Wagner as Man & Artist

by Ernest Newman

VI

The publication of Mein Leben, the Wesendonck letters, and the letters to Minna have made it possible to see both Wagner and Minna more in the round than we could do a few years ago. Not that any number of documents would ever bring reason into the writings of the more extreme Minnaphobes; their method in the future, as in the past, will no doubt be to insist that the composer was in every relation of his life as near impeccable as mortal man could be, and that Minna was very bad or very mad or a blend of both,—to belittle all the evidence that does not square with the demigod theory of Wagner, to sneer at the character and the intellectual attainments of everyone who seems to be a witness for the other side, and to declare effusively that the kind of evidence that does square with the demigod theory is "worth a hundred times" the testimony that does not.[78] It may soothe these good people—who always become infuriated at the mildest refusal to see Wagner through their spectacles—if we assure them that to believe that Minna was not so black as she is generally painted is not at all to hold that Wagner was an unmitigated villain. As a rule unmitigated villains exist only in fiction; the tragedies of married life among real human beings generally come not from deliberate and conscious turpitude on one side or the other, but from the mere friction of two quite normal characters who happen to be ill-adapted to each other in a few more or less trifling respects. Wagner was certainly no villain of the melodramatic sort. He could be kind enough to Minna at times; he certainly—when away from her—felt the acutest pity for her as well as for himself; and he could no more be consciously and intentionally cruel to her than to any other suffering creature. Yet an unprejudiced reader of the records can hardly doubt that he was often cruel unconsciously and unintentionally. It was Minna's misfortune to be the greatest obstacle to the realisation of himself along certain lines. Everyone who has studied Wagner knows how impossible it was for him to tolerate frustration anywhere. There probably never was a man so honest with himself in most ways. His art absorbed the whole of his nature. He knew what he wanted to do, and what he needed in order to do it; and for him to need a thing and to insist on having it were mental processes hardly separable from each other. At certain periods of his life it became an imperative necessity for him to win from other women the spiritual fervour, the idealistic glow, that were denied him at home. He once found what he wanted in Frau Wesendonck. To reach her he swept aside with calm indifference both his own wife and Frau Wesendonck's husband. With the blindness of perfect honesty, he could not see how Minna could regard the Mathilde Wesendonck affair from any other standpoint than his own. It seemed unreasonable of Minna to make such a pother over the matter after he had so carefully and fully explained to her that his relations with Mathilde were purely ideal. Why could not his wife keep home for him and be happy in administering to his physical comfort, and leave his intellectual and emotional appetites free to satisfy themselves where they would? As an abstract logical proposition the theorem had a good deal in its favour. It broke down through Minna declining to be thrilled by the beauty or the abstract logic of it. She saw herself simply as the wife neglected for another woman; it did not pacify her in the least to be told that so far as Wagner was concerned this other woman was an ideal rather than a reality,—that he sought her society less for what she was in herself than for something in the finest soul of him that came into being only when he talked to her. The average wife is not consoled for her husband's obvious preference of another woman by the assurance that his passion for the latter is free from any physical implications.[79] That is simply equivalent to telling the wife, in a roundabout way, that she has not intelligence enough to be his spiritual companion. It may be quite true that she has not; but the average wife is not likely to be pleased at being told so. Minna was an average wife, and she no doubt strongly objected to what could only appear to her as a criticism and a slight. Wagner had to choose between her feelings and his own satisfaction. He chose the latter, as he always did in these cases. His letters to her place it beyond dispute that his heart bled for her in her misery; but the demon within him forbade him to terminate the acquaintanceship that was the cause of her misery. To have done that would have hindered the one thing in the universe that seemed to him to be worth any sacrifice to further,—the development of his personality and his art to their very richest possibilities.

This, I venture to think, is a fair statement of the case as it must have looked to any impartial friend of the pair in the later 'fifties and 'sixties who tried to do justice to the psychology of both of them. I would suggest, though, that there were hitherto unsuspected reasons for Minna's unrelenting bitterness towards her husband throughout the Wesendonck affair. Unfortunately we do not possess her letters to him; but from many of Wagner's letters to her in the 'fifties and 'sixties we can see that she was for ever expressing suspicions of him—suspicions which he combats at great length and with all the epistolary skill he can command. Was there anything at the root of this attitude of Minna's towards him beyond a merely suspicious and jealous nature? Had she anything concrete to go upon? I think we can show that she had. The key to a good deal of the trouble, I imagine, is to be found in the Madame Laussot affair. And in that affair I am afraid we cannot acquit Wagner of a certain amount of disingenuousness both towards Minna and towards us.