VII
He was always much more fond of women than of men, having seemingly found the former more sympathetic not only to his art but to himself. His great desire, as a thousand passages in his letters and his prose works show, was for love that knew no bounds in the way of trust and self-surrender. In his immediate circle he probably had more experiences of this kind among the women than among the men; the women probably had a subconscious quasi-maternal sympathy for the sufferings of the little man, and would no doubt be more likely to overlook the angularities of his everyday character—if indeed, which is doubtful, he showed those angularities as openly to them as he did to his male friends. The story of his life is studded with the names of devoted women, from the Minna of the earliest days to the Cosima of the latest. Madame Laussot never attained the sanctification of some of the later women who played a part in Wagner's life, for the episode in which she figures was brief, and the end of it was of a kind that admits of no going back; but for a while she certainly loomed larger in his thoughts than has hitherto been suspected.[80]
Jessie Laussot was a young Englishwoman who had married a wine merchant,—Eugène Laussot—of Bordeaux, in which town the pair lived with Jessie's mother, Mrs. Taylor, the widow of an English lawyer. Jessie was introduced to Wagner in Dresden, by Karl Ritter, in 1848. Wagner's first account of the meeting is rather vague, but vague in that peculiar way that suggests to the careful student of him that he is deliberately saying less than he might. The young girl had shyly expressed her admiration for him "in a way," he says, "I had never experienced before." "It was with a strange, and, in its way, quite a new sensation," he goes on to say, "that I parted from this young friend; for the first time since my meeting with Alwine Frommann and Werder, in the Flying Dutchman days, I experienced again that sympathetic tone that came as it were out of an old familiar past, but never reached me from my immediate surroundings."[81] Knowing his susceptibility to feminine sympathy, we may probably assume that Madame Laussot counted for slightly more to him just then than he cared to put into words some twenty years later.
In Zürich, whither he fled after the political troubles of 1849, he received a letter from her in which she "assured him of her continued sympathy in kind and affecting terms."[82] (She was a friend, by the way, of Frau Julie Ritter, who gave Wagner as liberal financial assistance as she could, both now and later.) Early in 1850 he goes to Paris with the half hope of getting an opera produced there. He is very depressed, and has a longing to escape to the East where, he says, "I could live out my life in some sort of humanly-worthy fashion, without any concern with this modern world."[83] While in this mood he receives an invitation from Madame Laussot to spend a little time in her house. He accepts, and goes to Bordeaux on the 16th March, where he is received "in a very friendly and flattering manner." He learns that the Ritters have been corresponding about him with the Laussots, and that there is a scheme on foot under which Mrs. Taylor, who is well-to-do, is to join with Frau Ritter in settling three thousand francs a year upon him.[84] In the explanations that ensue from his side, he divines that Jessie is the only one who thoroughly understands him. An entente is established between them.[85] "I soon discovered," he says, "the gulf which separated myself, as well as her, from her mother and her husband. While that handsome young man was attending to his business for the greater part of the day, and the mother's deafness generally excluded her from most of our conversations, our animated exchange of ideas upon many important matters soon led to great confidence between us."[86] She was evidently intelligent and cultivated, a good musician and an accomplished pianist. He read her his poem of Siegfrieds Tod and his sketch of Wieland der Schmied, and they discussed these and other topics connected with his art. "It was inevitable," he goes on to say with the crude frankness into which he sometimes falls in Mein Leben,[87] "that we should soon feel the people around us irksome to us in our conversations."
