Chapter X: Act I: of Tristan, which he wanted to send to Frau Wesendonck: but (2)

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]