" at ZÜrich that seems to have irritated Wagner a good deal, depressed as he was at that time by the Minna-Mathilde catastrophe. Lachner was taking part in the festival. Wagner gave him the cold shoulder, and refused to return his call.[23]

Now let us see, from documents of the time, how matters really stood as regards Lachner. In 1854 Wagner was hoping to get TannhÄuser produced at Munich, where, as we have seen, Dingelstedt was Intendant and Lachner Kapellmeister. Lachner was a conductor and composer of the old school. Wagner had a poor opinion of him, and apparently thought him incompetent to do justice to TannhÄuser. "I don't at all know," he writes to Liszt on May 2, 1854,[24] "how to get Lachner out of the way. He is an utter ass and knave." In the summer of 1852 there had been some talk of giving TannhÄuser at Munich. Lachner thought it advisable first to familiarise the public with the style of the work by giving the overture at a concert on 1st November. The success was doubtful. Wagner had previously sent Lachner a copy of the explanatory programme of the overture that he had written in the preceding March for the ZÜrich orchestra. Perhaps this was thought too long for the Munich programme; in any case a much shorter "explanation" was given, that aroused Wagner's ire.[25] With his customary blind suspicion of people he did not like, he assumed that the concert production of the overture was a deliberate attempt to prejudice the public against the opera. This suspicion, as Sebastian RÖckl says,[26] finds no support in the external facts. A fortnight after the Munich performance of the overture, TannhÄuser was given at Wiesbaden with great success, and soon became one of the favourite pieces in the repertory of the theatre there. Dingelstedt at once sent his theatre inspector, Wilhelm Schmitt, to ZÜrich to arrange with Wagner for a production at Munich. Unexpected difficulties arose, however; an outcry was raised against the proposed performance of a work by "the Red Republican, Richard Wagner"; and there was opposition on the part of the Bavarian Minister, von der Pforten. By the spring of 1854 all obstacles had been removed, and, as we have already seen, Dingelstedt now arranged with Wagner for the production, although the composer thought Munich "not particularly well-disposed towards him, thanks to Lachner's influence." Having heard that the singer destined for the part of TannhÄuser was incompetent, Wagner asked Dr. HÄrtinger, of the Munich Opera, to undertake it. HÄrtinger came to ZÜrich in May to study the rÔle with the composer, and seems to have deepened Wagner's mistrust of and contempt for Lachner. The performance did not take place, as was intended, in the summer of 1854, but, as RÖckl says, the cause of the postponement was not Lachner but the cholera.

Later on, Dingelstedt found himself unable to fulfil his promises to Wagner with regard to the honorarium. "Thereupon," says RÖckl, "Lachner, fearing that he might be looked upon as answerable for the production having fallen through a second time, wrote to his friend Kapellmeister G. Schmidt, of Frankfort, asking him to arrange with the composer for more favourable conditions."[27] In the end this was done. "And now," says RÖckl,[28] "Lachner, although in his innermost conscience an opponent of the 'musician of the future,' did all he could in order to produce the work as excellently as was possible to him. Rehearsal after rehearsal was held, though the musicians were always moaning over the extraordinary efforts they were called upon to make"—as is shown by reference to a Munich comic paper of the time. As the tenor was unmistakably incompetent, a singer who was already familiar with the work was engaged from another opera house. TannhÄuser was given on 12th August 1855 with extraordinary success. Lachner was called on the stage, whence he thanked the audience in Wagner's name. He communicated the evening's result to the composer, and received a letter, dated 17th August 1855, warmly thanking him for the trouble he had taken over the work and the sympathy he felt with it, and for the friendliness of his feelings towards Wagner; and he was asked to thank the singers and orchestra in the composer's name. "Finally accept the assurance of my great gratification at having been brought by this circumstance closer to yourself. I sincerely hope for a continuance of this approach to an understanding that is necessary for the artist and possible to him alone."[29]

The success of TannhÄuser emboldened Dingelstedt to venture upon Lohengrin for the winter of 1856, but various events conspired against the production. In February 1857 Dingelstedt resigned the Intendantship. Lohengrin was put in rehearsal by his successor, von Frays, in November 1857, and produced on 28th February 1858, under Lachner. It was well received on the whole, but the opera found more antagonists than TannhÄuser had done.

From 21st July to 2nd August there was held at ZÜrich the vocal festival at which, as we have seen, Wagner refused to receive Lachner. What RÖckl rightly calls the ambiguous words of Wagner in this connection in Mein Leben are explained by the following letter from the composer to Lachner, that is published for the first time in RÖckl's book:

"VENICE, 26th September 1858.