The visit lasts three weeks or so, at the end of which time Minna, like a prudent and anxious wife, insists on his returning to Paris in order to pursue his plans for a rehabilitation of the shattered finance of the home.[88] He evidently does not like her letter. At the same time he reads in the papers that his friends Röckel, Bakunin and Heubner had been sentenced to death for their part in the Dresden rising. Out of tune with the world, he determines, he says, to break with every one and everything. He will give Minna half of the income his friends intended to settle on him, and with the other half go to Greece or Asia Minor, to forget and be forgotten. He communicates this plan to Jessie, who, dissatisfied with her own life, is disposed to seek a similar salvation for herself. "This resolve expressed itself in hints and a brief word thrown out now and then. Without clearly knowing what this would lead to, and without having come to any arrangement, I left Bordeaux towards the end of April, more agitated than calmed, full of regret and anxiety. I went to Paris in a sort of stupor, quite uncertain what to do next."[89]
Wagner now begins to be a little disingenuous, and we catch a glimpse or two of him as the "actor" that Nietzsche said he was. The facts and the dates must be carefully borne in mind. Wagner says[90] that he went to Bordeaux in the 16th March and that he stayed there more than three weeks.[91] That would make the date of his departure about the 7th April. In a letter of 17th April to Minna he speaks of having been "a fortnight again" in Paris,—which would make the date of his return about the 3rd. The precise date is of no importance; it is sufficient that it was somewhere between the 3rd and the 7th April.[92]
In this letter of the 17th April he refers to Minna's letter as having caused "an irremediable" dissonance between them, and he gives, at great length, the whole story of their married life, the thesis, of course, being that he had always been the loving and she the loveless and uncomprehending one. The plaidoyer is needlessly elaborate, and raises the suspicion that it was ultimately intended for more eyes than those of Minna; it reads like a plea to posterity to see him as he saw himself. But it is plainly insincere in part. "Your letters to Bordeaux," he says, "have startled me violently out of a last beautiful illusion about ourselves. I believed I had won you at last; I fancied I saw you softening before the might of true love,—and then realised with terrible grief, more deeply than ever, the inescapable certainty that we belonged to each other no more. I could bear it no longer after that: I could not talk to any one: I wanted to go away at once—to you: I left my friends in haste and hurried to Paris, thence to go with all speed back to Zürich. I have been here again a fortnight: my old nerve-trouble got hold of me: like an incubus it lies on me: I must shake it off,—I must, for my sake,—and yours." How little truth there was in his remark that "I wished to go away at once—to you; I left my friends in haste," &c., can be seen now from his own account in Mein Leben. He plainly left Bordeaux with his head full of the scheme for going to Greece or Asia Minor with Madame Laussot. Of this scheme he of course does not breathe a word to Minna; the consummate, self-deluding actor tries to persuade her that it was to her his injured heart turned first.
Let us now take up the narrative again in Mein Leben. After his return to Paris, he says, "I was at length obliged to reply to my wife's urgent communication. I wrote her a copious letter, recapitulating in a friendly but frank way the whole story of our life together, and explaining that I had firmly resolved to release her from any immediate participation in my lot, since I was quite incapable of ordering this in a way that would meet with her approval. She should always have half of whatever money I might have; she must fall in with this, and accept it as fact that the occasion had now arisen for parting from me again, as she had said she would do on our first meeting in Switzerland. I brought myself to the point of breaking with her completely."
He then writes to Jessie telling her what he had done, though, in view of his lack of means, he is unable to give her any definite information as to his plans for his "complete flight from the world." He receives from her the positive assurance that she had determined to take the same step as himself; she asks to be taken under his protection when she has completely freed herself. "Much alarmed," he tells her that it is one thing for a man in his woeful difficulties to resolve on flight, and another thing for a young woman in outwardly happy circumstances to do so, for reasons which probably no one but he would understand. This does not frighten her: she calmly tells him that her flight will be quietly effected,—she will first of all pay a visit to her friends the Ritters in Dresden. Wagner is so upset by all this that he has to seek solitude at Montmorency, near Paris, in the middle of April.[93]
Now of all that I have italicised in the last paragraph but one, there is not a word in his letter of the 17th April to Minna. The only passage resembling it is the final sentence of the letter: "Can I hope to attain that [i.e. to make her happy] by living with you?—Impossible." It may be thought that, writing his reminiscences of the affair twenty years or more after, his memory had played him false, and that he imagined he had written to Minna what he no doubt intended to say. But this explanation is negated by his next letter to her, dated 4th May, in which he says, "I cannot help writing to you once more before going far away from you. It has remained unknown to me—as indeed I could have wished—how you received the decisive step on my part which I announced to you in my last letter. As you have long familiarised yourself with the thought of living apart from me, and so regaining your independence, I presume and hope that you were, if perhaps surprised, at any rate not alarmed by my decision."
