Act I. of _Tristan_], which he wanted to send to Frau Wesendonck: but

he would not part with it when I wanted to look after it for him, and he hid it awkwardly. All this astonished me a little. When he could wait no longer, he called our servant. I was there by chance when the latter passed, and I asked him for the roll of music. I undid it, and took out the thick letter that was enclosed in it, opened it, and read the most jealous love letter, from which I will give you a couple of passages. After a wild night of love that he had had, he writes to her: 'Thus it went on the whole night through. In the morning I was rational again, and from the depth of my heart could pray to my angel, and this prayer is love! Love! Deepest soul's joy on this love, the source of my redemption. Then came the day with its evil weather, the joy of seeing you was denied me, my work would not go at all. Thus my whole day was a struggle between melancholy and longing for you,' &c. The letter ended in this way: 'Be good to me: the weather seems mild: to-day I will come again to your garden as soon as I see you. I hope to find you undisturbed for a moment. Now my whole soul to the morning greeting. R. W.' What do you say to that? At mid-day I told my husband that I had opened and read his fine letter; he was rather alarmed, but I said I would not suffer this deception towards the poor man: I would go away, but he must call this woman his own for ever. Richard wanted to justify himself with his wonderful gift of the gab,[179] but I would not have it.... Richard tried to force me to be silent, and to persuade me of the purity of his relations. How ridiculous! I abide by my conviction."[180]

Now let us look at the letter in which Wagner gives his sister Clara _his_ version of the catastrophe. After narrating the sacrifices Otto had made for him,[181] and declaring that although he and Mathilde loved each other they had been forced to recognise the necessity of resignation, he continues:

"My wife seemed, with shrewd feminine instinct, to understand what was going on: certainly she often showed jealousy, and was scoffing and disparaging: but she tolerated our intercourse, which never violated morals, but simply aimed at the possibility of knowledge of each other's presence. Therefore I assumed that Minna would be sensible and understand that there was really nothing for her to fear, since there could be no question of a union between us, and that therefore the most advisable and best thing for her to do was to be indulgent. I had to learn that I had probably deceived myself in that respect: chatter reached my ears, and she at last so far lost her senses as to intercept a letter of mine and--open it. This letter, if she had been at all able to understand it, would really have been able to give her all the pacification she could have desired, for the theme of it too was our resignation. However, she fastened simply on the intimate expressions in it, and lost her head. She came to me in a fury, and I was compelled to explain to her calmly and explicitly how things stood, that she had brought misfortune on herself by opening such a letter, and that if she did not know how to contain herself we must part. On this point we were agreed, I tranquilly, she passionately. Next day, however, I was sorry for her: I went to her and said, 'Minna, you are very ill.'[182] We arranged the plan of a cure (_Kur_) for her: she seemed to become composed again. The day for her departure to the _Kurort_ drew near. At first she absolutely insisted on speaking to Frau Wesendonck. I firmly forbade her to do so. Everything depended on my gradually making Minna acquainted with the character of my relations with Frau Wesendonck, and thus convincing her that there was nothing at all to be feared for the continuance of our wedded life, wherefore she had only to be wise, prudent and noble, abjure all foolish ideas of vengeance, and avoid any sort of sensation. In the end she promised me this. She could not keep quiet, however. She went over [to the Green Hill] behind my back, and--no doubt without realising it herself--wounded the gentle lady most grossly. After she had told her: 'If I were an ordinary woman I should go to your husband with this letter,' there was nothing for Frau Wesendonck--who was conscious of never having had a secret from her husband (which a woman like Minna cannot understand!)--but to inform him at once of the scene and its cause.--Herewith, then, had the delicacy and purity of our relations been broken in upon in a coarse and vulgar way, and many things must now alter. Not till some time after did I make it clear to my friend [Mathilde] that it would never be possible to make a nature like my wife's comprehend relations so lofty and unselfish as ours: for I had to endure her grave and deep reproach that I had omitted this, whereas her husband had always been her confidant."

Minna goes away to her cure, and returns unappeased. There are violent scenes between her and Wagner: the situation becomes quite impossible for everybody, and there is nothing for it but for the Wagners to quit the "Asyl." He can endure the bickering no longer, he tells Clara, if he is to fulfil his life's task. "Whoever has observed me closely must have been surprised from of old at my patience, kindness, aye, weakness; and if I am now condemned by superficial judges, I have become insensitive to that kind of thing. But never had Minna such an occasion to show herself worthy to be my wife as here, when it was a question of preserving for me the highest and dearest: it lay within her hand to prove if she really loved me. But she does not even understand what such true love is, and her rage runs away with her." He excuses her on the score of her ill-health, but is resolved not to live with her again. "She really is unfortunate: she would have been happier with a lesser man. And so take pity on her with me."[183]

Well might Minna be driven to distraction by his "vortreffliche Suade." Who, with no knowledge of the facts beyond what he could derive from this letter, would not think that Wagner had been at once the most perfect and the most ill-used of men? Here we have the actor--the self-deluding actor--marching and counter-marching across the stage in his full panoply. He is, as usual, dramatising himself: he is painting the picture of himself that he desires his friends and posterity to see. He is at work on _Tristan_. Frau Wesendonck is necessary to him if he is to maintain the artistic mood that the poem and the music require. Everything and everybody must therefore give way to his great need. He is utterly and honestly unable to see the situation through either Otto's eyes or Minna's. The former he dramatised also; of the grief the good man must have felt at seeing his wife's infatuation for a man who calmly took possession not only of the wife but of the whole household, he had plainly no conception. He allots Otto _his_ part in the play: they are all playing parts, and the title of the tragi-comedy is "The Three Renunciators." Wagner and Mathilde may talk as they like about their "renunciation" and "resignation": these words are only literary symbols with them, a subtle self-flattery, an extra and rather delicious flavouring in their cup. But the cup itself was a sweet one. Poor Otto had _his_ part thrust upon him willy-nilly: he was dragged on the scene, against his will, to act in a play for which he had no fancy, dressed up as Third Renunciator, and primed to speak the lines the author of the piece put in his mouth. But there was no delight in _his_ cup: and probably he could not, like Wagner, drug himself with words. As for Minna, she simply was not in the play at all. Her business was merely to attend to the costumes and sweep out the dressing-room of the principal comedian, and generally to keep the stage clear for him and the leading lady. So colossal was Wagner's egoism that he could not realise the bare possibility of the affair taking on in other people's eyes any aspect but that it had in his own. He evidently thought in all sincerity that it was Otto's and Minna's duty to step aside in favour of himself and Mathilde, and that Minna in particular ought to prove that she really loved him by turning a blind eye to everything that wounded her as woman and as wife. And in the act of demanding these impossible renunciations from other people in order that _he_ might have his way, he appealed volubly to God and man to witness the extent of _his_ renunciation and to have compassion on him! It is easy enough to follow your star if other people will do the rough work of cutting out your path for you: it is easy enough to live in a world of ideal emotional freedom if the real people around you will be content to become mere feeders for your own inward life. The only weak spot in Wagner's position was his forgetfulness of the fact that Minna was a human being like himself. How he and Mathilde appeared in eyes that saw things as they were, without any haze of romance about them, may be guessed from Minna's description of Mathilde as "that cold woman spoilt by happiness," and Frau Herwegh's incisive description of Wagner as "this pocket edition of a man, this folio of vanity, heartlessness, and egoism."[184]

A comparison of Minna's letter with that of Wagner's concerning the incident that led to the rupture with the Wesendoncks will suggest how little he is ever to be relied upon for full and strict accuracy when he is stating his own case. We may acquit him, as a rule, of any wilful intention to deceive; but he is so incapable of seeing the matter from any other angle than his own that he unconsciously distorts or re-arranges the picture. Like the artist he is, he sees only the inside of the Mathilde affair. Minna sees only the outside of it: but precisely for that reason she is more likely to have given us the outward facts as they were. These facts could never be gathered from Wagner's letter alone. That letter shows us an angelic, patient and greatly misunderstood man, worshipping his "Muse" as one might worship a saint in a shrine, and astonished and disgusted when coarser souls declined to see either a saint in her or an angel in him. As usual, he does not photograph the scene: he lets his imagination paint a fancy picture of it. It is from Minna's prosaic photograph that we get the facts and details,--the secret visits on both sides, the deceptions and evasions, the trickery with the servants, and all the other petty irritations. Once more, sympathetic as we may feel towards him,--and we are bound to sympathise with this eager, hungry, suffering soul, so wise in art, so foolish in life,--can we deny that Minna merely acted as any other woman in the world would have done in the same circumstances? To be kept by his side for her value as a domestic animal,[185] yet be shut out from her husband's inner life while another woman was admitted to it under her very eyes, and to be living all the while in a home provided for them by this very rival,--that was surely more than any woman with a spirit above that of a poodle could be expected to suffer quietly.

Leaving the psychology of the case, let us take up again the thread of the external facts. Minna's account of what happened during and after her interview with Mathilde runs thus:

"Frau Wesendonck was very grateful and friendly to me, accompanied me hand-in-hand to the steps, and everything was settled in a friendly way. Afterwards, however, she thought differently of it: she told her husband that I had insulted her frightfully, but without telling him the real truth as to the relations. She cried out to Richard how deeply and horribly I had offended her,--in spite of the fact that I had been delicate enough not to show her the fatal letter, which I had in my pocket. But this is the way with common little natures. They can do nothing but tittle-tattle and stir up mischief."[186]

Minna's heart trouble had been greatly aggravated by these emotional storms. To do Wagner justice, he was always making allowance in his correspondence for her conduct on the score of her ill-health,[187] but, needless to say, it never occurred to him to help to restore her health by refraining from his pursuit of his "Muse" at the Green Hill, or by making any other "renunciation" of the things he liked.[188] "My good husband," writes Minna to Frau Herwegh on 14th June 1858 from Brestenberg, where she had been undergoing a "cure," "could be good and assuage my pains[189] if he would not let himself be dragged about by certain people: his heart is good but very weak! So it comes about that he often writes me really good, dear, comforting letters, but still more often throws the wickedest and vulgarest things at me in them, cracks other people up to the skies, and levels me to the earth. This, my dear Emma, eats away my heart. I can seldom weep over these vulgarities, and that is very bad for me: but the heart in my body chokes as if it were being twisted about. On Sunday, a week ago, I was at home, but only for twenty-three hours, so that I had no time to visit you. I wish I had not gone: the dear Richard vented his spleen on me till two in the morning"[190]--by way, presumably, of exercising himself in "renunciation" and "resignation."

She returns to the "Asyl," but every day the impossibility of an understanding between them becomes more evident. Their letters, read side by side, are pathetic. Wagner is convinced that the purity of his relations with Frau Wesendonck ought to absolve him in everyone's eyes, and reconcile Minna to a more accommodating attitude towards him and his ways. (According to his own account, he invariably reasons with her patiently and from the serene height of his superior wisdom. This is not always borne out by Minna's testimony.) Minna, on the other hand, was resolved not to tolerate a situation that seemed to her to be beyond all reason.

"It grieves me," she writes to a lady friend on 2nd August 1858,[191] "to hear you talk as if I alone were the cause of my separating from my husband. You know only too well, if you question yourself closely, how hard for me even a short separation has always been, especially now when it is uncertain whether and when I shall see him again. It is no small thing when a separation faces one after twenty-two years of marriage. I at any rate cannot take it lightly. If it rested with me, I assure you it would certainly not happen. As regards forbearance for men I am likewise enlightened, and have already overlooked a good many things, like other women. I have besides gone on being blind a good six years. It is simply impossible, for the sake of Richard's honour, to remain here, since her husband,--I don't know how--has also learned of the relation. When I returned I was violently assailed and threatened by my husband, with the object of getting me to associate again with that woman. I yielded, was willing to go this great length: that is really all that it is possible for a wife in my position to do: but the husband and in the end this woman herself will not: she is--so my husband himself shouted at me--raging, beside herself, at my being there, and out of jealousy will not suffer me to remain: only Richard shall live here, which, however, he cannot do. Richard has two natures; he is ensnared on the other side, and clings to me from habit, that is all. My resolve now is, since this woman will not endure it, to remain with my husband; and he is weak enough to fall in with her wishes that he should live by turns in Dresden, Berlin and Weimar, until either Richard or God calls me away. My health does not improve under these circumstances; all the waters in the world are no use when the mind is assailed by upsets of this kind."[192]

So on the 17th August 1858 Wagner leaves the "Asyl" and goes to Venice (_viâ_ Geneva) with Karl Ritter, while Minna takes refuge with her friends in Dresden. Wagner continues to write to Mathilde, but his letters are returned to him unopened. Each of the lovers, however, makes a confidante of Frau Wille, and each of them keeps a diary. These diaries are exchanged in the autumn. That of Wagner is in the form of letters to Mathilde. These are full of the most ardent protestations of love. His declaration in _Mein Leben_ that his relations with Frau Wesendonck were "merely friendly" reads rather curiously after such outbursts as these:

"When I have thought of you, never have parents or children or duties come into my mind; I only knew that you loved me, and that everything noble in this world must be unhappy." (7th Sept.)

"That you loved me I know well: you are, as always, good, profound and sensible.... Our love is superior to all impediments, and every check to it makes us richer, brighter, nobler, and ever more intent upon the substance and the essence of our love, ever more indifferent towards the inessential." (13th Sept.)

"It always remained clear to me that your love was my highest possession, and without it my existence must be a contradiction of itself." (18th Sept.)

"The course of my life till the time when I found you, and you at last became mine, lies plain before you." (12th Oct.)[193]

"Once more,--that you could plunge into every conceivable sorrow of the world, to say to me 'I love you,'--that has redeemed me, and was for me that holy hour of calm that has given my life another meaning." (12th October.)

