VIII
That Minna was as much sinned against as sinning will hardly be disputed by any unprejudiced reader of Mein Leben and Wagner's correspondence. Let us throw as rapid a glance as possible over the various stages of their union.
Wagner himself sings the praises of the earlier Minna frequently enough. The picture we first get of her is that of a pretty bourgeoise, of no great intellectual capacity, but modest, sensible and sympathetic. On the other hand, several of Wagner's self-revelations show him in his youth as the harum-scarum one might expect a genius of his dynamic temperament to be—not vicious, perhaps, in the style of more stupid men, but keen for pleasure, and anxious to taste every vintage that life could offer him. His early life probably differed from that of tens of thousands of highly-strung young artists only in the degree of ardour with which he pursued his will-o'-the-wisps, and his quite abnormal imprudence in the affairs of daily life—financial affairs in particular. Throughout his career the protection, the solace, the domestic care of a woman were necessities to him. We may believe him when he says that he was the most home-loving of men; home and a devoted woman were haven and anchorage for him.[107] His longing for this haven would always be increased by the despair into which his vivacious nature, so keen for pleasure, was for ever bringing him. His early twenties were undoubtedly a very critical time for him mentally and morally. The debt-acquiring habit was already firmly rooted in him, and we get hints here and there of a certain hectic quality in his views of sex. In the Autobiographical Sketch (1842) he tells us how, under the impulse of these ideas, he dealt with Shakespeare's Measure for Measure in the act of metamorphosing it into his own Das Liebesverbot:
"Everything around me seemed to be in a state of ferment, and it seemed to me the most natural thing to give myself up to this fermentation. During a lovely summer's journey amongst the Bohemian watering places I drafted the plan of a new opera, Das Liebesverbot; I took the matter for it from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, only with this difference, that I deprived it of its prevailing seriousness and cast it in the mould of Das junge Europa: free and uncloaked [offene] sensualism [Sinnlichkeit] won the victory, purely by its own strength, over Puritanical hypocrisy."[108]
In this mood even the froth of the lighter French and Italian operas became a pleasure to him:
"The fantastic dissoluteness of German student-life, after some violent excesses (nach heftiger Ausschweifung) had soon become distasteful to me: Woman had begun to be a reality for me.[109] The longing which could nowhere still itself in life found ideal nurture in the reading of Heinse's Ardinghello, as also the works of Heine and other members of the then 'Young-German' school of literature. The effect of the impressions thus received found utterance in my actual life in the only way in which Nature can express herself under the pressure of the moral bigotry of our social system."[110]
His own commentary on the libretto of Das Liebesverbot is that it expressed a change in his moral nature of which he was fully conscious at the time:
"If one compares this subject with that of Die Feen, it becomes evident that there was a possibility of my developing along two diametrically opposite lines: confronting the religious (heilige) earnestness of my original sensibilities was a pert inclination to the wild frothing of the senses (zu wildem sinnlichem Ungestüme), to a defiant cheerfulness that seemed utterly at variance with the earlier mood. This becomes quite obvious to myself when I compare the musical working-out of these two operas.... The music to Das Liebesverbot had played its part in shaping both the matter and the manner; and this music was only the reflex of the influence of modern French and (as concerns the melody) even Italian opera upon my receptive faculties in their then state of violent physical excitation."
His libretto and his music were the reflection of his life:
"My path led me first of all straight to frivolity in my artistic views; this coincides with the epoch of my first practical experience as theatrical musical director. The rehearsing and conducting of the loose-jointed French operas that were then the mode, the knowingness and smartness (Protzige) of their orchestral effects, often filled me with childish delight when I could set the stuff going right and left from my conductor's desk. In life, which from this time consisted in the motley life of the theatre, I sought in distraction the satisfaction of an impulse which showed itself in more immediate things as sensualism (Genusssucht), and in music as a flickering, tingling unrest."[111]
Mein Leben shows him as he must have been in the Magdeburg days, ardent, passionate, variable, lacking in self-control, eager for the joys of life, and in danger of being sucked down into the maelstrom of the minor theatrical world. His own version of the outcome of all this—in the Mittheilung an meine Freunde—runs thus:
"The modern retribution for modern levity, however, soon visited me. I was in love; married in impetuous haste; under the unpleasant impressions of a moneyless home harassed myself and others; and so fell into the misery whose nature it is to bring thousands upon thousands to the ground."[112]
One may be allowed to surmise, however, that his marriage was at the time a godsend to him: it probably steadied him at a critical moment and saved him from greater spiritual damage. His picture of Minna as she appeared to him at their first meeting must be given in his own words:
"Her appearance and bearing formed the most striking contrast to all the unpleasant impressions of the theatre which I had received on this fateful morning. The young actress looked very charming and fresh: I was struck by the remarkable seemliness (Bemessenheit) and grave assurance of her movements and her behaviour, which lent an agreeable and engaging dignity to the affability of her expression."[113] Her "unaffected sobriety of character and her dainty neatness" did something to reconcile him to the vulgar and superficial theatrical world in which his lot had been cast. She was exceedingly kind to the nervous and maladif young conductor, yet all that she did for him was done "with a friendly calm and composure that had something almost motherly about it, without a suspicion of frivolity or heartlessness."[114]
After a few weeks or months of acquaintance, in which he had showed a decided liking for her society, Minna begins to be more distant with him—apparently because there is a more serious lover in the field. "I now experienced for the first time," he says, "the cares and pains of a lover's jealousy." For a time they are estranged; but early in 1835 they return to their former friendly footing. And now we get the first symptom of that egoism in his attitude towards her that was afterwards to be so fruitful in misfortune. Though he was not her accepted lover, he jealously objected to her receiving the attentions of other men—of whom there were plenty always dancing attendance on the pretty, engaging girl. He protests with "bitterness and quarrelsome temper" against her receiving other men's attentions, though he admits that "thanks to her grave and decorous behaviour, her reputation was unimpaired"; and while she remained as calm and sensible as ever, he cubbishly vents his rage in pretended dissipation, which had the effect of "filling her with the sincerest pity and anxiety" for him.
