THAT a young artist but six and twenty years of age, with a wife dependent on him for existence, unknown to fame, almost penniless, and even without art works that he could show in evidence of his ability, should boldly assault the stronghold of European musical criticism, confident of success, often flitted before Wagner’s mind in after-life as an act of temerity closely allied to insanity. “And ah!” he has added in tones of bitter pain, “I had to pay for it dearly: my privations and sufferings were as the tortures in Dante’s ‘Purgatorio.’” “But why did you undertake such a seemingly Quixotic expedition?” I asked. “Because at that time Paris was the resort of almost every artist of note, whether painter, sculptor, poet, or musician, and even statesmen, when all Europe clothed itself with the livery of Paris fashion.” He felt within him a power which urged him forward without fear of failure, and so he came to Paris.

Germany offered no encouragement to native talent. Paris was the gate to the fatherland. First achieve success in Paris, and then his German countrymen would receive him with open arms. It is true, that even a short residence in Paris invested an artist with a certain superiority over his confrÈres.

As Wagner had but a very imperfect acquaintance with the French language, he at once sought out the relative of the Mansons to whom he had been recommended. I have been unable to recall the surname of Wagner’s new friend, but do remember well that he was spoken of as Louis. This Monsieur Louis was a Jew and a German. He proved an exceedingly faithful and constant companion of Wagner’s during his stay in Paris, indeed played the part of factotum to the Wagner household. He must have been quite an exceptional friend, for on one occasion, when Wagner and I were discussing Judaism per se, he turned to me and with unusual warmth even for him, said, “How can I feel any prejudice against the Jews as men, when I sincerely believe that it was excess of friendship of poor Louis for me that killed him,—running about in all weathers, exerting himself everywhere, undertaking most unpleasant missions to find me work, and all whilst suffering from consumption. He did it too from pure love of me without any thought of self.” Through the aid of Louis he found a modest lodging in a dingy house. The future was so much an uncertainty that with the remembrance of the first days of the Boulogne expensive hotel before him, he yielded to Minna’s persuasiveness and reconciled himself to the new abode. He was told that MoliÈre was born there; indeed, a bust of the great Frenchman did, I believe, adorn the front of the house, and this helped to make him accept his new quarters with a little more contentment than his own ambitious notions would have admitted.

Settled in his scantily furnished rooms, with ready business habits, so unusual in a genius, he made it his first duty to call wherever he had been recommended. Difficult as it may be in any European city to gain access to the houses of prominent men, in Paris the troubles are greater, if only on account of that terrible Cerberus, the concierge, who instinctively divines an applicant for favours, and as skilfully throws obstacles in the way while angling for pourboires.

Disappointment upon disappointment met Wagner. Nowhere was he successful. In speech at all times he uttered himself en prince, and for a man seeking the favour and patronage of others this feature militated against him. Meyerbeer had told him in Boulogne that letters of introduction would avail him little or nothing, and that only by personal introduction could he hope to make headway. But though unsuccessful in every direction, he was not the man to give up without desperate efforts. In a few months his funds were entirely exhausted. Where to turn for the necessary money to provide the daily sustenance was the exciting trouble of the moment. His family in Germany had helped him at first, but material help soon gave place to sage advice. Barren criticism on his “mad” Parisian visit, and admonition on his present mode of existence, Wagner would not brook, and so communications soon ceased between him and Germany. But how to live was the harrowing question. It is with feelings of acute pain that I am forced to recall the deep distress that overwhelmed this mighty genius, and the humiliating acts to which cruel necessity drove him. After one more wretched day than the last he suggested to Minna the raising of temporary loans upon her trinkets. Let the reader try and realize the proud Wagner’s misery and anguish, when Minna confessed that such as she had were already so disposed of, Louis having performed the wretched office.

