These matters have nearly all been indirectly dealt with already, and as we come to review the situation, this is what we find. Minna was an impossible wife for such a man: she never could understand why he could not have remained quietly at his post in Dresden, indifferent to good or bad opera representations, and unambitious concerning the proper artistic production of his own works. When calamity followed calamity, to her all the trouble seemed due to Richard's pig-headedness; and she would at once have grown cheerful and good-natured had he burned his finished and unfinished scores and written "something popular." She was, I say, impossible. Cosima, for her part, found Bülow impossible. A splendid character in many ways, he was as wayward and quarrelsome a man as has lived. So Richard and Minna drifted apart, and Bülow and Cosima drifted apart, and in the end Richard and Cosima drifted together. The censures that still are passed at times on their conduct are hypocritical and grotesque. The people who pass them are usually people who think that the Ten Commandments were made only to be observed by the poorer classes, or by other people, not themselves, and are willing enough to excuse offences against the marriage laws when they are committed by folks of exalted social position. The whole truth about the Richard-Cosima affair will evidently never be known; no one has told; three of the four concerned have passed away; and those writers to-day who pretend to know most are precisely those whom I suspect of knowing least.

The charge of living in luxurious surroundings is well enough founded—Wagner undoubtedly did love them: he said so himself. What did the luxury amount to? A few carpets, chairs, a silk dressing-gown, and sufficient to eat and drink! He certainly worked hard enough for them and had a right to them. It is odd to think that most of those who brought these charges against him themselves grasped at as much luxury as they could get: had King Ludwig spent his money on them there would have been no objections raised, and doubtless they would have given us Rings and Mastersingers. This must be the judgment of every sane person.

However, Wagner settled peacefully at Triebschen, and remained there until the Bayreuth idea took solid and visible shape. He completed the Mastersingers and Siegfried, and made progress with the Dusk of the Gods. When Minna died in 1868 he immediately married Cosima. The idea of what ultimately became Bayreuth took shape. Bayreuth was first thought of for a very prosaic reason. The town theatre at that time possessed the largest stage in Germany, and in many respects was far ahead of every other German theatre, and this drew the attention of Wagner and his friends to the spot. Various causes combined to make the idea of giving the first performances of the Ring in this theatre an utter impracticability, and Wagner reverted to his old pet idea of building a theatre for himself. An eminent architect, Gottfried Semper, cheerfully helped at planning a building which should unite the utmost artistic usefulness with the smallest possible expense. The house is long out-of-date, but in the 'seventies it seemed a marvel. The seats were so arranged that every one commanded, theoretically, the same view of the stage; the stage was fitted with the most modern machinery, lights and so on. The orchestra was sunk, so that the movements of the conductor and his fiddlers should not distract the attention of the audience; the auditorium was darkened, so that everything happening on the stage could be seen with the greatest possible clearness. When the good burghers of a decaying mediæval town found what was going to happen to them they rejoiced, for they foresaw invasions of millions of aliens who would not hurt them but would pay out handsomely, and renew the days of the town's prosperity. Sites were granted free of cost, both for Wagner's own house—Villa Wahnfried—and the Festival Theatre. When the foundation of the latter was laid, brass bands and processions took an important part in the proceedings.

From the very start the enterprise was looked on as a commercial one. Wagner's house was built, but work at the theatre had soon to be stopped for want of money. Numerous Wagner societies were started to raise it; concerts innumerable were given with the same object; the composer himself laboured incessantly; and eventually it was possible to resume building. But the very means, or some of the means, adopted to raise money aroused fierce antagonism amongst the musicians who did not believe in Wagner, or had been attacked by him and his disciples, and put into their hands a weapon of counter-attack. "Begging" was a term freely employed; and a thousand newspapers were found willing—nay, anxious—to insinuate or to state boldly that the money was badly needed to enable the composer to live on a sumptuous scale. When, in the summer of 1876, the first cycle of the Ring was given, no artistic undertaking could have made a worse start. People did not know what they were asked to see and to hear; they did know that all these scandalous rumours had been flying about for years, that the "entertainment" was not ordinary opera, that the opening of Bayreuth was to mark the beginning of a millennium—a new moral, religious, political and goodness knows what sort of era. Bayreuth from the first had attracted a very disagreeable set of persons, men whom fathers would not allow to speak to their daughters—or to their sons. Wagner himself had invited ridicule by claiming that his theatre was not to be a mere opera-house, but, as he told Sir Charles Hallé, the centre of the intellectual and artistic world. "A noble ambition!" scornfully replied the pianist. In a word, nothing was done to conciliate; everything was done to create resentment and opposition. King Ludwig's unpopularity must not be forgotten. Not Bavarians only, but all the German-speaking peoples, knew Bavarian national finances to be in a deplorable, desperate condition, and it seemed to them scandalous that State funds should be used—as, rightly or wrongly, was thought—for Ludwig's own gross, unspeakable pleasures. While the Germans were thus alienated, Wagner immediately after 1871 had stirred up the wrath of the French by speaking of the German army as the "world-conquerors"; he had angered the English musicians by the many remarks concerning them uttered by or attributed to him after his exploits with the Philharmonic society. He had written against the Jews, and though their finest musicians were with him, the bulk were against him.