Clearly then he had announced, in the letter of 17th April, his intention of leaving Minna. We may be sure that with his usual tendency to copiousness he must have occupied considerable space in doing so. What has become of this passage? Why is it not included in the printed edition of the letters? If it has been intentionally omitted why has not someone conceived it to be his editorial duty to advise the reader of the fact?[94] In any case the omission of the passage does not strengthen our already tottering confidence in the integrity of such Wagnerian records as have come from Wahnfried.[95]
There is certainly something inaccurate in the sequence of events as given in Mein Leben.[96] We have seen that, apparently on the 17th April, he wrote to Minna announcing his intention of leaving her. A few sentences after the narration of this part of the episode in Mein Leben, he says that he left Paris to seek repose from his worries in Montmorency, "about the middle of April." We are left to infer that in these few days the events happened that are narrated in the sentences in Mein Leben describing his alarm at Jessie's reply. He fixes this date, both for himself and for us, by the fact that while resting at Montmorency he looks over the score of Lohengrin and decides to send it to Liszt, with a request that his friend shall produce it at Weimar. "Now that I had also got rid of this score I felt as free as a bird, and a Diogenes-like unconcern as to what might happen took possession of me. I even invited Kietz to visit me in Montmorency and share the joys of my retreat."
It is quite true that this happened "about the middle of April." We have the actual letter to Liszt; it is dated the 21st April. But this same letter makes it clear that the project of flight to the East is still in his mind:
"Decisive events have just happened in my life: the last fetters have fallen from me that bound me to a world in which I should shortly have had to go under, not only spiritually but physically. Through the endless constraint imposed upon me by those nearest to me,[97] my health is gone, my nerves are shattered. Now I must live almost entirely for my recovery. My livelihood is provided for; you shall hear from me from time to time."[98]
Though there is here no specific mention of the East, there can be little doubt that he is referring to his projected flight from Europe. It is hard to explain otherwise the remark as to the last fetters that bound him to the world having fallen from him, or his promise that Liszt should hear from him from time to time; and there would be no truth in his remark that his livelihood was provided for in his new habitat, except in the sense that Madame Laussot's purse was at his disposal.[99] Moreover he writes to Liszt some two months and a half later, when the whole affair had blown over, "When we meet again I shall have much to tell you: for the present only this much, as regards my immediate past, that my contemplated voyage to Greece has been knocked on the head. There were too many impediments (Bedenken), all of which I could not surmount. I should have preferred to have gone out of the world altogether. Well, you shall hear later."[100]
It is evident, then, that Wagner, whether by accident or design, has got the sequence wrong in Mein Leben. He makes it appear as if he had worried during the first week or two of April over Madame Laussot's plan for leaving Europe with him, that he had sought retirement in Montmorency about the middle of April, and that there the burden had quickly been shifted from his mind. He says no more about Madame Laussot and her scheme, but tells us that while in a "state of complacency" in Montmorency with Kietz he is startled by the news that Minna had come to Paris to look him up. Now the letter of 21st April to Liszt suggests a doubt as to the absolute correctness of all this; and that doubt is turned into certainty by Wagner's letter to Minna of the 4th May, in which he definitely announces his intention of leaving her: "The news I have to give you to-day gave me a special reason for writing to you again, since I have a feeling that it may soften for you all the possible bitterness of our separation. I am on the point of setting off to Marseilles, whence I shall go at once in an English ship to Malta, and thence to Greece and Asia Minor. I have always felt, and most strongly of all of late, the need of getting out of this mere life of books and ideas, that consumes me, and once more looking round me in the world. For the present the modern world is closed behind me, for I hate it and want nothing more to do either with it or what is nowadays called 'art.' Germany can only become a field of stimulus to me again when all its conditions shall be utterly changed.... So of late my longing has been again directed to distant travel, so as to get quite away for a time from our present-day conditions, and restore myself bodily and mentally by a change of sight and sound in other climes."