This state of sad absolute poverty lasted for months. He could gain no access to theatres or opera house. He offered himself as chorus master, he would have taken the meanest appointment, but everything failed him. With no prospect of succeeding as a musician, he turned to the press. As he possessed a facile pen and a wide acquaintance with current literature, he sought for existence as a newspaper hack. Here he succeeded, and deemed himself fortunate to obtain even that thankless work. The one man to whom he owed the chief means of existence during this wretched Paris sojourn was a Jew, Maurice Schlesinger, the great music publisher and proprietor of the “Gazette Musicale,” a weekly periodical. It is curious to note how again he finds a kind friend in a Jew. For Schlesinger he wrote critical notices and feuilletons upon art topics, one, now famous in Wagner’s collected writings as “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven.” The pilgrimage is wholly imaginary for as I have already stated Wagner never saw Beethoven. The paper itself contains some remarkable foreshadowings of the matured, thinking Wagner and his revolutionary art principles. He also wrote for other papers, Schumann’s “Die Neue Zeitschrift,” for a Dresden journal, and the “Europa,” a fashionable art publication which occasionally printed original tonal compositions. For this last paper he wrote three romances, “Dors mon enfant,” “Attente,” and “Mignonne.” He hoped by these to gain some entry into the Paris fashionable world, but, though he tried to assimilate his style to the popular drawing-room ballad of the day, his songs were pronounced “too serious,” and met with no success.

But alas! his literary work was not financially productive enough, and dire necessity drove him to very uncongenial musical drudgery. For the same music-seller, Schlesinger, he made “arrangements” from popular Italian operas, for every kind of instrument. He told me that “La Favorita” had been arranged by him from the first note to the last. The whole of this occupation, to a man as intimate with the orchestra as he, was an easy task, yet very uninteresting and to him humiliating. But though suffering actual privation, he would not give lessons in music. Teaching was an occupation which, even in the darkest days, he would not entertain for a moment.

Such were the means by which Richard Wagner gained an existence during his Paris sojourn. But they were not productive enough. Often he was in absolute want. It was then in this hour of tribulation that the golden qualities of Minna were proved. Sorrow, the touch-stone of man’s worth, tried her and she was not found wanting. The hitherto quiet and gentle housewife was transformed into a heroine. Her placid disposition was healing comfort to the disappointed, wearied musician. The whole of the Paris period is “a gem of purest ray serene” in the diadem of Minna Wagner. Thoughts of what the self-denying, devoted little woman did then has many a time brought tears to Wagner’s eyes. The most menial house duties were performed by her with willing cheerfulness. She cleaned the house, stood at the wash-tub, did the mending and the cooking. She hid from the husband as much of the discomforts attaching to their poor home as was possible. She never complained, and always strove to present a bright, cheerful face, consoling and upholding him at all times. In the evening she and his dog, the same that was temporarily lost in London, were his regular companions on the boulevards. The bustle of life and the Parisians diverted him from more anxious thoughts, whilst supplying him with constant food for his ever-ready wit.

In dress Wagner was at all times scrupulously neat. After nearly a year’s residence in Paris, the clothes he had brought with him from Germany were showing sad signs of wear. The year had been fruitless from a money point, and his wardrobe had not been replenished. His sensitiveness on this topic was of course well known to Minna. To give him pleasure she hunted Paris to find, if possible, some German tailor in a small way of business who, swayed by the blandishments of Minna, provided her with a suit of clothes for her husband for his birthday, 22d May, 1840, agreeing to wait for payment until more favourable times. This delicate and thoughtful attention on the part of Minna deeply touched Wagner, and he related the incident to me in illustration of the loving affection she bore him. He said that during those three years of pinching poverty and bitter disappointments his temperament was variable and trying. It was hard to bear with him. Vexed and worn with fruitless trials to secure a hearing for his “Rienzi,” angered at witnessing the lavish expenditure at the opera house upon works inferior to his own, he has admitted that his already passionate nature was intensified, and yet all his outbursts were met by Minna in an uncomplaining, soothing spirit, which, the first fury over, he was not slow to acknowledge. Her sacrifices for him and all she did became only known years after, when their worldly position had changed vastly for the better. He never forgot her devotion, nor did he ever hide his indebtedness and gratitude to her from his friends.

During the three years that Wagner was in Paris, he was brought into communication with several prominent men in the world of art, men eminent in literature, in music, both as composers and as executants, in painting, and other phases of art. Of the dozen or so of men with whom he thus became more intimately acquainted, the greater portion were his own countrymen and about half were Jews. This constant close intimacy of Wagner with the descendants of Judah is a curious feature in his life, and shows that when he wrote as strongly as he did of Jews and their art work, his judgments were based upon close personal knowledge of the question. As may be supposed, the acquaintance of a young man between twenty-six and thirty years of age with these several thinkers and writers, could not fail to influence, more or less, an impressionable and receptive nature.

It was an odd freak of fortune that almost immediately after Wagner had settled in Paris, he should, by accident, meet in the streets an old friend from Leipzic, Heinrich Laube. It was in a paper edited by Laube that Richard Wagner’s first printed article on the non-existence of German opera had appeared. That was when Wagner was about one and twenty. Laube was a political revolutionist who underwent several terms of imprisonment for daring to utter his thoughts about Germany and its government through his paper. But prison confinement never controlled the dauntless courage of the patriot. He was a man of considerable and varied gifts. It is not only as a political demagogue that he will be known in future times, but as a philosopher, novelist, and playwright. In Leipzic he had shown himself very friendly to Wagner, whose sound, vigorous judgment attracted him, and now after hearing of Wagner’s precarious situation, offered to introduce him to Heine. Such an opportunity could not be lost, and so the cultured Hebrew poet and Richard Wagner met.

A curious trio this: Laube, hard-featured and unpleasant to look upon, with a weirdness begotten possibly of frequent incarcerations,—a strange contrast to the handsome, regular-featured, soft-spoken Heine; and then the pale, slim, young Wagner, short in stature, but with piercing eyes and voluble speech which surprised and amazed the cynical Heine. When Heinrich Heine heard that Meyerbeer had given Wagner introductions, he doubted the abilities of the newcomer. Heine was strongly biassed against Meyerbeer and distrusted his sincerity. Although the meeting with Laube was a delight to Wagner, as it brought back to him all his youthful enthusiasm and hope, yet his appreciation of the accomplished writer, which in Leipzic amounted almost to reverence, had been by time and events considerably lessened. Wagner’s greatest majesty, earnestness, was wanting in Laube. The litterateur in Wagner’s estimation had no fixed purpose, no ideal. He frittered away considerable gifts in innumerable directions. Incongruities the most glaring not unfrequently appeared in his writings. A paragraph of sound philosophical reasoning would be followed by a page of the merest bombastic phraseology. In his dramatic efforts tragedy and farce were placed in amazing juxtaposition. He wrote a large number of novels, but not one proved entirely satisfactory. “Reisenovellen” was an imitation of Heine, but it fell immeasurably below the standard attained by his model. His best literary production was, without doubt, the history of his life in prison, which interests and touches us by its simplicity. However, Wagner could not resist the attraction which Laube’s peculiarities possessed for him. The litterateur’s unprepossessing pedantic exterior contrasted strangely with his voluptuous and imaginative mind. Possessed of a brain specially fitted for the conception of the noblest schemes for the freedom of human thought, he often childishly indulged in a roguish plaisanterie. From a thoughtful disquisition on the philosophy of Hegel he glides into the description of such unworthy topics as a ball-room, love behind the scenes, coffee-room conversation, etc. But, curiously, his revolutionary tendencies in all other matters were in strange contrast to his tenacious clinging to the then existing opera form, and Wagner’s outspoken notions about the regeneration of the opera into that of the musical drama were vehemently opposed by him.