That the performances were in many respects admirable, indeed without any precedent, we are bound to believe. The artists, great and little, had toiled for months to attain perfection. Most of the orchestra, headed by Wilhelmj, had slaved without payment that there might be no deficiencies in their department. The stage machinery, crude though it seems to us nowadays when we read of it, was on all sides reckoned marvellous. Interminable rehearsals had been held, Wagner supervising them all. In the end, even the anti-Wagnerites who went to curse, admitted that unheard-of results had been achieved: they would not give in about the music, which remained, in their crass ears, "without form or melody"; and we may therefore the more readily accept their testimony as to Wagner's supremacy as a musical director. The late Mr. Joseph Bennett's reports—and he was till his last breath a violent anti-Wagnerite—are typical: they may be read in the files of the Daily Telegraph, and are well worth reading. But, alas! when those heartless people called accountants came to add up their mysterious sums and to put figures on the credit side and on the debit side, they proved incontestably that an appalling deficit was the most obvious result of the whole proceedings; and if Wagner had any doubts, the steady inflowing tide of bills to be met must have finally convinced him. To pay the deficit, dresses and scenery had to be sold; and for a time, at any rate, it was clear the theatre could not open again. Wagner, in his old age, had to commence once again giving concerts, in London amongst other places, to raise funds. Ludwig had done much, and dared go no further. A huge subscription was arranged, and a large amount of money had been collected, when help came from somewhere, whereupon the subscriptions were returned. The detractors and slanderers who had shouted that all the money asked for in the name of Bayreuth was really destined to pay for Wagner's and King Ludwig's own private amusements received, if a vulgar phrase is allowable, a violent blow in their noisy mouths. Wagner paid no further heed to them, but went on working out his plans. The old dream referred to in his letters to Uhlig had been realised; he had his ideal theatre, he had given ideal performances, and he reckoned he had given the Germans an art. And now let us see what that art was.

CHAPTER XIV

'THE NIBELUNG'S RING' AND 'THE RHINEGOLD'

I

In the case of few artists is there an account of the creation of their works worth serious consideration. In the colloquial as well as the true sense of the word they are apt to be imaginative, and such a story as Edgar Allen Poe's of the composition of the Raven is not so much imaginative as imaginary. The creative artist is usually the last man in the world to give a veracious history of the genesis of his creations, for the simple reason that he does not know, and, during the later process of trying to find out, for his own private satisfaction, he is given to invent theories—or, let us say, hypotheses—which eventually he may come to believe pure fact. In music the act of creation is often done in a hypnotic state. Goethe mentions that his earlier songs were written in a state of clairvoyance. Many much more recent poets seem to have achieved their hugest popular successes whilst in a comatose state. Some, who also managed to secure a success with the public, apparently conceived and executed their mighty works in a state of hallucination—having somehow got the idea into their heads that they were poets. Handel, Mozart and Beethoven are three musicians who are known—if history may be at all believed—to have composed in a hypnotic state: Handel would sit for hours, unconscious of what went on around him; Mozart could not be trusted with a knife at dinner—when he had a dinner; Beethoven would pour cold water over his hands until the tenants beneath raised violent objections. No such tales are related of Bach, of Haydn, of Gluck, of Weber, nor of Wagner. If ever a man knew precisely what he had been doing, even if he was not self-conscious at the moment of doing it, that man was Wagner. He stands apart, therefore; apart from some of the greatest composers. His case, I take it, is analogous to that of a man who cannot remember a friend's address and thinks of it that night in a dream: how he chances to dream he cannot tell, but he knows what he has dreamt, and when.