XI

Nothing shows more instructively the fundamental dualism of his nature than a comparison of these letters to Mathilde with those he was writing at the same time to Minna. Every thought of Mathilde is a dream, an intoxication; to Minna he is the practical man, discussing the ordinary little things of life in the most prosaic fashion. Their parting was not intended to be a permanent one: each of them was to "go his own way for a while in peace and reconciliation" in order to "win calmness and new strength for life."[194] As is often the case when he is away from her, he sees their relationship in something like its true aspect. He admits that she "has a hard time" with him, on account of his "indifference and recklessness towards the outer relations of life." She is to enjoy herself in Dresden, and to try to win self-control and strength to bear her trial. But an understanding was plainly impossible between two people one of whom persisted in regarding his extra-domestic love affairs as special dispensations of Providence to assist him in his work as an artist, while the other as persistently looked upon them as a selfish seeking of his own gratification at her expense. Wagner sums it all up very appositely in a letter of 25th August 1858: "Your letter showed me that it will probably be always impossible for you to see correctly and clearly. With you, a definite blame must always be attached to a definite person: you do not comprehend the nature of things and Fate, but simply think that if this person or that thing had never been, everything would have happened differently."[195] To his dual nature it did not seem in the least an impossible thing for him to retain Mathilde as his "Muse" and Minna as his housekeeper--a very competent housekeeper, as he frequently lets us see--if only Minna would be sensible enough to consent to this _ménage à trois_. On the 3rd September he tells Mathilde that he hopes to get well for her sake. "To save you for me means to save myself for my art. With it,--to live to be your consolation, that is my mission, this accords with my nature, my fate, my will,--my love. Thus am I yours: you too shall get well through me. Here will _Tristan_ be completed--a defiance to all the raging of the world. And with this work, if I may, I will return to see you, to comfort you, to make you happy. This is my holiest, loveliest wish." But while he intends returning to Mathilde he also counts on returning to Minna, to whom he writes on the 14th September, advising her to select carefully her future home; "thither I would come to you as often as I needed a home: and for the rest, quite apart from my personal need of habitation, it would be _your_ peaceful retreat to which I also could withdraw when all the storms of life were weathered, there at last to find enduring repose beneath your care."

His whole spiritual life is centred in Mathilde: but his physical man also needs caring for, and who is so well qualified for this as Minna? A wandering life will not suit him in the long run, he tells his wife; at bottom he loves a permanent abode. He means to finish _Tristan_, and has hopes of being amnestied,[196] so that he can return to Germany and settle down in some town of his choice. "You can thus count with certainty on seeing me again next Easter, and--God willing--we shall then have no difficulty in finding the place where you can pitch the abiding tent for this wandering life of mine."

"How happy could I be with either," was the sigh of the old poet. "How happy could I be with both," says Wagner in effect. Even more than in most artists the inner and the outer life in him were separate and distinct. Into Mathilde's ear he could pour his dreams and his longings, while Minna's ear would be open to receive his less spiritual but equally sincere confidences upon the more material things of life. He looks at the stars over the Lido and thinks of Mathilde: "I have absolutely no hope, no future," he writes to her. This is the genuine artist, amorous of his own sorrows, lapping luxuriously the bitter-sweet water of his dreams. For the real man we have to turn to his letter of the preceding day (28th September) to Minna, from which it appears that although he is absolutely without a future and without hope, he is trying all he can "to use the great success of _Rienzi_ in Dresden" to "get profits out of the work elsewhere"; accordingly he has been inviting all the theatres with which he has friendly relations to acquire the opera quickly. He describes the material side of his life in Venice in detail. The world-weary one seems to be enjoying his existence, working each day until four in the afternoon, crossing the canal, walking up the St. Mark Piazza, dining with Karl Ritter "well but dear (even without wine I can never get off under four to five francs)"; then in a gondola to the Public Garden, where he has a promenade; then a glass of ice at the pavilion on the Molo, and so home to bed. "So I have been living for four weeks now, and am not tired of it yet, even without real absorbing work. The secret of the enduring charm of it all is" so-and-so and so-and-so.

He keeps his dual psychological life going with perfect honesty and absolute unconsciousness. How easy it was for him to adopt a different attitude upon the same question, according to which of his correspondents he was addressing, is shown by his letters of 28th September 1858 to Minna and the 1st October to Mathilde. In each of them he discusses the nature and attributes of joy and grief. He had witnessed the killing of a hen at a poulterer's stall a day or two before; the sufferings of the poor creature had stirred his sympathetic soul to its depths, and set him thinking of the general problem of suffering and pity. To Minna he writes thus:

"You are wrong to make light of compassion. Perhaps it is only because you have a false idea of it. All our relations with others have only one ground,--sympathy or decided antipathy. The essence of love consists in community of grief and of joy: but _community of joy is most illusory, for in this world there is little ground for joy, and our sympathy only has real durability when it is directed to another's grief_."[197]

To Mathilde he sings a different song. For her he can feel nothing but "community of joy, reverence, worship.... So do not contemn my pity where you see me exercise it, for to yourself I can now pour out nothing but community of joy. Oh, this is the sublimest: it can appear only in conjunction with the fullest sympathy. From the commoner nature to which I gave pity I must quickly turn away as soon as it demands community of joy of me. This was the cause of the last discord with my wife. The unhappy woman had understood in her own way my resolve not to enter your house again, and conceived it as a rupture with you: and she imagined that on her return, comfort and intimacy would necessarily be re-established between us. How fearfully I had to undeceive her!"

Yet it is to this "commoner nature" that he desires to return and settle down in some quiet corner of Germany for the rest of his life. "Only keep up your courage, my dear good Minna," he writes to her from Venice on 14th November 1858. "Overcome, and believe firmly in the perfect sincerity with which I now aspire to nothing--nothing on this earth--but to make up for what has been inflicted on you, to support and guard you, preserve you in loyalty and love, so that your suffering state may also improve, that you may once more feel joy in your life, and we may enjoy the evening of our days together as cheerfully and uncloudedly as possible,"--with a break, presumably, to permit of his dying in Mathilde's arms. And again in a second letter on the evening of the same day: "Think of nothing but our reunion: and to make that thoroughly good and enduring and beneficial for both of us, simply attend to nothing now but your health. For this you can do nothing, nothing in the world, but--cultivate tranquillity of mind." To do this she is to forget the Wesendonck episode; he insists on her never saying a word about it again to anyone. At Zürich "we were far too buried and thrown too much on our own resources; that was bound in time to be injurious and to set us bickering. When once we are in a large town again, where I can have performances to look after, and you can tend me when I am exhausted, and rejoice with me over their success,--it will be to you a dream that we were ever packed into a little den like that.... Well, well! All that will be altered, and a quite new life will begin, full of fame, honours and recognition, as much as I shall desire; so get in good trim to enjoy that harvest with me after a long and painful seed-time."

Thirteen days previously he had written thus to Mathilde:

"Help me to tend the unfortunate woman.[198] Probably I can do it only from a distance, for I myself must regard remoteness from her as most apt for this purpose. When I am near her I become incapable of it: only from a distance can I tranquillise her, as then I can choose the time and the mood for my communications, so as to be always mindful of my task towards her.[199] But I cannot do even that unless--you help me. I must not know that _your_ heart is bleeding," &c., &c. "You know that I am yours, and that only you dispose of my actions, deeds, thoughts and resolutions." The night before he had stood on the balcony of his house, and looking into the black waters of the canal below him the thought of suicide had flashed upon him. But he withdrew his hand from the rail as he thought of Mathilde: "Now I know that it still is granted to me to die in your arms."

He talked to Minna, on his own showing, much as one talks to a child, without meaning all one says, one's only object being to comfort it in its grief. He meant to be kind, for Minna's sufferings undoubtedly rent his heart. He could be sympathetic with her at a distance. The difficulties always arose when they set up house again together, for then the impossibility of his giving up anything he really desired, even for an ailing wife's sake, became manifest. He was, as usual, hypnotised by his own eloquence. On paper he could easily settle every question that arose between Minna and himself: it was merely in practical domestic matters that he was a failure. It probably never occurred to him to ask how he was going to square the problem of living for the remainder of his days with Minna with the problem of dying in Mathilde's arms, or indeed the general problem of maintaining his passionate intercourse with his "Muse" and at the same time of resuming relations with the commonplace wife he had quarrelled with so desperately over this very "Muse."

With this dualism of soul and this blindness in the face of facts it was inevitable that the catastrophe of 1858 should have befallen him,--inevitable also that any renewal of his relations with Mathilde should lead to another catastrophe of the same kind. The renewal took place in April 1859, Wesendonck having once more invited Wagner to visit him, apparently in order to give a _démenti_ to Zürich gossip. Later on Wagner seems to have realised that Minna's stay in Dresden was doing her little good, either bodily or mentally: so he resolved to set up house with her once more in Paris.[200]

In _Mein Leben_ he tells us that "under these circumstances [_i.e._ the difficulties he was finding in the way of his giving some concerts in Paris] I could only regard it as a most singular intervention of fate that Minna should announce her readiness to join me in Paris and that I was to expect her arrival shortly." But it is clear from letters of his to Minna of 19th and 25th September 1859, and to Dr. Anton Pusinelli of 3rd October,[201] that it was _his own suggestion_ that she should come to Paris to take charge of his new household. He needed her, and he argued eagerly against the objections which Pusinelli had evidently put forward. He was going to live very quietly: Minna would be in ideal surroundings for her health of body and peace of mind; and all would again be for the best in the best of all possible worlds. "So I beg you not to advance any objections against her coming to Paris: have faith in my reasons!... A decided medical treatment was indispensable for my wife: finally, however, notwithstanding all the art and care of the physician, moral influences are the weightiest with patients of this kind; and in this respect--I know it--the life and death of my wife depend solely upon myself. I can destroy her or preserve her: consequently, since I know her fate to be given into my hands, my future conduct towards her is prescribed with the greatest certainty. Trust me!"

No doubt he meant it all,--on paper.

XII

Minna joined him in Paris on the 17th November 1859. Their relations were soon as embittered as usual. Wagner was playing for high stakes, living feverishly and expensively, entertaining largely, giving disastrous concerts, accumulating new and heavy debts. The clear-sighted and careful Minna was appalled at the prospect of the ruin that was threatening them once more: and Wagner made the mistake of not confiding in her. She felt herself shut out from his inner life. Apparently he was also giving her fresh cause for jealousy, the lady this time, it is said, being Liszt's eldest daughter Blandine, the wife of the Paris lawyer Ollivier.[202]

After the disastrous _Tannhäuser_ performances in March 1861, Wagner fluctuated for a while between Paris, Karlsruhe and Vienna, at length settling down on the 14th August in the last-named city, where it was proposed to produce _Tristan_. Minna had gone to Soden for a cure on the 10th July: from there she went on to Dresden once more.[203] In Vienna Wagner had the loan of Dr. Standhartner's house for some weeks during the physician's absence. His wants were attended to by a "pretty niece" of Standhartner's.[204] This pretty niece was one Seraphine Mauro. According to Kapp,[205] "Wagner was not insensible to so much beauty in his daily surroundings, and his 'dear little doll' [_Puppe_], as he always called Seraphine, did not let him sigh in vain.... The suffering in this affair of Wagner's fell upon his friend Peter Cornelius, who ... had lost his heart to the beautiful Seraphine some time before."

Standhartner having returned to Vienna at the end of September, Wagner had to leave his comfortable quarters, and as there seemed no prospect of an early performance of _Tristan_, and life at a hotel was expensive, he accepted an invitation from the Wesendoncks to meet them in Venice. He remained there only four days--"four miserable days" he calls them.[206] How unbridgeable was the gulf made between him and Minna by the memory of the Mathilde affair of three years before may be estimated from his letters to his wife of 19th October and 13th November 1861. The first is sensible and tender; he is full of pity for the poor suffering woman, and will gladly do anything in his power to alleviate her misery,--anything, that is, but give up the Wesendonck acquaintance. He still has plans for a reunion, and a quiet old age to be spent together. But as a preliminary to any _rapprochement_ he insists, as he had always done on her consenting never again to mention the name of Mathilde, for whom, he declares, his passion has from beginning to end been absolutely pure. Of all the tragedies of Wagner's life this surely is the greatest, that his one truly noble love, the one that was so necessary to him as an artist, to which we owe _Tristan_ and many of the finest moods of the _Meistersinger_ and _Parsifal_, should have been the one to embitter his existence and his wife's beyond all hope of remedy while his less worthy attachments were either unknown to Minna or counted for little with her. With Wagner obstinately resolved not to give up the Wesendonck acquaintance, and Minna--blind to the ideal nature of the attachment, and seeing it, in all probability, merely as another Laussot affair[207]--as obstinately bent on making the cessation of this acquaintance a condition of a full reconciliation with her husband, it was impossible that the breach between the two tortured and self-torturing souls should ever be healed. That Wagner dreaded giving Minna any cause to be reminded of Mathilde's name is evident from the sophisticated version he gives her of his Venice excursion, in his letter of 13th November 1861: we can only regard as a piece of well-meant fiction his story that Dr. Standhartner, having been summoned in haste, as deputy physician in ordinary, to attend the Empress of Austria in Venice, pressingly insisted upon Wagner accompanying him for his health's sake. "I returned early this morning. I hope it has done me good; at least I had no talking to do for several days, but only to go sight-seeing, which really benefited me." Not a word, it will be observed, as to having gone to Venice at the request of the Wesendoncks, or even as to their being in Venice at that time.

So matters drifted on in the old way until Wagner had settled down in Biebrich (end of February 1862), after yet another visit to Paris. He took with him the furniture that had been in their Paris house. Minna came to help in the unpacking and arranging. She remained with him a week. According to the account he gives in _Mein Leben_ "the old scenes were soon renewed," Minna being angry at his having removed from the custom-house the articles he required for his new home, without awaiting for her arrival.[208] The real reason of their quarrel, however--concealed from us, as usual, in _Mein Leben_--was once more Frau Wesendonck. By a most unlucky coincidence a letter and a box arrived from Mathilde on the second and third days of Minna's visit. They were quite harmless,[209] but Minna would not listen to reason; she was more than ever convinced that her husband was carrying on another intrigue with Mathilde behind her back. It was enough, as poor Wagner says, to drive him out of his senses--the same scenes as four years before, the same invective, word for word. Yet in spite of it all, once more the wretched pair began making plans for a home in common, Minna's importunities among the Dresden Government officials having made it possible for Wagner to obtain an amnesty by a formal petition to the King.