"HIGHLY HONOURED SIR AND FRIEND ,—Now that, after a long and painful interruption of the way of living I have been accustomed to for many years, I have again won a little repose, permit me to approach you with the remembrance of your so friendly advances to me last summer, in order in some degree to link myself again with the life on which you have imprinted a significantly agreeable memory. If you found something strange at our meeting, something on my part apparently not quite corresponding to your friendly intentions, I now permit myself, by way of exculpation, to say that at that time I was in a very agitated and embarrassed frame of mind; few people know what difficult resolutions were maturing in me at that time.[30] It may, however, suffice for me to tell you that only now, after leaving my friendly refuge by the Lake of ZÜrich, in order to compose my mind here, in the greatest seclusion, for the resumption of my work, has the pleasant and encouraging significance of your ZÜrich visit become quite clear to me. By my sincere regret to know that you were in some degree hurt through a mistake of my servant,[31] you probably, nevertheless, understood even then how earnestly I realised the value of your visit; your friendly assurance that you were satisfied with my explanation of that misunderstanding was most tranquillising for me. Let me now say that I estimate highly the value of your advances, and with my whole heart I shall do my best to deserve your friendship—if you will favour me with it—can and most sincerely to reciprocate it. On the occasion of another personal meeting, if you will be so good, I hope that you will learn, with some satisfaction, in what sense I give you this assurance. I chiefly remember with the greatest pleasure that you expressed to me the wish that perhaps the first performance of my latest work, Tristan and Isolde, might be entrusted to you. I have so agreeable a recollection of this wish, that I can only regret not being able to gratify it immediately. Unfortunately just at the time when we met I was so grievously interrupted in this very work that only now again, for the first time, can I cherish the hope of getting into the proper mood for continuing and completing it. Consequently this opus is not one as to the time of whose coming to the light I can decide anything definite—which is in every respect unpleasant for me.

"The friendly wish you showed to occupy yourself with me once more soon, emboldens me, however, to approach you with regard to the granting of a very big request on my part. My Rienzi has again been given in Dresden with real success, and since I now no longer have any special reason for keeping back this effective work of my youth, I have been inviting the theatres that are friendly to me to take up this opera as quickly as possible; in so doing I am moved by the firm conviction that I am recommending to them a very good and remunerative work. Almost all whom I have approached have fallen in with my wishes. Would you therefore think it too bold of me if I were to request you also to get this score (which you have only to ask for, in my name, of Chorus-master Wilhelm Fischer, of Dresden), without much hesitation and delay, and to see what you can do with this tamed rebel (mit dem gezÄhmten Unband) for my consolation and benefit, while I am finishing Tristan?

"I beg you to take this in good part. But in any case I owe you very great thanks, and if you are not angry with me on account of this request, I shall take this as a particularly good sign.

"In any case I may probably hope to receive soon from you a friendly reply; console me also with the assurance that you have forgiven me, and accept in return the assurance of the sincerest devotion and esteem of your most indebted

RICHARD WAGNER." [32]

Lachner at once got the score of Rienzi from Fischer, and wrote to Wagner (October 13) expressing his pleasure at the prospect of an early production of the opera. "In spite, however, of his sincere endeavours," says RÖckl, "Rienzi was not put into rehearsal. The reading committee felt the subject to be inadmissible on religious grounds."

In July 1860, von Frays had the idea of giving the Flying Dutchman, and wrote to Wagner on the matter. Wagner thought that Lachner had been the moving spirit in this, and thanked him warmly in a hitherto unpublished letter of 20th August 1860.[33] But again Wagner's malignant demon intervened. Von Frays had to resign the Intendantship on account of illness, and his successor abandoned the Flying Dutchman project owing to the expense of the new inscenation. It was taken up again in 1864, and produced on the 4th December, Wagner conducting. Lachner had taken most of the rehearsals, and, though not much in sympathy with the work, he plainly did his best with it.[34]

The reader is now in a position to estimate the true value of Wagner's disparaging references to Lachner in Mein Leben. He seems to have started out with a prejudice against him that nothing could alter. Lachner was admittedly by temperament and training, and both as conductor and composer, in the opposite camp to Wagner. This, however, only entitles him to the more commendation for the pains he took to establish Wagner in Munich, and for the care he expended upon the performances.[35] Wagner nurses his imaginary grievance against the man, persists in believing that he is prejudicing all Munich against him, insults him, and denies him his door in ZÜrich; and then, when he has need of him, writes to him in the friendliest and most flattering way. Finally, when he pens his memoirs, he forgets all that Lachner had, on his own admission, done for him, forgets his own letters of thanks, and refers to him throughout in a tone of scarcely-veiled contempt and dislike. What conclusion can we come to except that it would be imprudent of us to accept, without corroborative evidence, Wagner's disparaging record of anyone he detested? No doubt he found Lachner in his way when, under cover of King Ludwig's favour, he was trying to transform the musical life of Munich. But even if Lachner did intrigue against him then, as the Wagnerians always hold, he was simply acting in self-defence; and in any case Wagner, when he came to write his autobiography, should not have passed over Lachner's earlier services to him without a word, and still less have given the unsuspecting reader the impression that Lachner's opposition to him began several years before it actually did. Once more we feel that had Wagner only postponed the writing of Mein Leben for a few years, till he had quite got over the bitterness of his Munich failure, the book would have been both pleasanter in tone and more reliable in fact.