Not a word, it will be observed, of Madame Laussot's accompanying him! He has simply felt, as any man might feel, the need of a change of scene.
He continues thus: "In these last decisive days, then, I conceived the plan of going to Greece and the East, and am lucky enough to find the means for carrying out this scheme placed at my disposal from London. For in London I have gained a new protector,—one of the most eminent English lawyers, who knows my works and will give me his support in return for the original manuscript of everything I may write."
Even Mr. Ellis, writing before the publication of Mein Leben, was constrained to conjecture, in a footnote to this letter, that this "new protector" in London "strongly resembles a myth." Let us eschew more forcible language, and be content to call it a myth. Mein Leben puts it beyond dispute that the financier of the expedition was Madame Laussot.[101]
Wagner's account of the affair so far is, I venture to say, coloured by his desire, twenty years later, to minimise the seriousness of the whole affair. But the story of his disingenuousness or his inaccuracy is even yet not complete.
By his own account he now does a rather shabby thing. He apparently dreads meeting Minna; so he "bilks" the lady. He leaves Montmorency, goes to Paris, and instructs Kietz to tell Minna that he knew nothing more of her husband than that he had left the capital. The ruse succeeds. Wagner flies to Villeneuve, on the Lake of Geneva, where he puts up at the Hôtel Byron. There, in a little while, he is joined by Karl Ritter. He has not been long settled down at Villeneuve, however, before the Laussot affair begins to take on a very unpleasant tinge. Jessie had apparently told her mother, the mother had told the husband, and the husband had expressed the intention of putting a bullet through Wagner at the first convenient opportunity. Wagner writes to Laussot "trying to make him see matters in their true light," but at the same time declaring, with characteristic impudence, that he "could not understand how a man could bring himself to keep a woman with him by force when she did not want to have anything to do with him." He is on his way to Bordeaux, he says, where he is at M. Laussot's service. He also writes to Jessie, advising her to be "calm and self-possessed." In three days he is at Bordeaux: he sends word to M. Laussot at nine o'clock in the morning. No reply is vouchsafed; but late in the afternoon he is summoned to the police station. He is requested to leave the town, ostensibly because his passport is not in order, but in reality, as the authorities admit, because they have had a communication from the Laussots. He obtains a respite of a couple of days, which he uses to indite a letter to Jessie, "in which I told her exactly what had occurred, and said that my contempt for the conduct of her husband, who had exposed his wife's honour by a denunciation to the police, was so great that I would have nothing more to do with her until she had released herself from this shameful situation."[102]
The Laussots had left Bordeaux when he arrived; so he obtains admission to the flat,[103] goes from room to room till he comes to Jessie's boudoir, places his letter in her work-basket, and returns. Still no reply is vouchsafed, and he makes his way back to Switzerland in quite a cheery frame of mind, evidently sure of having acted impeccably all through this affair.
In this, as in so many other episodes of Wagner's life, we have unfortunately only his version of what happened. He calls just the witnesses he wants, elicits just the evidence that suits him, and then complacently gives the verdict in his own favour. To the outsider it looks as if he had been extremely foolish with Madame Laussot and extremely arrogant with her husband; and we may reasonably suppose that if they could tell the story from their side they could make the case rather worse for Wagner than he has done for himself. The real facts will perhaps never be known: I say "the real facts," for no one who has studied the autobiography carefully, with a knowledge of such cases as those of Hornstein, Lachner, Hanslick, the Wesendoncks, and others, can believe that Wagner's account of the affair gives us the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But letting that pass, we may now observe how once more the story in Mein Leben fails to square with the evidence obtainable elsewhere.