Biebrich remained his home until the autumn. He was working at the music of the _Meistersinger_, and perhaps, on the whole, not unhappy. He made several new friends, among them the actress Friederike Meyer--the sister of the Frau Dustmann who was to have "created" the part of Isolde in the Vienna production of _Tristan_--and a pretty and intelligent young girl, Mathilde Maier, the daughter of a deceased lawyer. The fire of his passion for Frau Wesendonck having already cooled, he fell in love with the gentle Mathilde Maier. Kapp conjectures that rumours of their "friendly relations" had come to Minna's ears, and that the renewed bitterness of her letters at this time decided Wagner to take the step that had long been urged upon him by his friends, and obtain a divorce from Minna. He commissioned his Dresden friend Dr. Pusinelli to sound Minna on the subject; she declined to oblige him.[210] His desire to marry Mathilde Maier, however, says Kapp, found a new and insurmountable obstacle. She was threatened with hereditary deafness; this, she thought, would unfit her to be the wife of a musician. "The full significance of this tragic love in Wagner's life cannot be estimated yet," says Kapp, "since the autobiography preserves complete silence on this matter, out of consideration for Cosima, and the large and carefully guarded collection of intimate documents from Wagner's hands that Mathilde left behind her will not be published during Cosima's life-time."[211]

Meanwhile his relations with Friederike Meyer--a lively actress-temperament--had become more and more friendly. When he left Biebrich for Vienna in November 1862, he was accompanied by Friederike, who had surrendered her engagement at the Frankfort theatre for his sake.[212] He soon became involved, as he tells us, in disagreements with his Isolde, Frau Dustmann, Friederike's sister. "It was impossible," he says, "to make her see how matters really stood; she regarded her sister as being involved in a liaison, and cast out by her family,[213] so that Friederike's settling in Vienna was compromising for _her_."

We get a little light on the pair in an entry in the diary of Peter Cornelius under date 20th November 1862:

"We were at Wagner's. He gave a musical evening for his Fräulein Friederike M.... Her chambermaid was there as duenna. Friederike isn't so bad as they made out in Mainz; she isn't amiss as far as appearances go. She is intelligent, without making any attempt to thrust herself forward. She is not very pretty, but her face is animated. Wagner behaved very properly and decently in her presence. If he really must have a liaison of this sort, it looks as if he would get on quite tolerably with this one."[214]

The liaison seems to have been in one way at least a harmful one for Wagner. Frau Dustmann was so angered at Friederike's association with him and at her attempt to procure an engagement at the Burg theatre that she cooled towards _Tristan_. This, says Kapp, was the real cause of the failure to produce the opera in Vienna, not, as has hitherto been supposed, the difficulty the singers found with the work.

Friederike soon passed out of his life. With his liking for women's society, however, it was impossible for him to live alone for long. We may believe him when he tells Minna (December 27, 1862), "I am living an utterly wretched life, daily, hourly--and am never, never happy."[215] He is busy with concerts and with the _Tristan_ rehearsals; but he is getting no sleep, has palpitations of the heart, and is "completely knocked to pieces." After his Russian concert tour he settles in Penzing, a suburb of Vienna (May 12, 1863), in order to continue work at the _Meistersinger_. He has apparently given up all idea of a reunion with Minna. He tells us that about this time he suffered a great deal of trouble on her account: "she reproached me bitterly for everything I did."[216] He kept, he says, to his resolution of the previous year; he wrote instead to Minna's daughter Nathalie, who was still living with her, and still under the impression that she was Minna's sister.[217] The idea occurred to him of getting Mathilde Maier to take charge of his Penzing household. Apparently the proposal created some commotion in the Maier circle. Mathilde, he had thought, "would be sensible enough to take my meaning correctly, without being shocked. No doubt I was right in that supposition; but I had not taken sufficient account of her mother and her bourgeois surroundings in general. She seemed to have been thrown into the utmost excitement by my invitation; and her friend Luise Wagner, with bourgeois sense and precision, gave me the good advice first of all to obtain a divorce from my wife, and then everything else would easily be arranged. Greatly shocked at this, I at once withdrew my invitation as having been made without proper consideration."[218] Perhaps he really was shocked, though we have to remember that these memoirs were dictated to Cosima, and he would probably be disposed to paint himself in the most favourable colours. But the whole passage, ambiguous as it is, in a way that the student of _Mein Leben_ becomes accustomed to, points quite clearly to the belief in the Maier circle that his relations with Mathilde were very intimate.

Feminine society was an absolute necessity to him at all times, and now, perhaps, more than ever, for his life was a round of anxieties and his health was wretched. His lonely abode was brightened for a time by "a maiden of seventeen years, of an irreproachable family." According to his account,[219] she was bored and wanted to get back to the town again. He got rid of her with as much regard for her feelings as possible, and her place was taken by an elder sister. "She is more experienced," he tells Frau Wesendonck, "staid (_gemessen_), seems gentle, and is not unagreeable." "Eccentric as the episode may seem in itself," says Mr. Ashton Ellis,[220] "it disposes of the ridiculous legend--founded on a Viennese dressmaker's bills--that the writer used to dress himself in female garments. Long ago I had been struck by the 'we' in one of the crumbs of that correspondence flaunted by addle-brained purveyors of gossip, and felt more inclined to credit Hanslick's story of 'a pretty ballet-dancer'; but the amazing innocence of the whole arrangement is proved alike by its narration to Elisabeth and her unrebuking answer."

Whether the purveyors of gossip were addle-brained or not, gossip there certainly was: and apparently there was some fire to account for the smoke. That this second serving maiden, says Kapp, "had a better understanding [than her sister] of the position she was intended for, and gave Wagner thorough satisfaction," is evident from the following love letter, addressed to her after he had been away from Penzing some time on a concert tour:

"DEAR LITTLE MARIE,--I shall be home again next Wednesday. I shall be at the Northern station in Vienna at half-past seven in the evening. Franz [his man servant] must be there punctually with the carriage, and he must also have what is necessary for the trunk. Now, my best sweetheart, have everything in the house very nice, so that I can get a cosy rest, which I very much need. Everything must be quite tidy, and--well warmed. See that everything is very nice in the lovely study; if it is hot, open it a little, so that the study may be warm; _and perfume it nicely: buy the best bottles of scent, so as to give it a nice odour_. Ach Gott! how delighted I am to be able to rest again with you there. (_I hope the rose-coloured pants are ready?_) Aye, aye! You must be very pretty and charming; I deserve to have a thoroughly good time once more. At Christmas I will arrange the Christmas tree: and then, my sweetheart, you will get all sorts of presents. My arrival need not be made known to everybody; but Franz must tell the barber and the hairdresser to come at half-past nine on Thursday morning. So: _Wednesday_ evening at half-past seven in Vienna, and soon after in Penzing. I leave it wholly to yourself as to whether you will meet me at the station. Perhaps it will be nicer if you meet me first in the house, in the warm rooms. I shall probably need only the _coupée_. Kind greetings to Franz and Anna [Franz's wife]. Tell them to have everything thoroughly nice. Many kisses to my sweetheart. _Au revoir!_"[221]

This, it need hardly be said, is scarcely the sort of letter one writes to a servant who is no more than a servant.

In July 1863 he gives two concerts in Pesth, where he seems to have been smitten by the charms of a young Hungarian singer who greatly pleased him by her renderings of some of Elsa's music, and still more by her evident incandescence for himself.

There is no mention of this young lady in _Mein Leben_, but Wagner tells Mathilde about her in the same letter (3rd August 1863) in which he speaks of the engagement of Marie as successor to her sister. "I was quite touched at meeting with something so pure and unspoiled for my music; and the good child, on her side, seemed so moved by myself and my music that for the first time in her life she really felt. The expression of these feelings was indescribably charming and touching, and many might have thought that the maiden had conceived an ardent love for me:[222] so now I have to 'write' to her as well." He evidently takes a sort of impish pleasure in thus piquing the curiosity of his old love and "Muse." He adds "See, I am telling you all the good I can; but I really don't know of anything more, and I am not even sure whether you will credit this last tale to me as something 'good.'"

XIII

All this while the understanding between himself and von Bülow's wife had evidently been quietly ripening. Reading between the lines of his earlier accounts of Cosima, it is easy to see that there had been for some time a tentative if unavowed _rapprochement_ between them. In 1861, when taking leave of Cosima at Reichenhall, she gave him, he says, "an almost timid look of enquiry,"[223]--which strikes the old Wagnerian hand as one of those phrases in which the composer conceals more than he discloses.

By the following summer, matters had evidently matured a little. "The increasing and often excessive ill-humour of poor Hans, who seemed to be always in torment, had sometimes drawn a helpless sigh from me. On the other hand Cosima appeared to have lost the timidity (_Scheu_) towards me that I had noticed during my visit to Reichenhall in the previous year; she was now more friendly. One day, after I had sung 'Wotan's Farewell' to my friends in my own way, I noticed on Cosima's face the same expression that, to my astonishment, I had seen there when bidding her good-bye at Zürich; only now the ecstasy of it was raised to a serene transfiguration. There was silence and mystery over everything now; but the belief that she was mine took hold of me with such certainty, that in moments of more than normal excitement I behaved in the most extravagantly riotous way."[224]

He visits the Bülows both before and after his Russian concerts (March 1863), and again in November of the year, after the concerts at Budapest, Prague and elsewhere. Bülow being busy on the latter occasion with preparations for a concert of his own, Wagner went for a drive with Cosima. "This time all our jocularity gave way to silence; we gazed into each other's eyes without speaking, and a passionate longing for an avowal of the truth overpowered us and brought us to a confession--which needed no words--of the infinite unhappiness that weighed upon us. It gave us relief. Profoundly appeased, we won sufficient cheerfulness to go to the concert without feeling oppressed.... After the concert we had to go to a supper at my friend Weitzmann's, the length of which reduced us, yearning as we were for the profoundest soul's peace, to almost frantic despair. But at last the day came to an end, and after a night spent under Bülow's roof I resumed my journey. Our farewell so strongly reminded me of that first wonderfully affecting parting from Cosima at Zürich, that all the intervening years vanished from me like a wild dream between two days of the highest life's significance. If on that first occasion our presentiment of something not yet understood constrained us to silence, it was no less impossible to give voice to what we now recognised but did not utter."[225] Here again, anyone familiar with Wagner's literary manner must feel instinctively that there is a great deal more beneath these words than appears on the surface of them. This is the last reference to Cosima in _Mein Leben_: the further story of the pair has to be derived from other sources.

The Zürich leave-taking to which he refers can only be that of the 16th August 1858, the day before he was compelled to leave the "Asyl" as a result of the Mathilde catastrophe. His account of the farewell in _Mein Leben_, however, does not suggest any special community of feeling between himself and Cosima; all that he says is that "on the 16th August the Bülows left; Hans was dissolved in tears, Cosima was gloomy and silent." If it were not for the tragedy of it, the situation would be decidedly piquant: Wagner, on the very eve of his severance from one man's wife, finding some consolation in the look that another man's wife gives him, and assuring us,--or was it simply Cosima, his unofficial wife and amanuensis of the hour, that he was assuring?--that all the passion he poured out so eloquently to Mathilde in the days that followed the separation vanished from him, in 1863, "like a wild dream" at another look from Cosima. One could understand the elevated affection he felt for this remarkable woman ousting the smokier memories of Friederike Meyer and Blandine Ollivier and the maid-servant Marie, but hardly the luminous figure of Mathilde Wesendonck. Could he really forget so easily, or did he only imagine he forgot, or did he simply wish Cosima to believe he had forgotten? But alas, he forgot Cosima too when she was away from him. As we have seen, during his stay at Frau Wille's at Mariafeld, after his flight from his Vienna creditors (March 1864) he had it in his mind to restore his broken finances by means of a rich marriage.[226] Kapp conjectures that the lady he had in view was Henriette von Bissing, the sister of Frau Wille. (She had recently been left a widow, with a considerable fortune.) It is certain that Frau von Bissing and he had been drawn very close together at the end of 1863. When he went to Breslau in November, he tells us, she put up at the same hotel, listened sympathetically to his story of his woes and his financial difficulties, and dissuaded him from his projected Russian tour, promising to give him "the not inconsiderable sum necessary to maintain me in independence for some time to come."[227] But she found some difficulty in getting the needful funds from her family, "from whom she was meeting with the most violent opposition, apparently spiced with calumnies against myself." Plunged more and more deeply into debt, he at last appeals point blank to the lady for "a clear declaration not as to whether she _could_ help me at once, but whether she _would_, as I could no longer stave off ruin." "She must," he says, "have been very deeply wounded by something that had been told her of which I knew nothing, for her to be able to bring herself to answer somewhat to this effect--'You want to know finally whether I will or will not? Well then, in God's name, No!'" He accounts for this answer afterwards, as might be expected, by "the weakness of her not very independent character," particulars of which he had had from Frau Wille.[228]

Knowing him as well as we do, and knowing his trick of explaining every unpleasantness in other people's conduct towards him in a way that lays the blame with them rather than with himself, we can hardly accept his own account of the affair as the last possible word on the subject. It would be interesting to have Frau von Bissing's version of it. But if he has given us the events in their true sequence, Kapp's theory is untenable, for the rupture with Frau von Bissing must have taken place before the Mariafeld conversation on the subject of a divorce. It is not impossible, however, that he is anticipating the story of the severance from Frau von Bissing by a page or two.[229]

In May 1864 came his dramatic rescue by King Ludwig. His financial troubles were, for a time, at an end. And now the stage was clear for the last act of the drama in which he and Cosima were the principal actors. As the autobiography ends with the summons to Munich by King Ludwig, we are henceforth without any guidance from Wagner himself. We can imagine, however, that for a man of his temperament the necessity for feminine companionship soon became urgent. Minna was now out of the question; his other flames--Mathilde Wesendonck, Friederike Meyer, Mathilde Maier, Henriette von Bissing--had one by one died out. Only Cosima remained; and for the man who, with the turn of his fiftieth year, began to love with his reason more than with his senses, the masterful Cosima was obviously the one woman in the world for him. She had apparently never loved Bülow, nor he her; we are told that his marriage with her was an act of chivalry on his part, due to the desire to legitimise in the eyes of the world the illegitimate daughter of the Liszt whom he so admired and loved. The truth seems to have slowly dawned on Cosima that it was her mission in life to tend the buffeted composer of genius. He must have admired her both for her insight and her indomitable will; and no admirer of Wagner would grudge him the splendid instrument for his purposes that came to him in Cosima after so many years of delusion and disappointment. But it is tolerably clear that the pair, in the egoism of their devotion to each other, acted with a total lack of regard either for Bülow's feelings or for his position in the eyes of the world. In 1864, Bülow, at Wagner's request, sent Cosima and his own child to keep the lonely musician company in his Starnberg villa; and apparently at this time all barriers between the two were broken down, though their love for each other was still concealed from Bülow, who came to them in July at Wagner's request. Wagner persuaded the King to appoint Bülow his Court pianist--his avowed object being to rescue Hans from his unpleasant artistic surroundings in Berlin, the real object, as Kapp says, being "to keep the beloved woman near him."