He gives a New Year's party to the opera company, which is evidently meant to be a lively affair, and asks Minna to it; everyone doubts whether she will come. She accepts, however, "with perfect ingenuousness." As the evening wears on and the liquor circulates—punch succeeding champagne—"all the shackles of petty conventionality were thrown off," and the conduct of the theatrical ladies and gentlemen drifted into what Wagner calls "universal amiability." One can imagine the scene.[115] Throughout it all Minna acts with a simplicity, modesty and dignity that win Wagner's praise.
So far she appears much the more decent and likeable human being of the two. Wagner's further account of her increases our respect for her:
"From that time onward my relations with Minna were of an intimately friendly kind. I do not believe that she ever felt for me an affection that came near passion—the genuine feeling of love—or indeed that she was capable of such a thing; I can only describe her feeling for me as one of heart-felt good-will, the most fervent wish for my success and well-being, the kindest sympathy and a genuine delight in my gifts, which often filled her with astonishment. All this became at last part and parcel of her ordinary existence (welches alles ihr endlich zu einer steten und behäglichen Gewohnheit wurde)."[116]
The fact that, feeling no genuine passion for him, she should have been so kind to him as she was, and should have been willing to unite her life with his, simply increases our respect for her. To her he was simply a young wastrel of talent, who needed the care and protection of a sensible woman. She "mothered" him, as other women were destined to do in the course of his wild and wasteful life.
Then comes the—to Wagner—discreditable episode,[117] too long for narration here, that makes them avowed lovers. Still there is apparently nothing more on her side than kindliness and sympathy, while Wagner is madly in love. He shrinks from marriage in view of the difficulty and uncertainty of his position, while Minna too "declared that she was more anxious to see these [their finances] improved than for us to be married." But soon Minna leaves him to join a theatrical company in Berlin. This precipitates matters. "In passionate unrest I wrote to her urging her to return, and, in order to move her not to separate her fate from mine, spoke formally of an early marriage." He appears also to have threatened, in the same letter, that if she did not return he would "take to drink and go to the devil as rapidly as possible."[118]
He persuades the Magdeburg theatre authorities to renew her engagement, and sets off "in the depth of an awful winter's night" to meet her on her return, greets her "joyously, with tears from his heart," and leads her back "in triumph to her cosy Magdeburg home, that had become so dear to me."[119]
It is evident, however, that in Mein Leben he is not telling the reader the whole of the facts. Certain passages in the contemporary letters to Apel make it clear that in at any rate the latter part of the Magdeburg period he and Minna were husband and wife in everything but legal form. On 27th October 1835 he writes thus to Apel: "Don't get too many fancies in your head with regard to Minna. I leave everything to fate. She loves me,[120] and her love means a great deal to me now: she is now my central point; she gives me consistency and warmth: I cannot give her up. I only know that you, dear Theodor, do not yet know the sweetness of such a relationship; it has nothing common, unworthy or enervating in it; our epicureanism is pure and strong—not a miserable illicit liaison;—we love each other, and believe in each other, and the rest we leave to fate;—this you do not know, and only with an actress can one live thus; this superiority to the bourgeoise can only be found where the whole field is fantastic caprice and poetic licence."[121]
Das Liebesverbot is given and fails; his career as musical director in Magdeburg is terminated, and hungry creditors, seeing the end of all his hopes and perhaps theirs, begin legal proceedings against him. Every time he came home he found a summons nailed to the door. "And now Minna, with her truly comforting assurance and steadfastness in all circumstances, proved the greatest possible support to me."[122] She gets an engagement in Königsberg, whither he follows her. Then he begins to doubt her. He is uneasy as to one Schwabe, who is "passionately interested" in her. He afterwards learned that the pair had already been friendly; though he adds that he could not regard her relation with Schwabe as an infidelity to himself, since she had rejected the former in his favour. But he was made uneasy by the reflection that the episode had been concealed from him, and by the suspicion that Minna's comfortable circumstances were in part due to the friendship of this man. In fact, he, Wagner, the butterfly amorist, was jealous like any common person; and the desire grew upon him to hasten the marriage with Minna in order that he might find peace and quiet—a refuge from the storms of the miserable theatrical world in which his lot had been cast.
In Königsberg he obtains an appointment as conductor: and now we behold him drifting, like his own gods in the Ring, headlong to destruction. His reason warns him of the folly of a union with Minna, but his impulses drive him irresistibly into it:
"Minna made no objection, and all my past endeavours and resolutions seemed to show that, for my part, I was anxious for nothing so much as to enter into this haven of rest. Notwithstanding this, strange enough things were going on at this time in my inmost being. I had become sufficiently acquainted with Minna's life and character to be able to see, as clearly as this important step required, the great differences between our two natures, if only besides this perception I had had the needed ripeness of mind."[123] But blind lover as he had been, he goes into marriage with his eyes open:
"The peculiar power she exercised over me had no source in the ideal side of things, to which I had always been so susceptible; on the contrary she attracted me by the soberness and solidity of her character, which, in my wide wanderings in search of an ideal goal, gave me the needed support and completion."[124]
Always me! me! me! He used Minna as he used everyone else, as an instrument for his own happiness and comfort. And as he was the more intellectual of the two, and saw clearly the fatal differences of character between them,[125] one can only regard the unfortunate consequences of his marriage as an avengement of his own egoism and jealousy. On her part, though she "made no objection" to the marriage, she was plainly not anxious for it; she never seems to have concealed the fact that her feeling for him was mainly one of sympathy. He learns that her friendship with Schwabe had been more intimate than he had suspected:
"It ended in a very violent scene between us; it established the type of all the later similar scenes. I had gone too far in my outbursts, treating as if I had some real right over her, a woman who was not tied to me by any sort of passionate love, but who had yielded to my importunities only out of kindness, and who, in the deepest sense, did not belong to me at all. To reduce me to utter confusion, Minna had only to remind me that from a worldly point of view she had refused really good offers, and had yielded out of sympathy and devotion to the impetuosity of a penniless and uncomfortable (übel versorgt) man, whose talent had not yet been proved to the satisfaction of the world. I did myself most harm by the raving violence of my speech, by which she was so deeply wounded that as soon as I became conscious of my extravagance I always had to appease her injured feelings by admitting my injustice and begging her forgiveness. So this, like all similar scenes in the future, ended, outwardly, in her favour. But peace was undermined for ever, and by frequent repetition of these affairs, Minna's character underwent a notable change. Just as in later times she was perplexed by the (to her) more and more incomprehensible nature of my conception of art and its relationships, which gave her a passionate uncertainty as to her judgments upon everything connected with it, so now she became increasingly confused by my opinion—so different to hers—with regard to delicacy in moral matters; this confusion—as in general there was so much freedom in my opinions which she could not understand or approve—gave to her easy-going temperament a passionateness that was originally foreign to it."[126]
The "delicacy in moral matters" is good. Minna would probably have said that she considered it neither moral nor delicate to run away without paying your tradespeople and to sponge, and make your wife sponge, upon your friends. She was a bourgeoise, but at any rate she had the normal bourgeois scrupulosity in matters like these, in which Wagner's moral sense was anything but delicate. Posterity will refuse to credit him with moral delicacy of any kind. His failings in this respect were a source of sorrow to the friends who loved him most. Cornelius, for example, who adored him, sums him up thus in his Diary under date 3rd February 1863:
"Wagner! That is a leading chapter! Ah! I may not speak at large upon that subject. I say in a word: His morality is weak and without any true basis. His whole course of life, along with his egoistic bent, has ensnared him in ethical labyrinths. He makes use of people for himself alone, without having any real feeling towards them, without even paying them the tribute of pure piety. Within himself he has been too much bent on making his mental greatness cover all his moral weaknesses; and I am afraid that posterity will be more critical (die Nachwelt nimmt es genauer)."[127]
Yes, posterity sees the sharp division between the artistic greatness and the moral littleness of the man even more clearly than his contemporaries did; and it has learned to distrust the plausibility of his accounts of himself and others, and to distrust them most when they are most plausible. If only Minna could have survived to read Mein Leben, and to have given her own version of why the pair drifted so widely apart in the Dresden days—why she, who had borne untold sufferings for him in Paris, should in the course of four or five years have lost all respect for him and all belief in him!
So the breach widened between them. "The really painful feature of our later life together was the fact that owing to this passionateness of hers I lost the last support that Minna's peculiar nature had hitherto afforded me. At the time I was filled only with a dim foreboding of the fateful consequences of my marrying Minna. Her pleasant and soothing qualities still had such a salutary effect on me, that with the levity natural to me, as well as the obstinacy with which I met all attempts at dissuasion, I silenced the inner voice that prophesied dark disaster."[128]
Who, after that, will lay the blame wholly on Minna? He urges her into a marriage for which she has no great desire, forces her to abandon the career that had maintained her in decent comfort, hitches her to his fiery and erratic chariot and drags her through misery and privation unspeakable, quarrels with her from time to time and insults her with the "raving violence" of his speech.[129]