That Madame Laussot had become disillusioned concerning him is plain from his own further account. One day Karl Ritter receives a letter from her which he hesitates to show to Wagner. The latter tears it out of his hand, and finds that "she had written to say she felt obliged to let my friend know that she had become sufficiently enlightened about me to make it necessary for her to drop my acquaintance." Her mother and her husband had taken steps to break off all correspondence between her and Wagner; he gracefully refers to them now as "the two conspirators," and charges them with "calumniating" him. "Mrs. Taylor had written to my wife complaining of 'my intention to commit adultery,' expressing her sympathy with her, and offering her support; poor Minna, who now suddenly thought she had found a hitherto unsuspected reason for my resolve to live apart from her, in turn complained to Mrs. Taylor." There has been, in fact, "a curious misunderstanding" of a joking remark of his. He is very indignant over it all, but chiefly at the way Minna had been treated! While he was himself indifferent as to what the others might think of him, he accepted Karl Ritter's offer to go to Zürich and set Minna's mind at rest with a proper explanation.[104]
This looks plausible enough, but I am afraid there is a touch of fiction in it. Let us look at a letter from Wagner to Minna of nine years later:
"Neither can I blame you for giving me that dear Bordeaux to smell at in return, especially as you have kept a secret from me, the hearing of which really astounds me. So someone wrote you at the time, that I went that second time to Bordeaux to abduct a young wife from her husband?? Now let me assure you on my honour and most sacred conscience that such a shameless lie and calumny was never yet invented against any man. If it would conduce to your honour and peace of mind, I should be quite ready to give you the exact details of the whole of the episode, and you would then find that I doubtless acted very stupidly at that time, but certainly not evilly to any one."[105]
I do not see what meaning we can attach to this except that for nine years Wagner had been unaware that Minna knew as much as she actually did of the Bordeaux affair. The revelation evidently comes as a complete surprise to him. We can take it as certain that, as he says in Mein Leben, Mrs. Taylor had really written to Minna, telling her what had happened. But the letter of 1859 makes it appear as if Minna had kept the secret to herself all these years. The only conclusion we can come to, then, is either that Wagner was in error in saying he had deputed Karl Ritter to explain matters to Minna, or that he had told Karl rather less than the full truth. This may seem a bold conclusion to draw, but I do not see what other is possible from the evidence. The remark in the letter—"so someone wrote to you at the time," &c.—squares with the account given in Mein Leben. But the rest of the letter seems to indicate that till that moment he had no idea of there having been such a letter. We seem forced to conclude either that Wagner's memory was playing him false, or that his desire to make the world see the facts as he would have preferred them to have been had militated somewhat against strict accuracy—as it did in the Hornstein and other cases.
And now we have, I think, the explanation, or partial explanation, of a good deal of Minna's jealous suspicion in the 'fifties and 'sixties, especially as regards Frau Wesendonck. Knowing of Wagner's relations with Madame Laussot, knowing also that he had kept these relations a secret from her both when he was writing to her at the time and in the years that followed, knowing at first-hand, too, as well as we know now through Mein Leben and the letters, her husband's ineradicable tendency to prendre son bien où il le trouvait, we can understand her frequent uneasiness of mind. If we are to be fair to her we must get away from the historical standpoint, from which all that is seen is the great musician blundering through life and sacrificing everybody and everything in order to consummate his art; we must look at it also from the standpoint of Minna and the moment, putting the genius out of the question and taking it purely as a case of any husband and any wife. And when this is done, though we may still regret the tragedy of their union and admit that Minna was not the best wife possible for such a man as he—that she had, indeed, almost as many faults as a wife as Wagner had as a husband—we shall at all events refuse to join in the venomous outcry of the extreme Wagner partisans against her.[106]
MINNA WAGNER.