In October Wagner settled in the Munich house placed at his disposal by the King, and the Bülows took up their residence in the capital in the following month. Cosima constituted herself Wagner's secretary and general woman of affairs, two rooms being provided for her in his house, where she worked for several hours each day. On the 10th April 1865, a daughter, Isolde, was born to Cosima. Bülow believed the child to be his own,[230] and Wagner became its godfather. In reality the child was Wagner's own. (A second child, Eva, was born to them 18th February 1867 at Tribschen; Siegfried was born 6th June 1869.)

On the 25th January 1866 Minna died in Dresden. As soon as Cosima heard of it, Cornelius tells us, she telegraphed to Wagner, who was in Geneva at the time, asking whether she should come at once to him; he advised her to wait. But while Bülow was on a concert tour in March she went to Geneva and stayed three weeks with Wagner. His unpopularity in Munich had made it imperative for the King, however unwillingly, to request him to leave the city. He and Cosima now looked out for a Swiss refuge, and at the end of March found the ideal retreat in Tribschen, near Lucerne. There Cosima joined him, with her children, on the 12th May 1866. A letter from Wagner to her arrived in Munich after she had left. "It was opened by Bülow, who thought it might contain something that it would be necessary to telegraph to his wife; it revealed to him the whole bitter truth."[231] His position was an unenviable one, Munich gossip already making very free with his name. He went to Tribschen, and learned that Cosima was resolved not to return to him. He agreed to a dissolution of the marriage, but stipulated that, out of regard for himself, and to give pause to the malice of the world, Cosima should not be united to Wagner for another two years, which time she was to spend with her father in Rome. She refused him this concession; and Bülow, after remaining in the house two months, in the hope of giving a _démenti_ to Munich tittle-tattle, retired to Basle, leaving his family with Wagner.

In April 1867 King Ludwig appointed Bülow Court Kapellmeister. At the same time the King asked Wagner to superintend some projected performances of _Lohengrin_ and _Tannhäuser_, which necessitated his frequent visits to Munich. Apparently to save appearances, Cosima took up her abode for a time with Bülow at his house in the Arcostrasse, where two rooms were always ready for Wagner's use. But gossip and calumny only raged all the more fiercely, both in the town and in the press. It was openly said of Bülow that he owed his appointment at the Court "to his complaisance as a husband"; and at the end there was nothing for it but for Wagner and Cosima to retire together to Tribschen, and cut the last traces that bound them to Munich and convention. Deeply wounded, Bülow found it impossible to continue his work in the town: he resigned his appointment in June 1869, sent his own two children to Cosima, and went out alone into the world.[232]

The conduct of Wagner and Cosima led to a long estrangement between them and Liszt, and a cooling of other friendships; the King, too, pointedly showed his displeasure. Wagner, in his Tribschen retreat, turned his back angrily upon everyone who disapproved of him, and immersed himself in _Siegfried_ and _The Twilight of the Gods_. On the 6th June 1869 the birth of a son, Siegfried, sent him into the seventh heaven of delight. Cosima's marriage was dissolved, on Bülow's suit, on 18th July 1870; and on the 25th of the following month she was married to Wagner.

It is a thousand pities that Wagner himself has left us no account of the Bülow-Cosima affair. No one who has followed him thus far with me can doubt that he would have made himself, as usual, the suffering hero of the piece, that his intentions and his acts would have been strictly honourable from first to last, and that Bülow would somehow or other have been put in the wrong, as all the other friends and enemies were who happened to cross his path. The interesting thing would have been to see how he managed this.

XIV

I have given the erotic history of Wagner in such detail not only because of the enormous part the erotic played in his life and in the shaping of his character, but because to know him thoroughly from this side is to have the key to his whole nature. Nowhere and at no time was a middle course possible for him. It was all or nothing. To that extent he was consistent: yet viewed in detail he was a bundle of inconsistencies,--at once a voluptuary and an ascetic, a hero and a rogue, a saint and a sinner, always longing for death, yet always fighting lustily for his life, despising the public and pining for seclusion, yet unable to live anywhere except in the very centre of the stage and the full glare of the limelight. Frau Wesendonck once reproached him very gravely and wisely with his inconsistency in this last regard: "The wretchedness of your state of mind froze my blood. I felt I could do nothing. I was to tell myself that all the gifts of nature, even the most glorious, are wasted if they are not crowned by empty external success; that they are futile in and for themselves, and he who has them above others possesses only the right to be more wretched than they! It made me almost bitter to think you would have me believe that.... It is quite incomprehensible to me how anyone can at once despise and seek mere success, _i.e._ applause. It seems to me that only the sage, who asks nothing of the world, may despise it; the man who uses it becomes its accomplice by mere contact with it, and can no longer be its judge. You are at once a knower (_Wissender_) and accomplice in the last degree. You hurriedly grasp at every new deception, apparently to wipe out from your breast the disappointment of previous deceptions; and yet no one knows better than yourself that it never can or will be. Friend, how is this to end? Are fifty years' experience not enough, and should the moment not come at last when you are wholly at one with yourself?"[233]

He knew no law of life except the full realisation, of himself at the moment. He was by turns Christian and Freethinker and Christian again, republican and royalist, lover of Germany and despiser of Germany, anti-Semite (in theory), and pro-Semite (in practice);[234] but in each of his many metamorphoses he was sincerely convinced that he was not only right as against all the world, but right as against the Wagner of earlier years. Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Hafiz, and heaven knows who besides, were in turn the one great philosopher the world has known. In later life he becomes a vegetarian: it therefore went without saying that all mankind should forthwith abjure meat. He has the sense to recognise that a flesh diet is imperative for most people in a climate like that of Northern Europe. But a little difficulty of this kind does not daunt him; all that European humanity has to do, he tells us, is to migrate into other parts of the world.[235] He gives us, in 1851 and 1856, two divergent interpretations of the philosophies that underlie _Tannhäuser_ and the _Ring_. He of course explains it all by the fact that in his "intellectual ideas" he was at first working in opposition to his "intuitive ideal." The truth is that in 1851 he was still something of an optimist, while in 1856 he had become a pessimist with Schopenhauer.[236]

The many contradictions of his character have of course made him the easy butt of the satirists.[237] In 1877 there were published in the Vienna _Neue Freie Presse_[238] a series of letters of his to the milliner Bertha, who made him his wonderful lace shirts and satin trousers[239] and dressing-gowns, and decorated his Penzing rooms (and later his house at Tribschen) with the soft luxurious stuffs and colours he so loved. The witty editor of the Letters, Daniel Spitzer, twitted him on the inconsistency between his acts and his opinions, between his art and his life. Who would believe, he asks, that the man who indulged in these effeminacies was the same man who used to sneer in his books at the seductions of Paris: who, in his _Opera and Drama_, reproached Rossini with "living in the lap of luxury," called him the "luxurious son of Italy," and even, in a moment of towering virtue, styled him an "ausgestochene Courtisane"; or that the Wagner who, in the deplorable squib he wrote upon the French nation after its downfall in 1871, sneered at the French for their passion for bouquets, was himself ordering bouquets and rose garlands of the most extravagant kind from the Putzmacherin?

The man, in truth, who wrote with such a comic rage against the rich and their luxury, was himself the most luxurious of mankind. He may have admired the Spartan virtues of the poor, but he had not the least wish to practise them himself. He could not exist without a certain amount of pampering both of body and of soul, even in the days when, unable to make both ends meet, he was living on the charity of certain friends and borrowing at every opportunity from others. "It is with genuine desperation that I always pick up art again," he writes to Liszt on the 15th January 1854; "if I am to do this, if I am once more to renounce reality,--if I am to plunge again into the woes of artistic fancy in order to find tranquillity in the world of imagination, my fancy must at least be helped, my imaginative faculty supported. I cannot live like a dog; I cannot sleep on straw and refresh myself with bad liquor. My excitable, delicate, ardently craving and uncommonly soft and tender sensibility must be coaxed in some ways if my mind is to accomplish the horribly difficult task of creating a non-existent world."[240] A few days after it is the same story; he must have money by hook or by crook. Liszt will understand him,--though it will be "impossible for a Philistine to comprehend the exuberance[241] of my nature, which in these and those moods of my life drove me to satisfy a colossal inner desire by such external means as must seem to him questionable,[242] and at all events unsympathetic. No one knows the needs of men like us: I myself am often surprised at regarding so many 'useless' things as indispensable."[243]

He grew more and more luxurious in middle age. The scale of expenditure revealed in the _Putzmacherin_ letters, and a stray piece of information or two from other quarters, give us a hint of his recklessness in the early 'sixties,--a recklessness that brought him so near the verge of absolute ruin that it is terrible to think what might have happened to him had not King Ludwig come to his rescue. For the Christmas of 1863 he had, as is usual in Germany, a Christmas tree loaded with gifts for his friends. For a man without any income to speak of, very dubious prospects, and a grievous load of debt, his presents were magnificent. "The mad Wagner," says Cornelius in a letter to his sister Susanne (Vienna, 11th January, 1864), "had a great Christmas tree, with a royally rich table beneath it for me. Just imagine: a marvellous heavy overcoat--an elegant grey dressing-gown--a red scarf, a blue cigar-case and tinder-box--lovely silk handkerchiefs, splendid gold shirt studs--the _Struwelpeter_--elegant pen-wipers with gold mottoes--fine cravats, a meerschaum cigar-holder with his initials--in short, all sorts of things that only an Oriental imagination could think of. It made my heart heavy, and the next day I gave away half of them, and only then was I happy,--to Seraphine the gold studs, to Ernestine a lovely purse with a silver thaler, to Gustav Schönaich a sash, to young Ruben the cigar-holder, to Fritz Porges the pen-wiper, something to each of my house people, a yellow handkerchief to Marie, a red one to Frau Müller, ... to Herr Müller the tinder-box, to Karl Müller a new waistcoat from myself, in place of which I kept the one from Wagner."[244] All this was for Cornelius alone; no doubt his other guests were treated in equally generous fashion. We happen to have his own account of this affair; it is delightful. "Having very little ready money, but solid hopes,[245] I could now greet my few friends with tolerable good humour.... On Christmas Eve I invited them all to my house, had the Christmas tree lighted up, and gave each of them an appropriate trifle."[246]

With tastes and habits of this kind it is no wonder that he accumulated enormous debts, and came to be regarded by all his friends as perfectly hopeless on the financial side. King Ludwig gave him, as we have seen, 15,000 gulden with which to return to Vienna, to satisfy the more pressing of his creditors and to make arrangements with the others. He took up his Munich residence in the Briennerstrasse (No. 21), in October 1864, and sent for the _Putzmacherin_ Bertha to drape and decorate it for him according to his liking, and to provide him with the satin dressing-gowns, trousers, &c., &c., that he loved, paying her, of course, now and then when funds were more than usually plentiful.[247] His manner of living in Munich may be guessed from the fact that he was threatened with a writ on the day of the projected first performance of _Tristan_ (15th May 1865);[248] while in October of the same year he was compelled to borrow another 40,000 gulden of the King.[249] He soon earned in Munich the reputation of a reckless spendthrift, a reputation that has never left him. It is sometimes said that the standard of domestic comfort was so low among the good Müncheners of that epoch that a very modest expenditure upon fineries may have seemed to them a Capuan indulgence in luxury.[250] But the details of the fitting-up of one of his rooms in the Briennerstrasse are proof enough that he was giving full rein to his sybaritic tastes. "In the middle of the first floor was a large room containing Wagner's grand piano. On the right a door led into the so-called Grail or Satin Room, which was about 3½ m. high, 4½ broad, and 5 deep [roughly 11½ feet by 14½ feet by 1½ feet]. The walls were covered with fine yellow satin, which was finished off above with yellow vallances of the same material. The two blunt corners of the long wall that faced Count von Schack's house were broken by iron galleries, making artificial recesses. These, about 70 cm. deep (about 28 inches), were covered with rose-coloured satin in folds. Each of the iron galleries was covered with two wings of white silk tulle, trimmed with lace. The white curtains and the draperies were also adorned with delicate artificial roses. The room was lighted by a window at the small side at the left of the entrance. The curtains of this window were of rose-coloured satin, garnished with interlaced red and white satin draperies.... The top of the window curtain, the frame of the mirror [on one of the walls], and that of the picture [on another wall], were draped with rose-coloured satin, tied back with white satin bows. The ceiling was entirely covered with richly festooned white satin, then divided diagonally from one corner to the other with ruches of pearl grey satin of about 14 cm. wide (about 6 inches). The ceiling was also bordered on all four sides with similar pearl grey ruches; these were sown with artificial roses. The middle of the ceiling was decorated with a rosette of white satin, about 30 cm. (12 inches) in circumference and 25 cm. (10 inches) deep, trimmed with narrow silk lace and with roses like the others on the ceiling. The ground was covered with a soft Smyrna carpet. In the middle of the room was a soft and elastically upholstered couch, covered with a white flowered moire."[251] Satin, I believe, was much more expensive in the 'sixties than it is now; but any lady reader will be able to make an approximate estimate of the expense of fitting up such a room. No one to-day, of course, will presume to pass moral censure upon him for his love of luxury. Every sensible man surrounds himself with all the luxury he can procure. The remarkable features in Wagner's case are the uncontrollable nature of the desires that urged him to their gratification at anyone's or everyone's expense, and the dualism of soul that permitted him equally to evoke primeval heroes and to expound the doctrine of renunciation from the centre of a bower of satin.

Bülow once confessed to Weissheimer that he could not make out how Wagner managed to get through so much money. The secret apparently was that he had to indulge himself liberally in luxuries in order to put into practice his doctrine of renunciation. Here is an instance given us by Weissheimer himself from the dark days of 1862. Through the non-performance of _Tristan_ at Vienna, Wagner had been disappointed of the expected honorarium, which, as was usual with him, had been squandered in advance.