Let us now take another case—his treatment of Hanslick in Mein Leben. At one time these deadly enemies had been friends.[36] In the course of years Hanslick's antipathy to Wagner became more and more pronounced, and by the spring of 1861, when Wagner visited Vienna, the critic of the Neue Freie Presse was an opponent to be feared. Wagner, as he more than once tells us, never troubled to be particularly polite to critics; but in Vienna he seems, by his own account, to have been gratuitously rude to Hanslick. The critic was introduced to him on the stage at a rehearsal of Lohengrin. "I greeted him curtly, and as if he were a total stranger; whereupon Ander, the tenor, introduced him to me a second time with the remark that Herr Hanslick was an old acquaintance of mine. I replied shortly that I remembered Herr Hanslick very well, and turned my attention to the stage again."[37] The opera singers did their best to smooth matters over, but Wagner was irreconcilable; and to his refusal to be friendly with Hanslick he attributes his subsequent failure to make headway in Vienna.

A little while after, they met again at a dinner party at Heinrich Laube's, where Wagner refused to speak to Hanslick.[38] They met a third time, at an evening party at Frau Dustmann's, who was to sing Isolde in the projected performance of Tristan. Wagner being, as he tells us, in a good temper, he treated the critic as "a superficial acquaintance." Hanslick, however, drew him aside, "and with tears and sobs assured me that he could no longer bear to be misjudged by me; whatever extraordinary there might be in his judgment of me was due not to any malicious intention, but solely to his limitations; and that to widen the boundaries of his knowledge he desired nothing more ardently than to learn from me. These explanations were made with such an explosion of feeling that I could do nothing but try to soothe his grief, and promise him my unreserved sympathy with his work in future. Shortly after my departure from Vienna I heard that Hanslick had praised me and my amiability in unmeasured terms."[39]

Whether Wagner's account of the interview is strictly accurate or not, we have no means of knowing; but the story, even as he tells it, indicates that Hanslick was not at this time a hopelessly prejudiced or evil-natured antagonist. In November 1862 they met again at the house of Dr. Standhartner in Vienna. Wagner read the Meistersinger poem to the company. "As Dr. Hanslick was now supposed to be reconciled with me, they thought they had done the right thing in inviting him also. We noticed that as the reading went on the dangerous critic became paler and more and more out of humour; and it was noticed that at the end he could not be persuaded to stay, but took his leave at once with an unmistakable air of irritation. My friends all agreed that Hanslick regarded the whole poem as a pasquinade against himself, and the invitation to listen to it as an outrage. And truly from that evening the critic's attitude towards me underwent a striking change; it ended in an intensified enmity, of the consequences of which we were soon made aware."[40]

The innocence of it, the air of perfect candour, of conscious rectitude, of surprise that men should be found so base as Hanslick proved himself to be! Would it be believed from this ingenuous record that Wagner had given Hanslick the most unmistakable cause of offence? It may have occurred to more than one reader to ask how Hanslick managed to recognise a caricature of himself in Beckmesser. It is hardly likely that he could have done so from the poem alone. We may be tolerably sure he had something more to go upon.

We possess three prose sketches of the Meistersinger libretto. The first was made in 1845, the second and third—there is hardly any difference between the two—in the winter of 1861. The actual libretto was written in Paris in November 1861 and January 1862. In the second sketch the Marker is given the name of "Hanslich."[41] In the third he becomes "Veit Hanslich." In these two later sketches the Marker is drawn with a perceptibly harsher hand. That the conferring of this name on the Marker was something more than a passing joke is shown by its appearing in both sketches, and not merely in the list of dramatis personÆ, but written out in full throughout. These two sketches were made, as we have seen, after the first meeting of Wagner and Hanslick in Vienna in 1861. With an author so fond of reading his own works to his friends as Wagner was, it is incredible that news of Hanslick being satirised as the pedantic Marker in the forthcoming opera should not have spread through musical Vienna, and have reached the critic's ears. His feeling, therefore, at the party in November 1862, that the shaft was aimed at himself may safely be put down not so much to his own intuition as to a pre-suspicion of the truth. He would be quite justified, then, in regarding the invitation to be present at the reading as an insult. But even if we allow no weight at all to this theory, in spite of its inherent probability, what are we to think of Wagner's later conduct? He tells us more than once of Hanslick's enmity towards him; he makes no mention of himself having treated Hanslick, in the Meistersinger sketches, in a way that the critic and his friends could only regard as insulting. Hanslick was of course hopelessly wrong about Wagner the musician; but after Wagner's brusque treatment of him whenever he met him, and after the attempt to ridicule him in the Meistersinger, who will say that Hanslick was under any obligation to be fond of Wagner the man? Yet it is only Wagner's side of the case, as usual, that is given us in Mein Leben.

