"After my appointment in Dresden your growing discord with me came just at the time and in the degree as, forgetting my personal advantage, I could no longer, in the interest of my art and of my independence as man and artist, accommodate myself to the deplorable managerial relations of that art-establishment, and consequently revolted against them." Anyone who loved him, he says, would have seen what was going on within his soul and would have sympathised with him; but "when I came home profoundly dispirited and agitated by some new annoyance, some new mortification, some new disappointment, what did my wife give me in lieu of consolation and uplifting sympathy? Reproaches, fresh reproaches, nothing but reproaches! Fond of home as I was, I remained in the house in spite of it all; but at last no longer able to express myself, to communicate what was in me and be strengthened, but to keep silence, let my grief eat into me, in order—to be alone!"
His makes, no doubt, the finer literary record now; but who would have said in 1848 that Minna was the more in the wrong?
How hopelessly immiscible were their ideals of living becomes fully apparent a very little while after their reunion in Switzerland in 1849. Incapable of his imaginative flights and his belief in the future, she could see nothing but the misery and the humiliations of the actual day. For him there was his star; with his eyes on that he could forget his daily cares, or leave them to others; some raven or other, he knew, would feed him. Nothing is more remarkable in his letters of this period than the paradoxical sense of relief he felt at being, so far as the everyday world was concerned, a ruined man. "Never in all my life have I felt so happy and gay as in the summer of 1849 in glorious Switzerland.... I know that with the best I can do—and must do, since I can—I cannot earn money, but only love, and that from those who understand me, if they want to. So I am without a care for money either, since I know that love is caring for me. So let good Ottilie [his sister] and all the rest of you be easy in your mind about me and take it that a great piece of luck—aye, the greatest that could befall a man—has come to me."[144]
We can well believe him. On the whole his position was probably not so distressing as it is generally held to have been. He was not rich, of course; but he seemed to be assured of a livelihood, he had ample leisure for thought and for quiet self-development[145] without the necessity of wasting himself in inferior work—which is always the greatest misery to artists who have to reconcile the claims of art with those of life—and he was able to get a good deal of enjoyment out of travel. On one point he was quite firm; he had no intention of ever again competing in the arena with other men for a living. It was the world's duty to provide him with food and shelter in return for his work; how, as he pathetically put it, could he give the world the best that was in him if he had to waste his energies on futile things? Thousands of other men, it is needless to say, have felt the same difficulty; probably nine brain workers out of ten have to squander two-thirds of their best mental powers on futilities in order to win a little time in which to exercise the other third in the way they like. One thinks of George Meredith, for example, feeling his bent to be mainly towards poetry, but compelled to boil the pot with novels, and to purchase the pot itself by "reading" for a publisher. But Wagner, in this as in every other relation of his life, was nothing if not thorough; it was the secret, indeed, of all his successes and all his failures. Other men might truckle to expediency, but not he. His experiences in various opera houses had taught him how difficult it was for a man like himself to reconcile his artistic ideals with the facts of the theatre. There has probably never yet been a Kapellmeister with a soul who has not felt precisely as Wagner did;[146] but he makes the best of a bad bargain, is content with fifteen shillings if he cannot get a sovereign, and uses all the tact he can command to smooth his relations with his colleagues and to bend them to his will without their suspecting their own compliance. Wagner had no tact where his susceptibilities were hurt, and compromise was always hateful to him. Like the singer who was out of tune with the orchestra and expected it to tune to him when he gave it his A, Wagner blandly took his own course in everything and called upon the world to follow him. The call was often heroic and the response magnificent, as in the case of Bayreuth. But occasionally the call was unreasonable, and the singer and someone in the orchestra inevitably came to blows.