He had been in the habit of giving splendid dinners after the concerts to his friends and the chief performers; and his hotel-keeper had a two months' bill against him for food and lodging. "One evening when Tausig and I were with him, he bemoaned and lamented his wretched condition. We listened to him sympathetically, and sat miserably on the sofa, while he paced up and down in nervous haste. Suddenly he stopped and said, 'Here, I know what I need,' ran to the door, and rang vigorously. Tausig whispered to me, 'What's he up to? He looks just like Wotan after he has come to some great resolution.' The waiter came in sight slowly and hesitatingly--these people soon see how the wind is blowing--and was no less astonished than we when Wagner said, 'Bring me at once two bottles of champagne on ice!' 'Heavens above--in this state!' we said when the waiter had gone out. But Wagner gave us a fervid dissertation on the indispensability of champagne precisely when a situation was desperate: only _this_ could help us over the painfulness of it."[252]

Glasenapp tells how in the very last years of his life he could not work unless surrounded by soft lines and colours and perfumes. His almost morbid sensitivity multiplied enormously the ordinary pleasant or unpleasant sensations of touch and of sight. When in a difficulty with his composition he would stroke the folds of a soft curtain or table-cover till the right mood came. Not only the fabrics but the lines about him had to be melting, indefinite: he could not endure even books in the room he was working in, or bear to let his eyes follow the garden paths; "they suggested the outer world too definitely and prevented concentration." Among scents he particularly loved attar of roses, which he used to get direct from Paris--sent to him, however, under the fictitious name and address of "Mr. Bernard Schnappauf, Ochsengasse, Bayreuth," his barber obtaining delivery of it for him.[253] Such was the creator of the heroic, athletic boy Siegfried,--this poor little sickly, supersensitive, self-indulgent being who could hardly deny himself the smallest of his innocent little voluptuousnesses. The antinomy would be unresolvable did we not know from a hundred other cases that art is not life, and that the artist may be very different from his art. The Grand Duke of Baden once wounded Wagner deeply by declaring that he "could distinguish between the work and the man."[254] We have often to make that distinction with Wagner.

XV

At once a Spartan and a voluptuary in body, ready to endure many miseries rather than live any kind of life but the one he desired to live, yet unable to deny himself all sorts of luxuries even when he had not the money to pay for them, he was both a Spartan and a voluptuary in the things of the mind. He cut himself adrift uncompromisingly, even with rudeness, from people he disliked, even though they for their part were not ill-disposed towards him and might have been useful to him. But to his friends he clung with the same hungry passion as to his silks and satins and perfumes, and, it must be confessed, for the same reasons,--because they warmed and refreshed and soothed him. He loved his friends, but for his own sake, not for theirs. This may seem a harsh judgment of him, but his letters and his record admit of no other reading. With his lust for domination, he could never endure independence in anyone round about him. This was Nietzsche's great offence, that he dared to think his own way through life, instead of falling into the ranks and becoming simply the instrument of Wagner's will.[255] We have seen Wagner commending this person and that for their "devotion," their "fidelity" to himself, and becoming pettishly angry with Cornelius and Tausig for not coming to him the moment he wanted them. In his old age he was as insistent as ever that no one in his circle should follow a desire of his own if it clashed with his. In the later Wahnfried days he used to go through Bach's preludes and fugues in the evenings, expatiating upon each of them to an admiring company. One night he was deeply displeased at young Kellermann for having absented himself from Wahnfried, having preferred to go to some concert in the town; Wagner "got violently excited over it, and regretted afterwards that he could not 'give it to' anyone quietly and calmly, on which account he would rather avoid doing so altogether. On this day it was a long time before we could get to the 'Forty-eight.'"[256]

The unique correspondence with Liszt thrills us in its better moments even to-day; yet it can hardly be doubted that he loved Liszt selfishly, for the intellectual and emotional warmth his colleague brought into his life. He needs Liszt, we can see, in order that he may talk about and realise himself. After the Wesendonck rupture, in 1858, he goes to Venice. In September Liszt is in the Tyrol with the Princess von Wittgenstein and her daughter. Wagner writes him on the 12th September, asking him, as he is so near, to come to him at Venice, Liszt having been unable to accept a previous invitation to visit him at Zürich, owing to his having to attend the Jena University Jubilee celebrations. There had been some misunderstanding over another proposed meeting-place, and Liszt did not go to Venice. Thereupon Wagner becomes very angry, as usual, and actually writes to this man, to whom he owed such infinite benefactions, in the same half-grieved, half-accusing tone that he adopted towards Tausig. "Your letter of 23rd ult. ... awoke in me the hope that I should soon be able to see you and speak to you. But I doubt whether my letter to you to that effect, addressed to you at the Hôtel de Bavière, Munich, reached you in time, for I have neither seen you nor had an answer from you. I now fear that my desire to tell you of many things by word of mouth will not be realised; so I write, as I feel I owe you an explanation with regard to certain points that have not been clear to you. Altogether it cannot amount to much; in conversation it might have been more.

"I will not enlarge upon the moral necessities for my departure from Zürich; they must be known to you, and perhaps I may assume that Cosima or Hans has told you enough about them. To remain in Zürich under the previous conditions was not to be thought of; I had to carry out without any further delay a resolution made some months before. Each new day brought with it new and intolerable torments; only my departure could end them. From day to day I had to postpone this, however, for lack of the necessary means; I had to provide my wife with money, and make our definitive departure from Zürich possible by settling accounts, &c., that otherwise I should not have had to settle until the New Year. It was an unspeakable agony to go through day after day hoping in vain for money to arrive, and to see the troubles and torments that were the cause of my delay increasing. For you to have come to me suddenly at this time would have been a heavenly consolation for me and everyone involved in the conflict.

"You had to attend to University celebrations, &c., which, pardon me for saying so, appeared incredibly trivial to me in the mood I was in then. I did not press you any more, and was angry with Bülow for pressing you; but I must confess that when at last I received the news of your coming on the 20th, I had already become indifferent (_unempfindlich_) about it."[257]

In short, he was in trouble, thought that Liszt would be able to console him, and was angry with him for not coming to him at the instant he needed him. Liszt, always long-suffering and courteous, chides him gently in his reply of the 9th October.

"Another point in your letter, dearest Richard, has almost hurt me, though I can quite understand that you, in the midst of the griefs and agitations that embittered your last days in Zürich, should think the official impediments in the way of my coming to Zürich 'trivial,' and that you should not attach sufficient importance to the Jena University Jubilee and to the many considerations which I have to observe with regard to the Grand Duke,--were it only in order that I may be useful to you now and then in small matters. In a calmer mood, however, you will easily understand that I cannot and ought not to leave Weimar at every moment, and you will certainly feel that the delay of my journey to Zürich was not motived by any sort of 'triviality.' When I wrote that I should be with you on the 20th August I took it for certain that even in case of your earlier departure from Zürich you would appoint some other place. Lucerne or Geneva, for our meeting. I came to the conclusion which, however, I gladly put aside on your assurance, although, as I told you a little while ago, for years I have had to endure many incredible and deeply wounding things from the Countess d'Agoult.

"Enough of this, dearest Richard; we shall remain what we are,--inseparable, true friends, and such another pair will not be found soon."[258]

But Wagner was unappeasable. He does indeed write back to Liszt in cordial terms--"Thanks, dear friend! After the profoundest solace through the noblest, tenderest love that fell to my lot [_i.e._ Mathilde Wesendonck], your beautiful friendship alone can make any impression on me."[259] But that he still cherished some rancour against Liszt is evident from the account he gives of the episode in _Mein Leben_, written some years later. Liszt had carefully explained that he could not come to Zürich just at the time Wagner wanted him. That is not sufficient for Richard. Liszt had no right to have other engagements or other wishes when _he_ had need of his society; when _he_ was in tears, was it not the duty of the heavens themselves to weep with him? "It seemed to me that there must be one human being specially qualified to bring light and solace, or at all events tolerable order, into the confusion that enveloped us all. Liszt had promised us a visit; he stood so fortunately outside these dreadful relations and conditions, knew the world so well, and had in such a high degree what is called '_aplomb_' of personality, that I could not help feeling he was just the man to approach these discords in a rational spirit.[260] I was almost inclined to make my last resolutions depend on the effect of his expected visit. In vain we urged him to hasten his journey: he gave me a rendezvous for a month later at the Lake of Geneva"![261] It is clear that he thought Liszt still in the wrong in not setting everything aside in order to fly to _him_ at once.

A year later he is sending Liszt congratulations on his birthday, and talking very beautifully about friendship. It soon becomes clear, however, that he is using the word in a sense of his own. "Your friendship is an absolute necessity for me; I hold on to it with my last vital strength. When shall I see you at last? Have you any idea of the position I am in,--what miracles of love and fidelity I need in order to win ever new courage and patience? Ponder upon this yourself, so that I need not say it to you! You _must_ know me sufficiently now to be able to say it to yourself, although we have not lived much together."[262]

To this Liszt evidently replied that he could not come to Paris just then for any length of time, but that he would be glad to meet Wagner in Strassburg for a couple of days. This proposal Wagner curtly rejects. "What will be the use, to me, of these Strassburg days? I have nothing hurried to say to you, nothing that makes a discussion necessary. I want to enjoy you, to live with you for a while, as we have hitherto lived so little with each other.... My poor deserted life makes me incapable of understanding an existence that has the whole world in view at every step. You must pardon me, but I decline the Strassburg meeting, greatly as I value the sacrifice you thereby offer me; it is just this sacrifice that seems to me too great at the price of a few hurried days in a Strassburg hotel."[263]

That is to say, he loved Liszt, and valued his friendship above everything else in the world; but he must have Liszt on his own terms and at his own time or not at all. He claimed the right to live his own life in his own way, while his friends were to stand by with their sympathies, their purses, their wives and daughters ready. Always hungering for the love and self-sacrifice of others, he never sacrificed for their sakes a single desire of his heart. And always there was the same honest, childlike inability to comprehend how people could be so cruel as to refuse him whatever he wanted. He was generous and honourable enough in his own way; he supported Minna's parents, for instance, and would never let Minna be without money if he could provide it. But his good qualities were those of a benevolent despot. He could be kind where kindness was compatible with power; but he could never be just to a personality too independent to be drawn into his orbit, nor could he ever understand other people's desire for independence as against himself. With a nature so self-centred as his, it was inevitable that at one time or other friend after friend should find it necessary to part company from him. No man ever had such friends; no man ever lost such friends; and he lost them all by placing too great a strain on their friendship, their finances, their rights or their independence. Cornelius once cut him to the quick with the remark that "he let his old friends drop,"--"whereas," says the faithful Glasenapp with unconscious humour, "he himself had the sad consciousness that _they_ had given _him_ up as soon as he had tried to lift them above the narrow confines of their 'independence,' and demanded of them more than they were capable of performing,--Herwegh, for example, and Baumgartner, and Cornelius, and Weissheimer, and Karl Ritter and others."[264] But these were not all,--there were also Liszt, King Ludwig, Bülow, the Wesendoncks, Wille, Madame Laussot, and many another besides from whom he was estranged permanently or for a time. All his life through he insisted on being the centre of his own universe. He saw and felt himself with exaggerated sensibilities; whatever happened to him was either a bliss or a woe above anything that could happen to ordinary mortals. Like Strindberg he imagines at one time that the whole world exists simply to hurt him; at another, it is a portent of happiness for the whole world because _he_ is happy. He cannot go through so simple an experience as becoming a father without feeling that an event of this kind happening to him is a vastly different thing from the superficially similar events that happen to ordinary people. He must call the child "Siegfried,"--the name of the ideal hero of his life's work. He must write a serenade for the wife who has conferred this dazzling wonder upon an astonished cosmos. Even the serenade is not enough; it must be accompanied by a poem in which the importance of the event for him and for music shall be made clear to everyone.[265] He dropped into verse at the slightest provocation; never could he repress his inborn impulse to pour himself out copiously upon any and every subject under the sun. Our old English poets used to write "Poems Upon Several Occasions." Wagner wrote poems upon every occasion. He could not even build himself a house without conferring a portentously symbolical title on it, and engraving a couple of lines of pompous doggerel over the lintel.

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_)[266] with me as well! In these matters my moral sense is incurably naïf. I would see nothing at all in it if the maiden were also to come to me, and were to be to me just what, with her pretty little nature, she can be. But how to find the 'terminus socialis' for this? Ach Himmel! It amuses me and it grieves me!" However, if Seraphine could not come, Cornelius was to come alone; and they two were henceforth to be inseparable.[267]

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 had let Tausig take you off to Geneva. You have never fully known how deeply this put me out of humour. Nothing of that sort must happen this time; but we must be open with each other, like men." He knew that Cornelius was working at his opera the _Cid_, and doubted whether he could do this as well in Wagner's proximity as apart from him.[268] Wagner will have it that Cornelius can work at the _Cid_ and he at his _Meistersinger_ in their common home; he is willing and anxious, indeed, to advise his friend about his opera. "Either you accept my invitation immediately," he concludes, "and settle yourself for your whole life in the same house with me, or--you disdain me, and expressly abjure all desire to unite yourself with me. In the latter case I abjure you also root and branch (_ganz und vollständig_), and never admit you again in any way into my life.... From this you can guess one thing,--how sorely I need _peace_. And this makes it necessary for me to know definitely where I stand: my present connection with you tortures me horribly. It must either become complete, or be utterly severed!"[269]

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 and artist, &c., &c." He saw Standhartner, who advised him, in case he did not mean to accept Wagner's invitation, not to go near him just then, as it would probably lead to a complete rupture. So Cornelius writes to Wagner between one and three in the morning, telling him that he could not settle in Munich now with anyone but his brother, but that when he has finished the _Cid_ he will be willing to live there in merry companionship with Carl and Wagner. No answer was vouchsafed to this letter. "Standhartner speaks to him again in my interest. Heinrich Porges writes him--'Reconciliation with Peter: otherwise--Egoist!' Thereupon he writes at once to Porges: 'do not visit me to-day,' and to Standhartner: 'do not come till to-morrow,' &c., &c., &c., and when they come next day he is gone! So that one can truly say that he has treated his best friends in Vienna like so many shoe-blacks.... He came in May 1861. This is the upshot of these three years!"[270]

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."[271]

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."[272]

That is the conclusion to which the study of Wagner's life and letters so often lead us.

