The above passage is quoted as an instance of many others, and one must admire the candour of Wagner's widow, who has not suppressed a single touch in the picture of this beautiful friendship. But Liszt's help was not limited to material things. What was infinitely more valuable to Wagner, and what excited his gratitude to even more superlative utterance, was the confidence which Liszt showed in his genius, and without which, it is no exaggeration to say, Wagner's greatest works would probably have remained unwritten.
The first performance of "Lohengrin" at Weimar, which was really the starting-point of his fame, has already been alluded to. Every further step in his career was watched and encouraged by the loving sympathy of Liszt, and when Wagner, overpowered by the grandeur and difficulties of his "Nibelungen" scheme, was on the point of laying down the pen, it was Liszt who urged him to continue in his arduous task, and to go on in spite of all discouragement.
It must not, however, be thought that Wagner alone derived benefits from this remarkable friendship. Not only did he in his turn encourage Liszt in the career of a composer of great and novel works, but he distinctly raised the intellectual and artistic level of his friend. Liszt's nature was of a noble, one may say, ideal kind, but he had lived in dangerous surroundings, and the influence of the great world and of the glaring publicity in which a virtuoso moves, had left its trace on his individuality. Here, then, the uncompromising idealism, the world-defying artistic conviction of Wagner, served as a tonic to his character. If the reader will refer to Letter 21, or at least to that portion of it which has been vouchsafed by Madame Wagner, he will see how necessary the administration of such a tonic was to a man who even at that time could think it necessary to deprecate the "superideal" character of "Lohengrin", and to advise in a scarcely disguised manner that the Knight of the Grail should be brought a little more within the comprehension of ordinary people. All the more beautiful is it to see how Liszt is ultimately carried away by the enthusiasm of his great friend, how he also defies the world, and adopts the device "L'art pour l'art" as his guiding principle. Altogether the two friends might have said to each other in the words of Juliet:—
"My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite." A few words should be said of the spirit in which the translator has undertaken his extremely difficult task. There are in these pages many things which are of comparatively little interest to the English reader,—allusions to circumstances and persons with which he cannot be expected to be familiar, especially as the latter are frequently veiled by initials. There is no doubt that judicious omissions might have made these pages more readable and more amusing. But then such a book as this is not meant to amuse. It is almost of a monumental character, and his deep respect for that character has induced the translator to produce its every feature,—a remark which applies to manner no less than to matter. In consequence, not a line has been omitted, and the manners and mannerisms of the writers have been preserved as far as the difference of the two languages would allow. Such effusions of German enthusiasm as "dearest, best, most unique of friends," "glorious, great man," and the italics which both Wagner and Liszt employ with a profusion of which any lady might be proud, have been scrupulously preserved. These slight touches give a racy flavour to the letters; and although they may occasionally call forth a smile, they will, no doubt, be appreciated by those who with Sterne "can see the precise and distinguishing marks of national character more in these nonsensical minutiae than in the most important matters of state."
That the task of reproducing these minutiae without doing too much violence to the English idiom was an extremely difficult one, the experienced reader need not be told. Liszt, it is true, writes generally in a simple and straightforward manner, and his letters, especially those written in French, present no very great obstacles; but with Wagner the case is different. He also is plain and lucid enough where the ordinary affairs of life are concerned, but as soon as he comes upon a topic that really interests him, be it music or Buddhism, metaphysics or the iniquities of the Jews, his brain gets on fire, and his pen courses over the paper with the swiftness and recklessness of a race-horse, regardless of the obstacles of style and construction, and sometimes of grammar. His meaning is always deep, but to arrive at that meaning in such terrible letters, for example, as those numbered 27, 35, 107, 255, and many others, sometimes seems to set human ingenuity at defiance. It would of course have been possible, by disentangling dove-tailed sentences and by giving the approximate meaning where the literal was impossible, to turn all this into fairly smooth English. But in such a process all the strength and individual character of the original would inevitably have been lost. What I have endeavoured to do is to indicate the diction which a man of Wagner's peculiar turn of mind would have used, if he had written in English instead of in German.
To sum up, this translation of the correspondence is intended to be an exact facsimile of the German original. To supply notes and a serviceable index, to give a clue to the various persons who are hidden under initials—all this must be left to another occasion, provided always that the Wagner family consents to such a course, and that the interest shown by English readers in the work as it stands holds out sufficient inducement to so toilsome a piece of work.