Let us now take another case—his treatment of Hanslick in Mein Leben. At one time these deadly enemies had been friends.[36] In the course of years Hanslick's antipathy to Wagner became more and more pronounced, and by the spring of 1861, when Wagner visited Vienna, the critic of the Neue Freie Presse was an opponent to be feared. Wagner, as he more than once tells us, never troubled to be particularly polite to critics; but in Vienna he seems, by his own account, to have been gratuitously rude to Hanslick. The critic was introduced to him on the stage at a rehearsal of Lohengrin. "I greeted him curtly, and as if he were a total stranger; whereupon Ander, the tenor, introduced him to me a second time with the remark that Herr Hanslick was an old acquaintance of mine. I replied shortly that I remembered Herr Hanslick very well, and turned my attention to the stage again."[37] The opera singers did their best to smooth matters over, but Wagner was irreconcilable; and to his refusal to be friendly with Hanslick he attributes his subsequent failure to make headway in Vienna.
A little while after, they met again at a dinner party at Heinrich Laube's, where Wagner refused to speak to Hanslick.[38] They met a third time, at an evening party at Frau Dustmann's, who was to sing Isolde in the projected performance of Tristan. Wagner being, as he tells us, in a good temper, he treated the critic as "a superficial acquaintance." Hanslick, however, drew him aside, "and with tears and sobs assured me that he could no longer bear to be misjudged by me; whatever extraordinary there might be in his judgment of me was due not to any malicious intention, but solely to his limitations; and that to widen the boundaries of his knowledge he desired nothing more ardently than to learn from me. These explanations were made with such an explosion of feeling that I could do nothing but try to soothe his grief, and promise him my unreserved sympathy with his work in future. Shortly after my departure from Vienna I heard that Hanslick had praised me and my amiability in unmeasured terms."[39]
Whether Wagner's account of the interview is strictly accurate or not, we have no means of knowing; but the story, even as he tells it, indicates that Hanslick was not at this time a hopelessly prejudiced or evil-natured antagonist. In November 1862 they met again at the house of Dr. Standhartner in Vienna. Wagner read the Meistersinger poem to the company. "As Dr. Hanslick was now supposed to be reconciled with me, they thought they had done the right thing in inviting him also. We noticed that as the reading went on the dangerous critic became paler and more and more out of humour; and it was noticed that at the end he could not be persuaded to stay, but took his leave at once with an unmistakable air of irritation. My friends all agreed that Hanslick regarded the whole poem as a pasquinade against himself, and the invitation to listen to it as an outrage. And truly from that evening the critic's attitude towards me underwent a striking change; it ended in an intensified enmity, of the consequences of which we were soon made aware."[40]
The innocence of it, the air of perfect candour, of conscious rectitude, of surprise that men should be found so base as Hanslick proved himself to be! Would it be believed from this ingenuous record that Wagner had given Hanslick the most unmistakable cause of offence? It may have occurred to more than one reader to ask how Hanslick managed to recognise a caricature of himself in Beckmesser. It is hardly likely that he could have done so from the poem alone. We may be tolerably sure he had something more to go upon.
We possess three prose sketches of the Meistersinger libretto. The first was made in 1845, the second and third—there is hardly any difference between the two—in the winter of 1861. The actual libretto was written in Paris in November 1861 and January 1862. In the second sketch the Marker is given the name of "Hanslich."[41] In the third he becomes "Veit Hanslich." In these two later sketches the Marker is drawn with a perceptibly harsher hand. That the conferring of this name on the Marker was something more than a passing joke is shown by its appearing in both sketches, and not merely in the list of dramatis personæ, but written out in full throughout. These two sketches were made, as we have seen, after the first meeting of Wagner and Hanslick in Vienna in 1861. With an author so fond of reading his own works to his friends as Wagner was, it is incredible that news of Hanslick being satirised as the pedantic Marker in the forthcoming opera should not have spread through musical Vienna, and have reached the critic's ears. His feeling, therefore, at the party in November 1862, that the shaft was aimed at himself may safely be put down not so much to his own intuition as to a pre-suspicion of the truth. He would be quite justified, then, in regarding the invitation to be present at the reading as an insult. But even if we allow no weight at all to this theory, in spite of its inherent probability, what are we to think of Wagner's later conduct? He tells us more than once of Hanslick's enmity towards him; he makes no mention of himself having treated Hanslick, in the Meistersinger sketches, in a way that the critic and his friends could only regard as insulting. Hanslick was of course hopelessly wrong about Wagner the musician; but after Wagner's brusque treatment of him whenever he met him, and after the attempt to ridicule him in the Meistersinger, who will say that Hanslick was under any obligation to be fond of Wagner the man? Yet it is only Wagner's side of the case, as usual, that is given us in Mein Leben.