XVI

In _Mein Leben_ he half-humorously admits another little failing of his--a passion for reading his own works to his friends.[273] With the production of each new work he feels that here is something that the whole world of thinking men must be hungry to see and hear; so he either has it printed at his own expense--little as he can afford such a luxury--or he calls his friends and acquaintances together and remorselessly reads it to them. In 1851 he read the whole of _Opera and Drama_ to his Zürich circle on twelve consecutive evenings! We have seen him reading the _Meistersinger_ poem in Vienna.[274] As soon as he has finished the poem of the _Ring_ (1853) he cannot rest until he has "tried it on the dog"; so he "decides," he tells us, to pay the Willes a visit and read it to the company there. He arrives in the evening, begins at once on the _Rhinegold_, continues with the _Valkyrie_ till after midnight, polishes off _Siegfried_ the next morning, and finishes with the _Götterdämmerung_ at night. The ladies "ventured no comment"; he attributes their silence to their having been very deeply moved. But the effort had worked him up to such a pitch of excitement that he could not sleep, and the next morning he left in a hurry, to the mystification of the company. A few weeks afterwards he reads the tetralogy on four successive evenings to a number of people in the Hôtel Baur. He publishes the poem privately in February 1853,--twenty-three years before the performance of the whole work--so anxious is this artist who despises our modern world, and shrinks from appealing to it, to keep in the very centre of that world's eye.

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_.[275] Only the most devoted admirers could have stood this kind of thing night after night; did any one of them dare to rebel, he no doubt met with the same fate as the audacious and irreverent Kellermann.[276]

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, when he was still crushed by the news of the tragic death of his great singer Schnorr von Carolsfeld, "and mine is a frightful monster. When he is hovering about me a catastrophe is in the air. The only time I have been on the sea I was very nearly shipwrecked; and if I were to go to America, I am certain that the Atlantic would greet me with a cyclone."[277] He himself was either all cyclone or all zephyr: intermediate weathers were impossible for him. In 1865 he spent the happiest days of his life rehearsing _Tristan_ in Munich. "He would listen with closed eyes to the artists singing to Bülow's pianoforte accompaniment. If a difficult passage went particularly well, he would spring up, embrace or kiss the singer warmly, or out of pure joy stand on his head on the sofa, creep under the piano, jump up on to it, run into the garden and scramble joyously up a tree, or make caricatures, or recite, with improvised disfigurements, a poem that had been dedicated to him."[278]

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 force unchained, like a volcano in eruption. Everything in him was gigantic, excessive."[279]

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."[280]

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."[281] And again: "He was egoism personified, restlessly energetic for himself, unsympathetic towards and regardless of others."[282]

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."[283]

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, "It is a high honour for me to live with the great Master,--but it is often beyond bearing."[284]

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 moments--blotted from my life at any price. I know not what Wagner may have been for others; but no cloud ever darkened _our_ sky." And again: "I suppose I know better than anyone the prodigious feats of which Wagner was capable, the fifty worlds of strange ecstasies to which no one else had wings to soar; and as I am alive to-day and strong enough to turn even the most suspicious and most dangerous things to my own advantage, and thus to grow stronger, I declare Wagner to have been the greatest benefactor of my life. The bond which unites us is the fact that we have suffered greater agony, even at each other's hands, than most men are able to bear nowadays, and this will always keep our names associated in the minds of men." "I have loved Wagner," he says in another place; and in another he speaks of "the hallowed hour when Richard Wagner gave up the ghost in Venice."[285]

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.

"MY GREAT AND DEAR FRIEND,--Cosima maintains that you would not come even if I were to invite you. We should have to endure that, as we have had to endure so many things! But I cannot forbear to invite you. And what is it I cry to you when I say 'Come'? You came into my life as the greatest man whom I could ever address as an intimate friend; you went apart from me for long, perhaps because I had become less close to you than you were to me. In place of you there came to me your deepest new-born being, and completed my longing to know you very close to me. So you live in full beauty before me and in me, and we are one beyond the grave itself. You were the first to ennoble me by your love; to a second, higher life am I now wedded in _her_, and can accomplish what I should never have been able to accomplish alone. Thus you could become everything to me, while I could remain so little to you: how immeasurably greater is my gain!

"If now I say to you 'Come,' I thereby say to you 'Come to yourself'! For it is yourself that you will find. Blessings and love to you, whatever decision you may come to!--Your old friend,

"RICHARD."[286]

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, three times offended, came three times back to him again. The more ingratitude they received from Wagner, the more zealously they thought it their duty to work for him. The hypnotic power that he everywhere exerted, not merely by his music but by his personality, overbearing all opposition and bending every one to his will, is enough to stamp him as one of the most remarkable of phenomena, a marvel of energy and endowment."[287]

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_]."[288]

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 was, should die before his time, before his whole work was done. He gambled superbly with life, and he won. In those twelve hazardous years he wrote two of the world's masterpieces in music. He played for great stakes in city after city, losing ruinously time after time, but in the end winning beyond his wildest dreams. He saw _Tristan_ and the _Meistersingers_ produced; he dictated his memoirs. And then he turns calmly again to the great work that had been so long put aside, takes it up as if only a day, instead of twelve years, had gone by since he locked it in his drawer, thinks himself back in a moment into that world from which he had been so long banished, and, still without haste, adds stone upon stone till the whole mighty building is complete. What a man! one says in amazement. What belief in himself, in his strength, in his destiny, in his ability to wait! And then, after that, the toil of the creation of Bayreuth, and the bringing to birth of the masterpiece, twenty-eight years after the vision of it had first dawned upon the eager young spirit that had just completed _Lohengrin_! Was there ever anything like it outside a fairy tale?

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:

[44] See _Mein Leben_, pp. 19, 20. Later on he speaks of "the importance the theatrical had assumed in his mind in comparison with the ordinary bourgeois life" (_Mein Leben_, p. 25).

[45] _Mein Leben_, p. 65.

[46] "He had it temperament like a watch-spring, easily compressed, but always flying back with redoubled energy," says Pecht, who knew him during the time of his appalling misery in Paris. Glasenapp, _Das Leben Richard Wagners_, i. 329.

[47] _Briefe an Apel_, p. 15.

[48] _Briefe an Apel_, p. 48.

[49] He is writing from Frankfort.

[50] Letter of January 21, 1836.

[51] He was twenty-one at this time, and evidently very like his later self.

[52] _Mein Leben_, p. 105.

[53] See the account of his quarrel with Wagner in Daniel Halévy's _Life of Friedrich Nietzsche_ (English translation), p. 167.

[54] This was true of him even as a boy of seventeen. He cared, he said, only for a companion who would accompany him on his excursions, "and to whom I could pour out my inmost being to my heart's content, without my caring what the effect might be on him" (_Mein Leben_, p. 50).

[55] _Mein Leben_, p. 282.

[56] _Mein Leben_, p. 368.

[57] Mr. Ashton Ellis (_Life of Wagner_, v. 126 ff.) has pointed out how many difficulties might have been avoided had Wagner taken the advice of some of his friends and called upon Davison, the critic of the _Times_. Wagner would have cleared Davison's mind of many misconceptions that had become current as to the aims of "Wagnerism" and his own attitude towards the older composers and Mendelssohn. Wagner's temper and his dislike of critics made him refuse. He refers to them _en masse_, in a letter to Otto Wesendonck, as "blackguards," and again (to Liszt) as "this blackguard crew of journalists." Mr. Henry Davison, in his biography of his father, the former musical critic of the _Times_, gives a reasonable enough explanation of the antipathy of the London press to Wagner in 1855. Berlioz was giving concerts in London at the same time. His music was as strange to English ears as Wagner's; but he was much more gently handled by the press. "The explanation," says Mr. Davison, "is not very difficult.... Berlioz had not written books in advertisement of his theories and himself. He had not attacked cherished composers--far otherwise. He had not studiously held aloof from the critics; on the contrary, he had courted and conciliated them. In fine, with all the peculiarities of an irritable, extraordinary, and self-conscious mind, Berlioz was polished, courteous and fascinating. Wagner was somewhat pedantic, harsh and uncouth" (Henry Davison, _From Mendelssohn to Wagner_, p. 180).

[58] The charge was indignantly repudiated by Davison when it came to his ears. See the quotation from the _Musical World_ of May 12, 1855, in Ellis, v. 128 _n._ Davison replied to a letter of Wagner's to a Berlin paper (after the London concerts were over) in the _Musical World_ of September 22, 1855. (See Mr. Henry Davison's _From Mendelssohn to Wagner_, p. 175.) Wagner's readiness to bring these unfounded charges must make us regard with suspicion his unproved allegations against Meyerbeer and others.

[59] November 12, 1846.

[60] Glasenapp, ii. 171.

[61] It would be interesting to know how Mr. Ellis, who was _not_ present at the supper, is able to decide that the account of a man who _was_ present is "exaggerated," but still has "a grain of truth in it."

[62] How does Mr. Ellis know?

[63] _Mein Leben_, pp. 568, 569.

[64] See _Mein Leben_, pp. 627, 641, 656, 659, 662, &c.

[65] _Mein Leben_, p. 631.

[66] _Mein Leben_, p. 755.

[67] See the _Fortnightly Review_ for July 1905.

[68] It is less generally known that while Cosima was still the wife of Bülow she bore Wagner two daughters--Isolde, born in Munich on April 10, 1865, and Eva, born at Tribschen on February 10, 1867.

[69] It was the third case of the kind, though the Madame Laussot and Frau Wesendonck affairs apparently did not go so far.

[70] Wagner's candour about Minna contrasts strongly with the concealments the worshipping Wagnerian biographers practise with regard to the fact of his son Siegfried being born out of wedlock. At the end of the first volume of the Glasenapp _Life_, for example, is a genealogical table of the Wagner family from 1643. It ends thus:--

WILHELM RICHARD WAGNER (1813-83) Married (first) 1836, Christine Wilhelmine Planer (1814-66), secondly Cosima Wagner [_sic_], née Liszt (born 1837)

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.

[71] _Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck_, p. 273.

[72] _Ibid._, p. 372. The italics are Mr. Ellis's own. He does not offer any evidence in support of this charge. He merely remarks loftily that "it is too long an argument to set forth here."

[73] Wagner writes thus to Otto Wesendonck on the 25th June 1861, seventeen days before the letter to Mathilde: "In this anxious time [the Paris _Tannhäuser_ fiasco had occurred three months before, and his prospects were unusually black], when any resolution is impossible for me, and I am incapable of any mental effort, everything conspires to grieve me. The dear little dog that you once gave me died the day before yesterday, quite suddenly and in an almost inexplicable way. I had become so used to the gentle animal, and the manner of its death, everything, distressed me greatly." _Briefe Richard Wagners an Otto Wesendonck_, pp. 99, 100.

[74] "Nach dem Vorfalle," which may mean either "after the accident," or "after the occurrence."

[75] _Mein Leben_, pp. 765, 766.

[76] _Mein Leben_, p. 631.

[77] _Mein Leben_ had not been given to the world at the time Mr. Ellis wrote; but in the _Richard Wagner und die Tierwelt_ of the well-known Wahnfried partisan Hans von Wolzogen occurs this passage: "but the little dog died suddenly in the confusion of Paris, _perhaps poisoned_." (Quoted in Glasenapp, iii. 330.) These last words are probably due either to a private reading of the then unpublished _Mein Leben_, or to conversations in the Wagner circle. Again there is no evidence: we are simply left with Wagner's own words in _Mein Leben_ and the two Wesendonck letters.

[78] See, for instance, Mr. Ashton Ellis's Introduction to the English edition of the letters to Mathilde Wesendonck.

[79] Especially when the wife does not believe the husband on this point. As we shall shortly see, Minna had good reasons for doubting the purely ideal attitude of Wagner towards other women.

[80] Chamberlain actually tells us (_Richard Wagner_, Eng. trans., p. 65) that she was "personally unknown to Wagner." Glasenapp ignores the whole episode.

[81] _Mein Leben_, p. 429.

[82] _Mein Leben_, p. 510.

[83] _Mein Leben_, p. 515.

[84] See _Mein Leben_, p. 530, and his letter to Minna of February 13, 1850.

[85] She was about twenty-two years of age.

[86] _Mein Leben_, p. 516.

[87] One is reminded of his calm recitals of how he almost shouldered Otto Wesendonck and François Wille off their own hearths.

[88] One gathers from other sources that she had also got an inkling of the state of affairs in Bordeaux.

[89] _Mein Leben_, p. 519.

[90] Letter of March 17, 1850, to Minna.

[91] _Mein Leben_, p. 518.

[92] In the passage just quoted from _Mein Leben_ he says he returned "towards the end of April." This is demonstrably a slip of the pen for either "the end of March" or "the beginning of April." The true dates are clearly established by letters to Minna and to Liszt, and indeed by Wagner's own remarks, on the next page of _Mein Leben_, that "towards the middle of April" he left Paris for Montmorency.

[93] _Mein Leben_, pp. 519, 520.

[94] It may be argued that Wagner wrote _two_ letters about this time, that it was in the _second_ of these that he told Minna of his impending separation from her, and that this letter has been lost. This theory, however, is put out of court by the passage last quoted from _Mein Leben_. The "long and detailed letter" in which he retraced their married life is clearly that of the 17th April. It is significant that the letter of 17th April, as printed, terminates with the utmost abruptness and bears no signature. Has the ending been lost or suppressed?

[95] The letters to Minna were given to the world in two volumes in 1908, without any editor's name, and without a preface or a single explanatory note. It appears, however, from the publisher's preliminary announcement, that the editing was done by Baron Hans von Wolzogen.

[96] It is not improbable that he was deliberately trying to minimise the importance of the matter.

[97] "Durch meine nächste Umgebung." In the English version of the Wagner-Liszt letters this is rendered "by my immediate surroundings." Apparently Minna is meant.

[98] _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, i. 48.