In Heinrich Heine Wagner found a more congenial listener to his advanced theories. Although Heine’s appreciation of music was not based on any more solid ground than that of a general acquaintance with the operas then in vogue, he was far more affected, and was a greater critic on the tonal art than his contemporary, Laube. Heine had resided in Paris since 1830, and was thoroughly acclimatized to Parisian taste. He was accepted as the representative of modern German poetry, and his works, particularly “Les deux Grenadiers,” “Les Polonais de la vraie Pologne,” were popular amongst all classes. Heine was pre-eminently spiritual, a quality exceedingly appreciated by the French; hence his popularity. However serious or painful the topic, Heine could enliven it by his clever Jewish antithetic wit. Heine received Wagner with a certain amount of reserve. His respect for musicians was not great. He had found many who, with the exception of their musical knowledge, were uncultured. Wagner’s thorough acquaintance with literature, especially that of the earlier writers, agreeably surprised him, and the composer’s elevated idea of the sacred mission of music touched the nobler chords of the poet’s nature. His opinion on Wagner, as quoted by Laube, presents an interesting example of Heine’s perspicacity. As a specimen of unaffected appreciation from a critic like Heine, who rarely sat in judgment without giving vent to a vitiated vein of sarcasm, it is most interesting.

“I cannot help feeling a lively interest in Wagner. He is endowed with an inexhaustible, productive mind, kept almost uninterruptedly in activity by a vivacious temperament. From an individuality so replete with modern culture, it is possible to expect the development of a solid and powerful modern music.” Heine could never refrain from employing a degenerated imitation of irony, called persiflage, as a weapon for the purpose of mockery, and for the production of effect. Heine’s imagination is bold, and his language idiosyncratic, though not affected. His sentiment is deep, but his fault is the want of an ideal outside the circle of his own ideas. In his poems, effeminate tenderness is contrasted by a vigorous boldness, the purest sentiment by sensual frivolity, noble thought by the meanest vulgarity, and lofty aspirations by painful indifference. Whilst overturning all existing theories and institutions, he failed to establish any one salutary doctrine.

It was a happy chance for Wagner that a man in the prominent position of Schlesinger should have interested himself in a young musician, whose nature was the opposite of his own. A shrewd music-seller, with an eye always to the main chance, and an art enthusiast in close intimacy, was a strange spectacle, only to be accounted for by the fact that opposite natures attract, whereas similar characters repel each other. Schlesinger admired in Wagner the very qualities of earnestness and enthusiasm which were lacking in his own being. Meyerbeer was his deity. It was one day in a mail coach that I found myself the travelling-companion of Schlesinger. He talked the whole day, of Meyerbeer principally. He said that Meyerbeer showed a commercial sagacity in composing his works which was remarkable. Behind the stage he was as painstaking with artists and the mise-en scÈne as he was careful in the comfortable seating of critics. Not the smallest journalist, nor even their relations, failed to be seated well. Meyerbeer was the embodiment of the art of savoir faire. It seemed to me, then, a curious contradiction in my companion’s character, that he could regard such phases in a man’s character as wonderful, and at the same time have listened to the intemperate outpourings of the earnest Wagner. But it was so.

At the back of Schlesinger’s music shop was a room where artists casually met for conversation. Wagner, owing to the “musical arrangements” for the firm and being writer for Schlesinger’s “Gazette Musicale,” was a frequent visitor. He met many known men and noted their speech. It all tended one way. The French were light-hearted, persiflage was a principal subject of their composition, and for such a public only light dainties were to be provided. They wanted the semblance and not the reality. Amusement first and truth after. His own romances, penned, as he hoped, in a fittingly light manner, were not light enough and as a consequence were not pleasing enough.

