PURSUED by a police warrant, Wagner first sought refuge and a home in Paris. The French capital possessed alluring attractions for him, but his reception, in 1849, was no brighter or more promising than it had been ten years earlier. He therefore left Paris, after a few weeks, and went to Zurich. Here he found a true home and hearty friends, and felt, as far as was possible, so contented that in the autumn following he became a naturalized subject. And yet Wagner used to say his forced exile pressed sore upon him, and there is no doubt he did chafe under it, and strove hard to free himself from its galling chains. He could not settle to work. He endeavoured to open communications with August Roeckel, through influential friends in Dresden, but was unsuccessful. When in Paris, and whilst still under the influence of the multitudinous, unsettling thoughts that had pressed him into the ranks of liberty, making him one of its most energetic champions, he endeavoured to negotiate with the editor of a newspaper of standing, for a series of letters, on the interesting and timely topic of “The Revolution, and its Relation to Art.” But the proposal came to nothing. He was told the time was inopportune. “Strange and silly people,” was his comment, and he left the Parisians for the more homely, though heavier folk, of Zurich.
And still he could not tear himself away from Paris. The city and people fascinated him then and at all times, and he returned, in the early part of 1850, to make another effort in the cause of art. Though his invectives were frequent and bitter, yet I have seen enough, and know enough, of the inner Wagner, to state positively that he highly esteemed the French intellect and judgment in matters of art. This is one of those curious paradoxes in Richard Wagner’s character. He could never refer to the French without some sarcastic allusion to their frivolity. At all times Wagner was “terribly in earnest,” and he almost took it as a personal insult to see the French full of sensuous enjoyment, and regarding art as a pleasant, agreeable relaxation, at the end of the day’s labour. And yet he strove to succeed there for all that; even in 1860, when he was again in Paris, his feelings were precisely the same. Writing on this point, some sixteen years later, he says: “I thought that it was there (i.e. Paris) only that I could find the atmosphere so necessary to the success of my art,[6] that element of which I so much stood in need.”
His success in 1849-50, however, was no more than it had been hitherto. His vanity was piqued at his reception. He visited old acquaintances, and was received with a patronizing friendship, as one who had come to Paris, an aspirant for fame. They would not see in him the “Tannhäuser” composer, the prophet who had come to baptize them with the pure, holy water of the true in art. His pride was wounded.
He was envious, too, of that smooth, highly polished gracefulness which the French possess in the small matters of every-day life, and which he was conscious he lacked. Though refined in intellect, courteous in bearing, carrying himself with majestic dignity when occasion demanded, yet Richard Wagner’s natural characteristic was a plainness and directness of speech, which often took the form of abruptness. “Amiability usually runs into insincerity,” says Mr. Froude, when describing Carlyle’s character in the “Reminiscences,” and Wagner was at all times sincere. Sensitive, too, as artists commonly are, he saw the Parisians resolving life and art into a pastime, and doing it with an elegant, natural gracefulness that was absent in his own serious utterances of the heart. Impatient of incapacity, blunt in speech, and vehement in declamation, even with bursts of occasional rudeness, he was angered and jealous, that a people—his intellectual inferior—should take life so easily.
NOT FOND OF EXILE.
Sick in heart, he soon became sick in body; seriously ill indeed. On his recovery, feeling naught congenial to him in Paris, he left again for Zurich, via Bordeaux and Geneva. At Bordeaux an episode occurred similar to one which happened later at Zurich, about which the press of the day made a good deal of unnecessary commotion and ungenerous comment. I mention the incident to show the man as he was. The Opposition have not spared his failings, and over the Zurich incident were hypercritically censorious. The Bordeaux story I am alluding to, is, that the wife of a friend, Mrs. H——, having followed Wagner to the south, called on him at his hotel, and throwing herself at his feet, passionately told of her affection. Wagner’s action in the matter was to telegraph to the husband to come and take his wife home. On telling me the story, Wagner jocosely remarked that poor Beethoven, so full of love, never had his affection returned, and lived and died, so it is said, a hermit.
Another adventure of this description took place at Berlin, which to my mind is a verification of the homeopathic doctrine, similia similibus curantur, for I often taunted him with possessing, though in homeopathic doses, just those very failings he denounced in others, viz. amorousness, Hebraic shrewdness, and the Gallic love of enjoyment. When he was in a jocular mood he would laugh heartily at my endeavour to prove the truth of my opinions by the citation of instances, and occasionally he would admit the impeachment, whereas, at other times, he would become irritated, and put an end to any such conversation by charging me with having lost all my German feeling under the pernicious influence of a London fog.
Back in Zurich, he could not force himself to compose. He could not, and never did, take kindly to his compulsory exile, even appealing himself to the authorities more than ten years later for permission to re-enter his fatherland. And yet I have no hesitation in asserting that the world should regard it as a boon for art that he was thus driven into exile. Away from the theatre and the busy activity connected with his office of conductor, he had time to reflect over the many schemes for the elevation of art that constantly held communion with his inner self. Freed from the contact of that vortex of petty agitation which constitutes the active life of the stage, and of which every individual, no matter how inferior his grade, thinks himself the chief attraction, he gained that repose which enabled him to see art matters in their just proportion. His state, he described to me, as that spoken of by both Aristotle and Plato: “One of the highest happinesses attained through the pleasures of the intellect by the contemplative life.” Indeed, it can be maintained, that all the great works of his after-life were either completed or sketched during those years of exile.
THE VILLA AT ZURICH.
To begin with his literary work. In this branch of thought he was remarkably active. For five whole years, the first five of his Zurich life, I remember he said he did not compose a bar; all was literary outpouring, and so much was he given to reflection on the strange position in which he found himself in the art world, and the manner in which his operas had been received, that he even seriously considered the question whether music was his province, whether he should not reject tonal composition entirely in favour of the spoken drama. In a letter of that period he says, “I spend my time in walking, reading, and literary work.” And when one considers what Wagner did during those years of banishment, it will be seen how hard a worker he was. His exile lasted for something like twelve years, and during that time he wrote those masterly expositions: “Art and Revolution,” “The Art Work of the Future,” “Art and Climate,” “Judaism in Music,” and “Opera and Drama,” whilst, as regards the music-drama, he wrote the whole of the words and music of the “Nibelung’s Ring,” “Tristan and Isolde,” the “Mastersingers” (1861-62), and a fragment of music subsequently embodied and amplified in “Parsifal.”