[99] It will be remembered that he proposed to divide between Minna and himself the annuity of 3000 francs he was to receive from Frau Ritter and Mrs. Taylor. We can hardly imagine Wagner maintaining life on £60 per annum, even in Greece or Asia Minor; and he could hardly expect that Mrs. Taylor would continue the annuity after he had eloped with her married daughter.

[100] Letter of July 2, 1850, _Briefwechsel_, i. 49.

[101] Her father, by the way, _was_ an English lawyer. But as he had been in the grave for some time he could hardly be said, with a strict regard for truth, to be interested in Wagner's music, and to be advancing money on phantom assignments of the copyright of unwritten works.

[102] The people in whose private affairs he was thus confidently meddling were, on his own showing, "utter strangers," to him a few weeks before this. It would be interesting to have Laussot's opinion of _him_!

[103] According to his own account, which makes some demands on our credulity, he simply "rang the bell and the door sprang open: without meeting anyone I entered the open first floor, passed from room to room," &c. Julius Kapp cynically suggests that he must have been wearing the Tarnhelm.

[104] _Mein Leben_, p. 528.

[105] Letter of May 30, 1859: _Richard an Minna Wagner_, ii. 95.

[106] The Laussot story as told in _Mein Leben_ is another instance of the damage Wagner has done his own case by voluntarily going into the witness box to give evidence on his own behalf. The older biographers apparently know nothing of the Laussot affair. There is not a word of it even in the latest Glasenapp biography, though it is hard to believe that Glasenapp had never heard of it. (His work as a whole, with its copiousness and its general accuracy as to facts, suggests access to _Mein Leben_ before publication of the latter.) Reading his account of the Paris-Zürich excursion of 1850, indeed, in the light of our present knowledge, it is hard to resist the conclusion that he knows more than he is telling.

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.

[107] From his childhood he was extremely susceptible to women. His heart, he tells us, used to "beat wildly" at the touch of the contents of his sisters' theatrical wardrobe (_Mein Leben_, p. 21).

[108] _Autobiographische Skizze_, in _G.S._, i. 10.

[109] In the first edition (1852) there came after this a passage in which Wagner more than hints at sexual escapades in his youth. He deleted the passage from the second edition (1872), as also the following words after "moral bigotry of our social system"; namely,--"as what people call unfortunately to-be-tolerated vice." See Mr. Ellis's translation of the _Prose Works_, i. 396.

[110] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 253.

[111] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 256.

[112] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 256.

[113] _Mein Leben_, p. 109.

[114] _Mein Leben_, p. 110.

[115] He had been so certain in advance of the liveliness of the party that he had warned the landlord of possible damage to his furniture, for which he would be compensated.

[116] _Mein Leben_, p. 117.

[117] See _Mein Leben_, p. 117 ff.

[118] This letter is not included in the published volume of Wagner's correspondence with Minna, which commences with 1842. I quote it from Julius Kapp's _Richard Wagner und die Frauen: eine erotische Biographie_ (1912), p. 34. Kapp has had access to a large number of still unpublished Wagner letters.

[119] _Mein Leben_, p. 138.

[120] The bitterness of the later years seems to have affected Wagner's memory of the earlier ones. In _Mein Leben_ his thesis is that Minna was kind enough to him, but without love, and perhaps without the capacity for loving. That was not his opinion at the time, however. "Minna was here," he writes to Apel on 6th June 1835 from Leipzig, "and stayed three days for my sake, in the most dreadful weather, and without knowing a single other person, and without going anywhere, simply to be with me.... It is remarkable what influence I have acquired over the girl. You should read her letters; they burn with fire, and we both know that fire is not native to her" (_Richard Wagner an Theodor Apel_, p. 48).

[121] _Richard Wagner an Theodor Apel_, p. 62.

[122] _Mein Leben_, p. 146.

[123] _Mein Leben_, pp. 154, 155. At this point he digresses to give us the story of Minna's early life. From the age of ten she had had to help to maintain the family, her father having sustained misfortunes in business. She was a most charming girl, "and at an early age attracted the attention of men." At sixteen she was seduced; her child, Natalie, was always supposed during her life-time to be her younger sister. Minna went on the stage. She had no particular talent for acting, and saw in the theatre only a means of livelihood. According to Wagner she was "devoid of levity or coquetry," but used her powers of charm to make friends and obtain security of tenure in the theatre.

[124] _Mein Leben_, p. 157.

[125] He had soon accustomed himself, he says, not to talk of his ideal cravings before her. Uncertain of them himself as he was, he passed over this side of his life with a laugh and a joke. With the better part of him thus sealed up from her, it is no wonder they ultimately drifted apart.

[126] _Mein Leben_, pp. 157, 158.

[127] Cornelius, _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 698.

[128] _Mein Leben_, p. 158.

[129] He pleads guilty more than once to an offensive manner of speech when he was angry. We can dimly imagine what he was like in moments such as these. Hornstein, Nietzsche, and others had experience of it. Nietzsche's account of _his_ scene with Wagner has become classical. See Daniel Halévy's _Life of Friedrich Nietzsche_, Eng. trans., p. 167.

[130] _Mein Leben_, p. 166.

[131] It must be remembered, however, that we have only his account of all this. It is just possible that the accounts of the other actors in the episode might have given it a slightly different colour here and there.

[132] Printed for the first time in Julius Kapp's _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 143.

[133] Minna's letters of 28th October and 17th November 1840, in _Richard Wagner an Theodor Apel_, pp. 80-87.

[134] See _Mein Leben_, pp. 212, 213, 232. His feeling towards her seems to have hardened during their later residence in Dresden. In the first sketch of the _Flying Dutchman_ he gave the name of Minna to the redeeming heroine; and as late as 1845 he could speak warmly of her to Hanslick. When the latter praised Minna's good looks, Wagner said, "Ah, you can scarcely recognise her now. You should have seen her a few years ago. The poor woman has gone through much trouble and privation with me. In Paris we had a wretched time, and without Meyerbeer's help we might have starved" (Hanslick, _Aus meinem Leben_, i. 65, 66).

[135] Liszt also urged him to do this.

[136] He had apparently forgotten his promise (_Mein Leben_, p. 177) never to mention the affair to her again; and when he said in _Mein Leben_, "I can pride myself on having kept this resolution to the letter," he had evidently forgotten this epistle of May 18, 1859.

[137] See p. 68.

[138] _Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner_, ii. 92.

[139] See pp. 55, 56. He protests that she has been misinformed; the object of his "second journey to Bordeaux" was not to "abduct a young wife from her husband." So far as it goes, that statement is correct. The object of his _second_ journey, apparently, was merely to pacify Eugène Laussot. But he does not seem to have told Minna as much of his relations with Jessie Laussot as he has told the world in _Mein Leben_.

[140] No one would guess, for example, from _Mein Leben_ how much money had been put at his disposal and how much consideration had been shown him by Napoleon III and others during the Paris _Tannhäuser_ period.

[141] November 9, 1851; _Briefe_, i. 88.

[142] _Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner_, i. 302.

[143] Kapp, _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 65.

[144] Letter to Hermann Brockhaus of February 2, 1851, in _Familienbriefe_, p. 165.

[145] Minna objected energetically to the time he spent in writing prose instead of music. Between August 1847, when he finished _Lohengrin_, and the autumn of 1853 he seems to have written no music at all, though he was occupied with the text of the _Ring_.

[146] See, for example, Weingartner's tragic-comic account of his experiences, in his _Akkorde_.

[147] It is quoted in Kapp's _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 90, but without date or name of addressee. It is simply given as "addressed to a lady friend."

[148] Wagner, however, conducted some concerts at Zürich for a fee.

[149] _Richard Wagner an Eliza Wille_, p. 123.

[150] _Mein Leben_, p. 731.

[151] "I left Baden to fill up my time with a little trip to Zürich, where I again tried to get a few days' rest in the Wesendoncks' house. The idea of helping me did not occur to my friends, though I told them frankly of the position I was in." _Mein Leben_, p. 857.

[152] "Whereupon," he characteristically remarks, "I could not resist sending him a reply pointing out the wrongness of this." _Mein Leben_, p. 865.

[153] _Mein Leben_, pp. 866, 867.

[154] _Richard Wagner an Eliza Wille_, pp. 74, 75.

[155] _Familienbriefe_, pp. 189, 190. He recurs to the same idea in a letter to his sister Cäcile Avernarius of 30th December 1852: _Familienbriefe_, p. 194. See also the letter to Uhlig of December 1849, and other passages.

[156] "Und weil er so sei, wie er ihm erschiene." Mr. Ashton Ellis (_Wagner's Prose Works_, i. 341) translates this, "and because he was whate'er _she_ deemed him," reading, perhaps rightly, "ihr" for "ihm."

[157] _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 295.

[158] _Ibid._, p. 266.

[159] _Familienbriefe_, p. 279.

[160] _Familienbriefe_, pp. 217, 218. See also Wagner's letter to Mathilde in his diary of August 21, 1858: "What you have been and are to me these six years now."

[161] Robert von Hornstein, _Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner_, in the _Neue Freie Presse_ for 23rd and 24th September 1904 (written in 1884; Hornstein died in 1890). I have been unable to procure a copy of the article. My quotation is from Mr. Ashton Ellis's preface to his translation of the Wesendonck correspondence, p. lv. Hornstein adds, "he [Wagner] would turn sulky, hasty, perverse, never coarse. With one little word he might have thrust a poniard in the woman [Minna]; he never breathed it."

[162] Earlier in the month a child had been born to Mathilde. Hornstein tells us that at the christening he stood by Wagner's side. "He was very moody; all at once he muttered to himself, 'It is like attending one's own execution.'" Ellis, p. lviii.

[163] _Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonck_, pp. 44, 45.

[164] I do not know that Mr. Ashton Ellis is justified in assuming that "Wagner at last made his bosom friend [Liszt] a confidant and counsellor," on the basis of the letter to Liszt of [5?] November 1857 which he quotes: "Now take my hand, and take my kiss; a kiss such as you gave me a year ago, when you accompanied me home one night--you remember, after I had told my doleful tale to both of you. However much it may lose its impression on me,--what you were to me that night, the wondrous sympathy that lay in what you told me as we walked,--this heavenliness in your nature will follow with me, as my most splendid memory, to each future existence." (_Op. cit._, lvii.) What Mr. Ellis translates as "told my doleful tale to you both," is in the German "nachdem ich Euch bei Dir meine traurige Geschichte von Bordeaux erzählt" ("after I had told you both my mournful Bordeaux story"). _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, ii. 181. Wagner's confidence and Liszt's sympathy were apparently as much in connection with the Laussot affair as with the other. But the words "von Bordeaux" were suppressed in the first edition of the letters.

[165] In _Mein Leben_ Wagner tells the story of the purchase of the "Asyl" somewhat differently. There is not a word there of Wesendonck having been persuaded by his wife into buying the property for Wagner, or of the trouble in the Wesendonck household over him. See _Mein Leben_, p. 645.

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.

[166] I am well aware that he filled his letters with moanings about his "renunciation" and "resignation." But the words were little more than resounding literary counters for him, helping him to some of the best of his epistolary effects.

[167] _Mein Leben_, p. 654.

[168] _Mein Leben_, p. 667. In his Venice diary of September 18, 1858 (after his flight from the Asyl) he reminds her how she has placed her arm round him and declared that she loved him. See also under 12th October. On 1 January 1859 he speaks with ardent recollection of her caresses. On 1 November 1858 he tells her how sweet it would be "to die in her arms." If we are to die in the arms of all the women with whom our relations have been "merely friendly" we shall all of us need more lives than a cat.

[169] _Mein Leben_, pp. 658, 659.

[170] _Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonck_, p. 45. In the same winter he set to music the "Five Poems" of Mathilde.

[171] Kapp, _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 119.

[172] _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, ii. 184. This letter was omitted from the first issue of the Wagner-Liszt correspondence, and consequently will not be found in the English edition.

[173] Also published for the first time in the expanded edition (1910).

[174] _Ibid._, ii. 186.

[175] _Ibid._, ii. 188. This passage was suppressed in the previous editions of the Wagner-Liszt letters.

[176] Letter of 24 (?) January 1858, ii. 188 ff. That matters at Zürich had been on the verge of a crisis we may guess from a sentence in a previous letter (18-20 (?) January); in which Wagner speaks of it being necessary for him to go away in order to "give some appeasement to the sufferings of the good-natured man [Otto Wesendonck]," and that this being done he will return in a few weeks. All this, again, and more, was suppressed in the first issue of the correspondence. Truly the way of Wahnfried passeth understanding.

[177] Kapp, _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 123.

[178] I have ventured, here and elsewhere, to improve upon Minna's rather illiterate system of punctuation.

[179] "Mit seiner vortrefflichen Suade."

[180] Kapp, pp. 124, 125. Mr. Ellis wrongly conjectures the intercepted note to be the one quoted as No. 36 in the German edition of the Wagner-Wesendonck correspondence (No. 49 in the English edition).

[181] See the quotation on p. 86.

[182] In Mr. Ellis's translation of the letter (preface to the English edition of the Wagner-Wesendonck correspondence, p. ix.), this sentence is followed by "get well first, and let us have another talk then." I cannot find this sentence in the German edition of the _Familienbriefe_, p. 219.

[183] _Familienbriefe_, pp. 218 ff.

[184] Kapp, _op. cit._, p. 102. The remainder of the letter shows that while Frau Herwegh had a good opinion of Minna, she was not blindly prejudiced in her favour; and she was quite conscious that intellectually Minna was unfitted to keep pace with her husband's development. Her testimony to the excellency of Minna's heart and the hardness of her lot with Wagner is therefore all the more valuable. Wagner, it is hardly necessary to say, did not like Frau Herwegh.

[185] With all his sense of the intellectual and other divergencies between them, Wagner was not as a rule anxious to sever his life from Minna. He admits more than once that she was an excellent housewife, and specially expert in ministering to his comforts. After every dispute we find him setting up house with her again.

[186] Kapp, p. 127.

