He had been in the habit of giving splendid dinners after the concerts to his friends and the chief performers; and his hotel-keeper had a two months' bill against him for food and lodging. "One evening when Tausig and I were with him, he bemoaned and lamented his wretched condition. We listened to him sympathetically, and sat miserably on the sofa, while he paced up and down in nervous haste. Suddenly he stopped and said, 'Here, I know what I need,' ran to the door, and rang vigorously. Tausig whispered to me, 'What's he up to? He looks just like Wotan after he has come to some great resolution.' The waiter came in sight slowly and hesitatingly—these people soon see how the wind is blowing—and was no less astonished than we when Wagner said, 'Bring me at once two bottles of champagne on ice!' 'Heavens above—in this state!' we said when the waiter had gone out. But Wagner gave us a fervid dissertation on the indispensability of champagne precisely when a situation was desperate: only this could help us over the painfulness of it."[252]
Glasenapp tells how in the very last years of his life he could not work unless surrounded by soft lines and colours and perfumes. His almost morbid sensitivity multiplied enormously the ordinary pleasant or unpleasant sensations of touch and of sight. When in a difficulty with his composition he would stroke the folds of a soft curtain or table-cover till the right mood came. Not only the fabrics but the lines about him had to be melting, indefinite: he could not endure even books in the room he was working in, or bear to let his eyes follow the garden paths; "they suggested the outer world too definitely and prevented concentration." Among scents he particularly loved attar of roses, which he used to get direct from Paris—sent to him, however, under the fictitious name and address of "Mr. Bernard Schnappauf, Ochsengasse, Bayreuth," his barber obtaining delivery of it for him.[253] Such was the creator of the heroic, athletic boy Siegfried,—this poor little sickly, supersensitive, self-indulgent being who could hardly deny himself the smallest of his innocent little voluptuousnesses. The antinomy would be unresolvable did we not know from a hundred other cases that art is not life, and that the artist may be very different from his art. The Grand Duke of Baden once wounded Wagner deeply by declaring that he "could distinguish between the work and the man."[254] We have often to make that distinction with Wagner.
XV
At once a Spartan and a voluptuary in body, ready to endure many miseries rather than live any kind of life but the one he desired to live, yet unable to deny himself all sorts of luxuries even when he had not the money to pay for them, he was both a Spartan and a voluptuary in the things of the mind. He cut himself adrift uncompromisingly, even with rudeness, from people he disliked, even though they for their part were not ill-disposed towards him and might have been useful to him. But to his friends he clung with the same hungry passion as to his silks and satins and perfumes, and, it must be confessed, for the same reasons,—because they warmed and refreshed and soothed him. He loved his friends, but for his own sake, not for theirs. This may seem a harsh judgment of him, but his letters and his record admit of no other reading. With his lust for domination, he could never endure independence in anyone round about him. This was Nietzsche's great offence, that he dared to think his own way through life, instead of falling into the ranks and becoming simply the instrument of Wagner's will.[255] We have seen Wagner commending this person and that for their "devotion," their "fidelity" to himself, and becoming pettishly angry with Cornelius and Tausig for not coming to him the moment he wanted them. In his old age he was as insistent as ever that no one in his circle should follow a desire of his own if it clashed with his. In the later Wahnfried days he used to go through Bach's preludes and fugues in the evenings, expatiating upon each of them to an admiring company. One night he was deeply displeased at young Kellermann for having absented himself from Wahnfried, having preferred to go to some concert in the town; Wagner "got violently excited over it, and regretted afterwards that he could not 'give it to' anyone quietly and calmly, on which account he would rather avoid doing so altogether. On this day it was a long time before we could get to the 'Forty-eight.'"[256]
The unique correspondence with Liszt thrills us in its better moments even to-day; yet it can hardly be doubted that he loved Liszt selfishly, for the intellectual and emotional warmth his colleague brought into his life. He needs Liszt, we can see, in order that he may talk about and realise himself. After the Wesendonck rupture, in 1858, he goes to Venice. In September Liszt is in the Tyrol with the Princess von Wittgenstein and her daughter. Wagner writes him on the 12th September, asking him, as he is so near, to come to him at Venice, Liszt having been unable to accept a previous invitation to visit him at Zürich, owing to his having to attend the Jena University Jubilee celebrations. There had been some misunderstanding over another proposed meeting-place, and Liszt did not go to Venice. Thereupon Wagner becomes very angry, as usual, and actually writes to this man, to whom he owed such infinite benefactions, in the same half-grieved, half-accusing tone that he adopted towards Tausig. "Your letter of 23rd ult. ... awoke in me the hope that I should soon be able to see you and speak to you. But I doubt whether my letter to you to that effect, addressed to you at the Hôtel de Bavière, Munich, reached you in time, for I have neither seen you nor had an answer from you. I now fear that my desire to tell you of many things by word of mouth will not be realised; so I write, as I feel I owe you an explanation with regard to certain points that have not been clear to you. Altogether it cannot amount to much; in conversation it might have been more.
"I will not enlarge upon the moral necessities for my departure from Zürich; they must be known to you, and perhaps I may assume that Cosima or Hans has told you enough about them. To remain in Zürich under the previous conditions was not to be thought of; I had to carry out without any further delay a resolution made some months before. Each new day brought with it new and intolerable torments; only my departure could end them. From day to day I had to postpone this, however, for lack of the necessary means; I had to provide my wife with money, and make our definitive departure from Zürich possible by settling accounts, &c., that otherwise I should not have had to settle until the New Year. It was an unspeakable agony to go through day after day hoping in vain for money to arrive, and to see the troubles and torments that were the cause of my delay increasing. For you to have come to me suddenly at this time would have been a heavenly consolation for me and everyone involved in the conflict.
"You had to attend to University celebrations, &c., which, pardon me for saying so, appeared incredibly trivial to me in the mood I was in then. I did not press you any more, and was angry with Bülow for pressing you; but I must confess that when at last I received the news of your coming on the 20th, I had already become indifferent (unempfindlich) about it."[257]
In short, he was in trouble, thought that Liszt would be able to console him, and was angry with him for not coming to him at the instant he needed him. Liszt, always long-suffering and courteous, chides him gently in his reply of the 9th October.