Minna Planer was amiable and kind, but the frantic effort she made at times, in public, to be profound or chic must have touched the great man on the raw. He sought, however, to protect her, and at public gatherings used to keep very near to her in order that she should not fall into the clutches of some sharp-witted enemy and be lead on into unseemliness of speech. The scoffs of critics and the ready-made gibes and jeers of the mob were to her gospel truth; her husband's genius was a vagary to be stoutly endured. So for many years she was inclined to pose as one to be pitied—and so she was. That she suffered at times can not be denied, yet God is good, and so has put short limit on the sensibilities of the vain.
But Wagner would never tolerate an unkind word spoken of Minna in his presence, and once rebuked a friend who sought to console him by saying, "Never mind, Minna lives her life the best she can, and expresses the thoughts that come to her—what more do you and I do?"
And in his later years, when calm philosophy was his, he realized that Minna Planer had supplied him a stinging discontent, a continued unrest that formed the sounding-board on which his sorrow and his hope and his faith in the Ideal were echoed forth.
Love is the recurring motif in all of Wagner's plays. A man and a woman, joined by God, but separated by unkind condition, play their parts, and our hearts are made by the Master to vibrate in sympathy with the central idea. Only a broken-hearted man could have conjured forth from his soul such couples as these: Senta and the Dutchman, Elizabeth and Tannhauser, Elsa and Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Siegmund and Sieglinde, Walter and Eva, Siegfried and Brunhilde.
Wagner's unhappy marriage forms the keynote of his art. Every opera he wrote depicts a soul in bonds. From "The Flying Dutchman" to "Parsifal" we are shown the struggle of a strong man with cruel Fate; a reaching out for liberty and light; the halting between duty and inclination; and the endless search for a woman who shall give deliverance through her abiding love and faith.
ll art seems controlled by fad and fashion. No fashion endures, else 'twere not fashion, and in its character the fad is essentially transient. Still we need not rail at fashion; it is a form of periodicity, and periodicity exists through all Nature. There are day and night, winter and summer, equinox and solstice, work and rest, years of plenty and years of famine. Comets return, and all fashions come back. Keep your old raiment long enough and it will be in style.
All things move in an orbit, even theories and religions. Certain forms of fanaticism come with the centuries—every new heresy is old. All extremes cure themselves, for when matters get pushed to a point where the balance of things is in danger of being disturbed, a Reformer appears and utters his stentorian protest. This man is always ridiculed, hooted, reviled, mobbed, and very happy indeed is his fate if he is hanged, crucified or made to drink of the deadly hemlock; for then his place in the affection of men is made secure, sealed with blood, and we proclaim him liberator or savior. The Piazza Signora is sacred soil because there it was that Savonarola died; John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on; J. Wilkes Booth linked his own name with that of Judas Iscariot and made his victim known to the Ages as the Emancipator of Men.
These strong men, sent at the pivotal points in history, are born out of a sore need—they are sent from God. Yet strong men always exist, but it is the needs of the hour that develop and bring them to our attention. Not always have the Reformers been fortunate in their takings off—many have lingered out lengthening, living deaths in walled-up cells. The Bastile, Chillon, London Tower, that prison joined to a palace by the Bridge of Sighs, and all other such plague-spots of blood are haunted by the ghosts of infamy. Before the memory of all those who wrote immortal books behind grated bars we stand uncovered.