The autobiography, then, has to be used with caution: not that Wagner, I suppose, ever consciously perverted the truth, but that it was impossible for him to believe he was ever in the wrong in his judgments of other people, and that it would therefore be necessary to let the reader have the whole of the story in order that he might judge for himself. Nor can the careful student of his letters resist the feeling that Wagner was often writing with at least one eye on the possibility of the publication of his words at some time or other. His intense egoism—I use the term here in no condemnatory sense, but simply to denote the passion of vigorous temperaments like his for mastery—his intense egoism could probably not bear the thought that any estimate of his conduct but his own should obtain currency. Time after time we feel that his letters to and about Minna are speeches of the counsel for the defence, addressed to a larger audience than their first recipient. Here again it is only a thick-fingered psychological analysis that would write him down as a deliberate trickster. Wagner was in some respects a selfish man, as numberless testimonies agree; but he was not a bad man in the sense that it ever gave him pleasure to inflict suffering. His heart no doubt bled for Minna, but it is probable that he pitied her out of the vast fund of Æsthetic and ethical feeling that was in him, as in all artists, without being a motive part of his life. The commonest daily facts prove that a musician need not have a beautiful soul of his own in order to write beautiful music or to perform music beautifully. This implies no conscious insincerity; it is simply the actor's faculty for dramatisation, for momentary self-hypnosis. And many of them can carry the exercise of this faculty beyond art into life itself. Wagner was apparently one of these. When he pitied Minna, it was in the abstract, detached way that we pity Desdemona or Cordelia on the stage—without feeling in the least impelled to rise from our seats and run any personal risk in order to save her. Nietzsche, who, for all his tendency to over-write his subject, often saw to the secret centre of Wagner's soul, was always laying it down that the instinct of the actor was uppermost in everything Wagner did. "Like Victor Hugo," he says, "he remained true to himself even in his biography—he remained an actor."[42] An actor he certainly is in many of his letters—an actor so consummate as to deceive not only his audience but himself. And so, when we read the plentiful and handsome certificates of good conduct that he gives himself, in Mein Leben and the letters, with regard to Minna,[43] we may be pretty sure that he believed every word he said, and really regarded himself as a monumentally patient and saintly sufferer of unmerited misfortunes. But the Hornstein and other affairs have shown us that Wagner is not always a perfectly veracious witness in his own behalf; and we may reasonably decline to give him a verdict in this or that episode of the Minna matter on his unsupported testimony.

What I have called his passion for self-justification is shown in nothing more clearly than in the device of postponing his autobiography for some thirty years after his death, when the persons so liberally criticised in it would all be tolerably certain to be no more. It is singular, indeed, how fortunate Wagner has been in having the stage to himself throughout. This has materially helped to create and sustain the Wagnerian legend. Most of the people with whom he came into unfriendly or only partially friendly relations in his youth or middle age died before it was realised what a world-figure he was to become; consequently they have left hardly any records of their impressions of him. Meyerbeer, for example, died in 1864. We need not take up any brief for Meyerbeer as a whole; but will anyone contend that if we could get his account of his dealings with Wagner, the present story would not have to be modified at many points? Wagner, it must be confessed, was often lacking in delicacy of soul. Had Liszt and BÜlow, Wesendonck and Wille, Cornelius and Tausig been equally indelicate, and written as frankly of Wagner the man as he has written of them, would not many features of Wagner's portraits of all of them need altering? And if Minna had had something of her husband's literary faculty and passion for special pleading, could she not have shown more alloy than he ever suspected in the golden image he loved to make of himself? Everywhere, in fact, in dealing with the memoirs and the letters, we have to remember that we are face to face with an artist who is as persuasive as he is powerful, with an overwhelming lust for mastery and for unfettered self-realisation, and with a faith in himself that must have made other people's occasional scepticism a pure mystery to him. Wherever, then, his written words involve the interpretation of his own or other men's acts and motives, they are to be accepted with caution. For the rest, the psychologist can only be thankful that Wagner poured himself out in such profusion. Let us now try to trace from his own records his general development as a man.

FOOTNOTES: