Chapter XI: Act I: of Tristan, which he wanted to send to Frau Wesendonck: but (3)

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.