[187] See, for example, his letter of 1st November 1858 to the Dresden physician and friend Anton Pusinelli, to whose care he had entrusted Minna. _Bayreuther Blätter_, 1902, p. 98. "By periodical separations I have attained what I instinctively contemplate--namely, to place myself in a position to be able always to exert only a pacifying, conciliating influence upon her spirit. In view of the sad state of her health, this had been my only design during the time we lately lived together; but with a character as irritable as mine the agitation and excitement of the moment were too much for me now and then, as in general I too needs must truly suffer greatly during these eternal, useless and senseless vexations. Here, however, at a distance, I can choose the hour and the mood when I am fully master of myself, and have to achieve faithfully only my purpose, my duty." Letter of 18th November to Pusinelli; _ibid._, p. 100.

[188] He reminds us of Mr. Shaw's Prossy in _Candida_, who was only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.

[189] She has just given a distressing account of her sufferings from her heart disease.

[190] Kapp, pp. 129, 130.

[191] Kapp (p. 134) wrongly gives the date as 1850.

[192] Kapp, pp. 134, 135.

[193] Mr. Ashton Ellis, reading "liegt deutlich vor mir," instead of "vor dir," translates this "lies plain before _me_."

[194] See his letter of 19th August 1858, _Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner_, i. 296.

[195] _Ibid._, i. 299.

[196] The warrant for his arrest for his supposed complicity in the Dresden rising of 1849 was still in force.

[197] Italics mine.

[198] He had just had the Dresden physician's distressing report on Minna's health. In addition to her heart trouble and the nervous ravages made by laudanum, she was now said to be developing dropsy of the chest.

[199] Compare his letter to Pusinelli of 18th November 1858, quoted on p. 97.

[200] Otto Wesendonck provided the funds, giving Wagner 24,000 francs for the rights of the still unfinished _Ring_.

[201] _Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner_, ii. 139 ff.; _Bayreuther Blätter_, 1902, p. 101.

[202] According to Kapp (p. 159), Wagner's relations with her were the subject of much comment in Paris at that time, and were the reason for the Princess Wittgenstein--Liszt's companion--breaking off all intercourse with him and refusing to visit him in Paris in 1860. "An anxious silence upon this affair," Kapp remarks, "has been maintained in the Wagnerian literature, which was the easier inasmuch as all the passages relating to it in Wagner's letters have been suppressed before publication. Later publications will bring to light much interesting material."

[203] Except for a few days, they never lived together again. They kept up their correspondence, however.

[204] _Mein Leben_, p. 779.

[205] _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 157.

[206] He seems to have taken it rather ill of his friends that they should have been prosperous and happy while he was poor and disappointed and up to his eyes in difficulties of all kinds. See his account of the visit in _Mein Leben_, pp. 787, 788.

[207] Mathilde's character, like that of Wagner, has probably been slightly idealised for us by time. She had probably been less agreeable to the bourgeoise Minna than to her genius of a husband.

[208] _Mein Leben_, p. 798.

[209] Owing to his having ceased to correspond with the Wesendoncks, his changes of address were unknown to them. The box contained a present that Mathilde had sent him the preceding Christmas; after many journeyings it had been returned to her through the post. Having learned his Biebrich address, she sent it to him there. See his letter to Minna of 12th June 1862.

[210] _Mein Leben_, p. 806. See, however, his letter to Pusinelli of 1st July 1862, in _Bayreuther Blätter_, 1902, p. 103.

[211] _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 182. In a letter to his sister Clara of 11th July 1862, Wagner denies that the idea of a divorce proceeded from him, "obvious as it is, and excusable as it might be for me to indulge the wish to utilise my remaining years for the benefit of my work, by the side of someone sympathetic to me" (_Familienbriefe_, pp. 247, 248), which last remark probably refers to Mathilde Maier. In this letter he makes it clear that a reunion with Minna is out of the question. His idea was that she should have a small establishment of her own in Dresden, where he can visit her occasionally. In a letter to Minna of two days earlier he makes out that being unusually distressed as to her health--which was steadily worsening--he had sent Pusinelli to report upon her, but the physician had broached the question of divorce of his own accord (_Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner_, ii. 290). "Your believing that you were to understand the opinion he gave you of his own account as if I too entertained the idea of a divorce from you has greatly distressed me. Never has that entered _my_ head, and it never will." Whether or not it had entered his head at that time, it certainly entered it later. In less than two years he had to fly from his Vienna creditors to Mariafeld, near Zürich. He was at the very end of his resources, and was apparently a ruined man had not King Ludwig come to his rescue. Discussing his prospects with his hostess, Frau Wille, "we touched, among other things, on the necessity of obtaining a divorce from my wife, in order that I might contract a rich marriage. As everything seemed to me expedient, and nothing inexpedient, I actually wrote to my sister Luise Brockhaus, asking her whether she could not, in a sensible talk with Minna, induce her to be satisfied with her settled yearly allowance, and abandon her claim to my person" (_Mein Leben_, p. 866). This letter is not to be found in the _Familienbriefe_. It would be interesting to know whether it is one of the letters that Glasenapp speaks of as being "lost beyond recall," or has simply been suppressed.

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.

[212] Kapp, _op. cit._, p. 187. See Wagner's own account in _Mein Leben_, p. 828.

[213] _Mein Leben_, p. 828. Later on he said that his relations with Friederike had involved her in serious trouble. Friederike had apparently already been the mistress of von Guiata, the manager of the Frankfort theatre.

[214] Peter Cornelius, _Ausgewählte Briefe_, in _Literarische Werke_, i. 683.

[215] "Keep that in mind," he continues, "and your own griefs will seem less to you. They simply add to mine." _Richard Wagner an Minna Wagner_, ii. 310, 311.

[216] _Mein Leben_, p. 848. What was the subject of these reproaches it is impossible to say, as Minna's letters to him have not been published.

[217] It is a little difficult to know what he means by a resolution made "in the previous year." He corresponded with her a good deal in 1862, and we have a few of his letters to her of 1863. In one of these, dated 8th November 1863, he tells her that there is a possibility of his conducting a concert in Dresden on the 25th, and asks her if she can put him up. This letter is not included in the German edition. It was published in Adolf Kohut's _Der Meister von Bayreuth_ (1905), and a translation of it will be found in Mr. Ellis's English version of the letters to Minna, p. 787.

[218] _Mein Leben_, pp. 848, 849.

[219] See his letter to Frau Wesendonck of 3rd August 1863.

[220] _Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck_, p. 318.

[221] Kapp, _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 194.

[222] "Eine heftige Liebe." Mr. Ashton Ellis renders this "a sudden love."

[223] _Mein Leben_, p. 777.

[224] _Mein Leben_, p. 816. This was in the summer of 1862, just a year before the Marie episode.

[225] _Mein Leben_, pp. 858, 859.

[226] King Ludwig gave him 15,000 gulden with which to pay his debts in Vienna. Röckl, _Ludwig II und Richard Wagner_, Erster Teil, p. 33.

[227] _Mein Leben_, p. 861.

[228] _Mein Leben_, p. 863.

[229] In a letter to Peter Cornelius of the end of March 1864, addressed from Frau Wille's house at Mariafeld, he says that that lady, Frau Wesendonck and Frau von Bissing "love him equally: only Frau von Bissing was lately so very jealous (I had a suspicion of it!), that her behaviour towards me is only now, through that discovery, intelligible to me." Peter Cornelius, _Ausgewählte Briefe_, in _Literarische Werke_, i. 762.

[230] See his letter of 14th April 1865 to Dr. Gille, in _Hans von Bülow: Briefe_, iv. 24.

[231] Kapp, _Richard Wagner und die Frauen_, p. 222.

[232] He behaved afterwards with the greatest nobility to Wagner, raising by his concerts £2000 for the Bayreuth venture, though his presence at the Festival was of course impossible.

[233] Letter of 23rd September 1863: _Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonck_, p. 355.

[234] He never had any objection to accepting money from Jews, nor to calling on their assistance in the production of his operas. The first performance of _Parsifal_ was conducted by Hermann Levi.

[235] "If the assumption be correct that a flesh diet is indispensable in Northern climates, what is to prevent us from carrying out a rationally conducted emigration into such countries of the globe as, by reason of their luxuriant fertility, are capable of sustaining the present population of the whole world,--as has been asserted of the South American peninsula itself?... The unions we have in mind would have to devote their activities and their care--perhaps not without success--to emigration; and according to the latest experiences it seems not impossible that these northern lands, in which a flesh food is said to be absolutely indispensable, will soon be wholly abandoned to hunters of boars and big game...." _Religion und Kunst_, in _G.S._, x. 243.

[236] See _Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde_, in _G.S._, iv. 279, and the letter to Roeckel of 23rd August 1856; also a general discussion of the subject in Henri Lichtenberger's _Wagner, Poète et Penseur_, pp. 109-16.

[237] See, for example, the very prejudiced and rather foolish book of Emil Ludwig, _Wagner, oder die Entzauberten_ (1913).

[238] Afterwards in book form as the _Briefe Richard Wagners an eine Putzmacherin_. Vienna, 1906.

[239] We must always remember that his extremely sensitive and irritable skin made coarse fabrics intolerable to him.

[240] _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, ii. pp. 4, 5.

[241] "Das Überschwängliche meiner Natur." In the English version of the Correspondence this is rendered "the transcendent part of my nature."

[242] "Bedenklich"--rendered in Hueffer's version "dangerous."

[243] _Briefwechsel zwischen Wagner und Liszt_, ii. 10.

[244] _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 748, 749.

[245] He had just returned from the meeting with Frau von Bissing, at which she had undertaken to provide for him.

[246] _Mein Leben_, p. 862.

[247] The _Putzmacherin_ letters extend into the Lucerne period of 1886-7.

[248] Röckl, _Ludwig II und Richard Wagner_, Erster Theil, p. 151.

[249] The relations between Wagner and the King's ministers were already embittered at this time, and the King granted the loan against their wish. The Court Treasurer objecting to sending the money by a servant, Cosima had to call for it personally. He gave her the whole of the sum in silver coins, which she had to carry away in sacks, his object being to render the transport of it as public as possible, and so arouse popular feeling against the composer. The loan was repaid to the Munich Treasury by Wagner's heirs. See Röckl, _op. cit._, p. 197.

[250] See Ludwig Nohl, _Neues Skizzenbuch_, p. 146.

[251] Röckl, _op. cit._, pp. 245, 246.

[252] Weissheimer, _Erlebnisse mit Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt und vielen anderen Zeitgenossen_, 3rd ed., 1898, pp. 229, 230.

[253] Glasenapp, _Das Leben Richard Wagners_, vi. 154, 155.

[254] _Mein Leben_, p. 811.

[255] "Wagner has not the strength to make those around him free and great," he writes in his diary. "Wagner is not loyal; he is, on the contrary, suspicious and haughty." See Daniel Halévy, _Life of Friedrich Nietzsche_ (Eng. trans.), p. 130.

[256] Glasenapp, vi. 165.

[257] _Briefwechsel_, ii. 216, 217. This and several other passages in the letter were suppressed in the first edition of the correspondence. The Countess d'Agoult--the mother of Liszt's daughter Cosima--was visiting Wagner at the same time as Cosima and Hans. Apparently there had been some gossip as to Wagner's behaviour with her; and in this letter he indignantly protests against Liszt's "suspicions."

[258] _Briefwechsel_, ii. 222. The passage relating to the Countess d'Agoult was at first suppressed.

[259] _Briefwechsel_, ii. 294. The first part of the sentence, as far as "fell to my lot," was suppressed in the first edition of the letters, as well as the succeeding sentences,--"The love of a tender woman has made me happy: she can throw herself into a sea of sorrows and torments in order to say to me 'I love you,'" &c. &c. This was the lady with whom his relations were "merely friendly." The first edition of the Wagner-Liszt correspondence was systematically manipulated so as to keep from the reader all knowledge of the Wesendonck affair.

[260] The English version (p. 687) makes nonsense of this passage.

[261] _Mein Leben_, p. 674.

[262] Letter of 20th October 1859 (Paris), in _Briefwechsel_, ii. 275.

[263] Letter of 23rd November 1859, in _Briefwechsel_, ii. 276, 277.

[264] Glasenapp, vi. 139.

[265] See the poem _Siegfried-Idyl_, in the _G.S._, xii. 372.

[266] Seraphine Mauro. See p. 106.

[267] Cornelius, _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 640 ff.

[268] The gentle and honourable Cornelius--whom it obviously pains to have to say a word in disparagement of Wagner--knew that his only chance of developing his artistic nature along its own lines was to avoid coming too much under the influence of the much stronger personality of the older man; he should, he says, "hatch only Wagnerian eggs."

[269] Letter of 31st May 1854, in Peter Cornelius' _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 767.

[270] _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 770, 771.

[271] _Ibid._, i. 774.

[272] _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 784. At a later time Cornelius did yield to Wagner's solicitations and take up his abode for a time in Munich.

[273] All testimonies agree as to the extraordinary expressiveness and dramatic vivacity of his reading--as indeed of his conversation also. See Cornelius, _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 623, Weissheimer, _Erlebnisse_, pp. 89, 90, and Liszt's letter to the Princess Wittgenstein, in _Briefe_, iv. 145. His tumultuous conversation used to give King Ludwig a headache.

[274] He writes thus to Cornelius from Paris, at the end of January 1862: "Listen! On Wednesday evening, the 5th February, I am to read the _Meistersinger_ at Schott's house, in Mainz. You have no idea what it is, what it means for me, and what it will be to my friends! You must be there that evening! Get Standhartner at once to give you, on my account, the necessary money for the journey [from Vienna]. In Mainz I will reimburse you this, and whatever may be necessary for the return journey." See the letter in Cornelius' _Ausgewählte Briefe_, i. 643.

[275] Glasenapp, vi. 161.

[276] See p. 129.

[277] Edouard Schuré, _Souvenirs sur Richard Wagner_, p. 76.

[278] Röckl, _op. cit._, p. 133.

[279] Schuré, _op. cit._, pp. 54, 57.

[280] Liszt, _Briefe_, iv. 140, 145.

[281] Hanslick, _Aus meinem Leben_, ii. 11.

[282] _Ibid._, p. 12.

[283] Weissheimer, _Erlebnisse_, p. 128.

[284] Weissheimer, _Erlebnisse_, p. 392.

[285] _Ecce Homo_ (Eng. trans.), pp. 41, 44, 122, 97.

[286] Liszt's reply of the 22nd runs thus:

"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.

[287] _Aus meinem Leben_, ii. 12.

[288] Weissheimer, _Erlebnisse_, p. 391.