"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]
IX
In the end they marry. Wagner was twenty-three and a half, Minna twenty-seven. At the altar, he says, he had the clearest of visions of his life being dragged in different directions by two cross-currents; but he accounts for the levity with which he chased away these thoughts by the "really heart-felt affection" he had for this "truly exceptional girl," who "gave herself so unhesitatingly to a young man without any means of support."
Almost immediately after the marriage, whatever little idyll there had been in it is shattered. In a few months new financial troubles have accumulated. Minna cannot resign herself to them so easily as he does. The less he is able to provide for the necessities of the household, the more does she feel compelled to take upon herself the duty of supplying them. This she does, to his "unbearable shame," by "making the most of her personal popularity." He was unable to bring her to see the matter from his point of view; and as usual, all attempts at an understanding were frustrated, as he admits, by the bitterness and violence of his words and manner.[130] What he means by "making the most of her personal popularity" it is not easy to say. On the surface it suggests infidelity to Wagner; but a letter of his to Minna of 18th May 1859 makes this hypothesis more than doubtful. Ultimately there appears on the scene one Dietrich, a rich merchant, of whom Wagner is obviously jealous. On the 31st May 1837 Minna leaves her home while Wagner is at the theatre. She has fled to Dresden, Dietrich accompanying her a small part of the way. Wagner half-recognises that she has done no more than flee from a desperate situation, and he reproaches himself for being the cause of her despair. He finds her on the 3rd June under her parents' roof in Dresden; there she confesses that she regarded herself as badly treated by him, and thought him "blind and deaf" to the misery of her position.
Matters grow brighter for a time, but Dietrich turns up once more, and Minna again disappears with him. In time she writes Wagner "a most affecting letter," in which she confesses her infidelity, but pleads that she had been driven to it by despair. She has been deceived in the character of her seducer; now, again in despair, ill and wretched, she begs Wagner's forgiveness, and assures him that she has only now become truly conscious of her love for him. He writes back, taking on himself the chief blame, and declares that there should never again be any mention between them of what happened,—a pledge, he says, which he can pride himself on having carried out to the letter.
He was unquestionably generous on this occasion;[131] no doubt his conscience told him that he himself was largely answerable for the distracted state of Minna's mind. Her flight was no romantic love affair, but the mere willingness to accept any outstretched hand that would help her to escape from her husband and the disillusionment the marriage with him had brought her.