The autobiography, then, has to be used with caution: not that Wagner, I suppose, ever consciously perverted the truth, but that it was impossible for him to believe he was ever in the wrong in his judgments of other people, and that it would therefore be necessary to let the reader have the whole of the story in order that he might judge for himself. Nor can the careful student of his letters resist the feeling that Wagner was often writing with at least one eye on the possibility of the publication of his words at some time or other. His intense egoism—I use the term here in no condemnatory sense, but simply to denote the passion of vigorous temperaments like his for mastery—his intense egoism could probably not bear the thought that any estimate of his conduct but his own should obtain currency. Time after time we feel that his letters to and about Minna are speeches of the counsel for the defence, addressed to a larger audience than their first recipient. Here again it is only a thick-fingered psychological analysis that would write him down as a deliberate trickster. Wagner was in some respects a selfish man, as numberless testimonies agree; but he was not a bad man in the sense that it ever gave him pleasure to inflict suffering. His heart no doubt bled for Minna, but it is probable that he pitied her out of the vast fund of æsthetic and ethical feeling that was in him, as in all artists, without being a motive part of his life. The commonest daily facts prove that a musician need not have a beautiful soul of his own in order to write beautiful music or to perform music beautifully. This implies no conscious insincerity; it is simply the actor's faculty for dramatisation, for momentary self-hypnosis. And many of them can carry the exercise of this faculty beyond art into life itself. Wagner was apparently one of these. When he pitied Minna, it was in the abstract, detached way that we pity Desdemona or Cordelia on the stage—without feeling in the least impelled to rise from our seats and run any personal risk in order to save her. Nietzsche, who, for all his tendency to over-write his subject, often saw to the secret centre of Wagner's soul, was always laying it down that the instinct of the actor was uppermost in everything Wagner did. "Like Victor Hugo," he says, "he remained true to himself even in his biography—he remained an actor."[42] An actor he certainly is in many of his letters—an actor so consummate as to deceive not only his audience but himself. And so, when we read the plentiful and handsome certificates of good conduct that he gives himself, in Mein Leben and the letters, with regard to Minna,[43] we may be pretty sure that he believed every word he said, and really regarded himself as a monumentally patient and saintly sufferer of unmerited misfortunes. But the Hornstein and other affairs have shown us that Wagner is not always a perfectly veracious witness in his own behalf; and we may reasonably decline to give him a verdict in this or that episode of the Minna matter on his unsupported testimony.
What I have called his passion for self-justification is shown in nothing more clearly than in the device of postponing his autobiography for some thirty years after his death, when the persons so liberally criticised in it would all be tolerably certain to be no more. It is singular, indeed, how fortunate Wagner has been in having the stage to himself throughout. This has materially helped to create and sustain the Wagnerian legend. Most of the people with whom he came into unfriendly or only partially friendly relations in his youth or middle age died before it was realised what a world-figure he was to become; consequently they have left hardly any records of their impressions of him. Meyerbeer, for example, died in 1864. We need not take up any brief for Meyerbeer as a whole; but will anyone contend that if we could get his account of his dealings with Wagner, the present story would not have to be modified at many points? Wagner, it must be confessed, was often lacking in delicacy of soul. Had Liszt and Bülow, Wesendonck and Wille, Cornelius and Tausig been equally indelicate, and written as frankly of Wagner the man as he has written of them, would not many features of Wagner's portraits of all of them need altering? And if Minna had had something of her husband's literary faculty and passion for special pleading, could she not have shown more alloy than he ever suspected in the golden image he loved to make of himself? Everywhere, in fact, in dealing with the memoirs and the letters, we have to remember that we are face to face with an artist who is as persuasive as he is powerful, with an overwhelming lust for mastery and for unfettered self-realisation, and with a faith in himself that must have made other people's occasional scepticism a pure mystery to him. Wherever, then, his written words involve the interpretation of his own or other men's acts and motives, they are to be accepted with caution. For the rest, the psychologist can only be thankful that Wagner poured himself out in such profusion. Let us now try to trace from his own records his general development as a man.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "From her [Frau Wesendonck] it was I earliest learnt a truth which added years have simply verified; that in Richard Wagner we have more than a great,—a profoundly good man." Mr. Ashton Ellis's Introduction to his version of the Wagner-Wesendonck Letters, p. xl.