We see, in a letter of Minna's of about 1851,[147] the clashing of his ideas and Minna's on the subject of whether it is more honourable to earn your living by work you do not like or to live—and compel your wife to live—on charity. "The director [of the Zürich theatre] had offered Wagner 200 francs a month if he would accept the post of first Kapellmeister in the theatre; but he thinks it beneath his dignity to earn money, and prefers to live on charity or on borrowed money. You can understand, with one of my way of thinking, with what disesteem—to say nothing of what has already happened—I, as no doubt any other woman, must regard this. What will become of me—of us—on such principles as these? I often cry my eyes out, and am quite worn out with the worry my husband causes me."[148]
It is customary to censure Minna solemnly for not having a better insight into the genius of her husband, and for not having been willing to sacrifice the last vestige of her happiness and self-respect in order that he might be undisturbed in his inner world. It must be remembered, however, that in time a great many of the friends who had been most generous to him came round to something like Minna's point of view. Everyone knows the letter of 25th June 1870 to Frau Wille, in which Wagner speaks of his happiness in his retreat with Cosima who, he said, had showed that he "could be helped," and "that the axiom of so many of my friends, that I could not be helped, was false."[149] The last phrase hints at earlier disagreements between him and his friends on the question of finance. In Mein Leben he tells us how coldly some of them received his entreaties for help in the desperate days before King Ludwig came to his rescue. Perhaps they had not met with the gratitude they would have liked. When Madame Kalergis, in 1860, gives him 10,000 francs to wipe off the debt he had incurred in connection with his concerts in Paris, his only comment is, "I felt as if something were merely being fulfilled that I had always been entitled to expect."[150] It is hardly to be wondered at that ideas on finance so expansive as these did not always appeal with the same force to those who were expected to find the money as they did to him. Even the Wesendoncks declined to help him in his dire need in 1863.[151] Later on a request to Otto Wesendonck to harbour him met with a point-blank refusal,[152] though Wesendonck knew that Wagner was fleeing from his Vienna creditors, and that he was in serious danger from the law. Hornstein, as we have seen, refused to open his purse to him; other people repulsed him still more roughly. At his wits' end to raise money, he thinks of divorcing Minna in order to marry some rich woman. "As everything seemed to me expedient and nothing inexpedient, I actually wrote to my sister Luise Brockhaus, asking her if she could not have a sensible talk with Minna, and persuade her to be satisfied in future with her yearly allowance, without making any claims on my person. In her reply she advised me, with deep feeling, first of all to think of establishing my good name and of obtaining undisputed credit by a new work, which would probably help me without my taking any eccentric step; in any case I should do well to apply for the vacant Kapellmeister's post in Darmstadt."[153]
Ultimately (23rd March 1864) he fled to Frau Wille at Mariafeld (Zürich). Wille himself had, as Wagner admits, become cool in his friendship. But at that time the master of the house was away in Constantinople. When he returned he was "uneasy" at the guest who had settled there in his absence. "He probably feared that I might count on his help also," says Wagner. He might well be alarmed, for Wagner, untaught by experience, was as convinced as ever that it was the world's duty to provide for him, and as resolved as ever not to take up any work of the ordinary kind. Frau Wille has given us an interesting picture of him brooding over his wrongs and crying in the face of heaven against mankind:
"I had got together a number of books out of my husband's library and placed them in Wagner's room—works on Napoleon, on Frederick the Great, works of the German mystics, who were of significance to Wagner, while he had turned his back on Feuerbach and Strauss as dry men of learning. What I could I gave him in happy impartiality for the best: but cheer him up I could not. I still see him sitting in his chair at my window (it is still there), and impatiently listening as I spoke to him one evening of the splendour of the future that would yet certainly be his.... Wagner said: 'What is the use of talking about the future, when my manuscripts are locked up in a drawer? Who can produce the art-work that I, only I, helped by good dæmons, can bring into being, that all the world may know so it is, so has the master conceived and willed his work?' He walked agitatedly up and down the room. Suddenly he stopped in front of me and said, 'I am differently organised; I have excitable nerves; I must have beauty, brilliancy, light! The world ought to give me what I need. I cannot live in a wretched organist's post like your Meister Bach. Is it an unheard-of demand if I hold that the little luxury I like is my due? I, who am procuring enjoyment to the world and to thousands?"[154]
It was this unshakable belief in the rightness of whatever ministered to his own comfort for the time being that accounts in large measure for the hopelessness of the misunderstanding between him and Minna on the question of Frau Wesendonck. As this romantic episode had the deepest bearing on his life and his art, and his attitude during it gives us the best possible illustration of the dual nature of the man, it is worth while studying it with some closeness.