With Berlioz his relations were less happy. The two men met often, but were mutually antagonistic. They admired each other always. Both were serious and earnest, but their friendship was never intimate. In after-life the same strained bearing towards each other was maintained. From close observation of the two men under my roof, at the same table, and under circumstances when they were open heart with each other, I should say however that the constraint arose purely from their antagonistic individualities. Berlioz was reserved, self-possessed, and dignified. His clear, transparent delivery was as the rhythmic cadence of a fountain. Wagner was boisterous, effusive, and his words leaped forth as the rushing of a mountain torrent. Wagner undoubtedly in Paris learned much from Berlioz. The new and refined orchestration taught, or perhaps I should rather say indicated, to Wagner what could be done with the orchestra. Indeed, Wagner has said that the instrumentation of Berlioz influenced him, but disagrees with the use to which the orchestra was put. To Berlioz it was the end: to Wagner, a means. Berlioz expended his ideas in special colouristic effects, whilst Wagner’s pre-eminent desire was truthfulness of situation, the orchestra serving as the medium for the delineation of his ideas. Wagner paid Berlioz a tribute in Paris by declaring that he was distinguished from his Parisian colleagues, that he did not compose for money, and then in the same breath sarcastically asserts that “he lacks all sense of beauty.” This I think unfair, nor do I consider it as representing what Wagner really wished to convey. Berlioz was undoubtedly possessed of ideality, his intentions were noble and earnest, but in their execution he fell short of his conceptions. However, he towers above all French composers for earnestness of purpose and strength of intellect.

Although Wagner often and strongly disagreed with Heine’s judgment in matters of art, yet with one, the poet’s racy notice dated April, 1840, published in “LutÈce,” a miscellaneous collection of letters upon artistic and social life in Paris, he felt that the pungent criticism was not altogether wide of the truth. Wagner kept the notice, and when he and Berlioz were in this country together in 1855, he gave it to me, remarking that though grotesque it was in the main faithful. As it is very interesting I reproduce it:—

Of the other notabilities in the art world with whom Richard Wagner came into contact in Paris, the chief were HalÉvy, Vieuxtemps, Scribe, and Kietz. For HalÉvy he had great admiration. His music was honest. It had a national flavour in it. It was of the French, French. There was a visible effort to reflect in tones the mind and sentiment of a people which was highly meritorious. He was the legitimate descendant of Auber, the founder of a really national French opera. If conventionality proved too strong for Auber, HalÉvy made less effort to throw off the thraldom. The latter was wholly in the hands of opera directors, singers, ballet masters, etc. Had he been a strong man, an artist of determination, governed more with the noble desire to elevate his glorious art than of pleasing popular favourites, he might have done great things. Opera comique represented truly the national taste of the Gauls. Auber and HalÉvy were the men who, assisted by Boildieu, could have laid a sure foundation, but conventionality proved too powerful for all three.

It is not difficult to understand why Wagner so constantly made a “national music-drama” the subject of discourse. In his judgment a drama reflecting the culture and life of a people was the noblest teacher of men. It appeals direct to the heart and understanding. It is the mirror of themselves, purified, idealized, and as such cannot fail to be the most powerful and effective moral instructor. “National drama” was an undying subject with Wagner. His constant effort was the founding of a national art for his own compatriots. It was the ambition of his life, so that after the first and so grandly successful festival performance of the “Nibelungen” in the Bayreuth theatre, 1876, his address to the spectators began, “My children, you have here a really German art.” No wonder, then, that he spoke in Paris with such earnestness of the absence of a true national opera, and of the destruction of such as there promised to be through the attention lavished on Rossini and Donizetti. HalÉvy’s “La Juive,” a grand opera, Wagner considered a particularly praiseworthy work, and thought it promised great things. So much did he consider it worthy of notice, that when later on he became conductor of the Dresden Opera House, he devoted great attention to its production and adequate rendering.

Vieuxtemps, Wagner met occasionally, but was on less intimate terms with him. He admired him as a virtuoso on the violin; he had a grand style, but in his conversation and writings he was without any distinguishing or attractive ability, adhering so steadfastly to the rigid classical form that there was little sympathy between them. In Scribe he admired the skill and esprit of his stage works. He saw that the Frenchman most accurately gauged the taste of his public and was dexterous in the manipulation of his matter. Scribe was not then at anything like the zenith of his power, yet was possessed of a finish and delicacy in writing that Wagner admired. Lastly, Kietz, a painter from Germany, of a certain merit, was perhaps one of his most intimate friends. He painted a portrait of Richard Wagner which is now regarded as very excellent. Full of fun, his jocularity harmonized completely with Wagner’s own humour, and, united with Louis, the three were ever at their most comfortable and happy ease.