Minna has always been the subject of contumelious and sometimes venomous remarks from the simpler-minded Wagnerians, especially those who have apparently taken their cue from Villa Wahnfried. Their quick and easy way with the problem has been to assume, as usual, that Wagner was in all things the just man made perfect; his marriage with a woman who was his intellectual inferior was a mistake, but his conduct was always that of an affectionate husband and an honourable gentleman,—his patience and forbearance, indeed, with such a thorn in his side being nothing less than angelic. The Wagnerians detest poor Minna even more than they detest Meyerbeer or Nietzsche. The climax of comic pettishness was reached a few years ago in Mr. Ashton Ellis\'s remark that for the offence of flicking a pellet of bread on to a manuscript that Wagner was reading to a young friend she should have been put in a cab and taken to the nearest station, railway or police.[67] Fortunately even the Wagnerians are not always so comical as this; but by way of doing justice to the memory of Wagner, they have showered their contempt or their hatred in abundance upon poor Minna\'s head. How grievously the recollection of the old unhappy days rankled in Wagner\'s memory is shown by the meanness of some of his revelations about her in Mein Leben. The fires of fate, when he dictated these reminiscences, seemed to have scorched rather than warmed him; he had learned many things from life, but neither delicacy nor magnanimity. Nor, one regrets to say, was Cosima, vastly as we must admire the power of her remarkable personality, the woman to impose these virtues upon him. One can recall nothing in literary history quite so unpleasant in its moral shabbiness as this spectacle of the second wife taking down from her husband\'s dictation the most damaging details he can remember of the conduct of his first wife,—both of them knowing that in the circumstances under which these reminiscences would be published it was impossible for either Minna or her friends to state her case for her as she herself must have seen it. And all the world knows that this second wife, when Wagner fell in love with her, was herself wedded to another man, who divorced her on the 18th July 1869; that their son Siegfried was born on 6th June 1869, and that she and Wagner were married on 25th August 1870.[68] Plain people, used to putting things in plain language, would say that this virtuous gentleman, who was so severe a censor of Minna\'s matrimonial conduct, first of all stole the affections of a friend\'s wife—or at any rate accepted them when they were offered to him[69]—and afterwards lived in adultery with her, to the anger of her father and many of Wagner\'s best friends.[70] It strikes one, then, as rather a mean thing for a couple of people with a far from immaculate record of their own to be laying their heads together, day after day, to commit to paper, for the benefit of the world half a century or so later, a record of the failings of a poor creature who was no worse than either of them,—and a record, of course, coloured throughout by their own prejudices. The disproportion between what Richard tells us about Cosima and Frau Wesendonck and what he tells us about Minna, and the vast difference in candour in his treatment of these episodes, is very remarkable in a book of which the sole value is supposed to reside in its "unadorned veracity." Of course in telling the story of how you took your second wife from a friend, and deceived him day by day, the fact that the lady herself happens to be your amanuensis rather militates against "unadorned veracity"; but Wagner and Cosima might have reflected on this simple fact, and stayed their eager hands a little when dissecting the first wife. People so vitreously housed should be the last to commence stone-throwing.

Minnaphobia seems to be traditional in the circles that have chosen to regard Wagner as peculiarly their own. Apparently no tittle-tattle about her is too absurd for them to believe. Let us take, in illustration, the portentous case—that really deserves to become historic—of Mr. Ashton Ellis and the little dog Fips. Wagner and Minna were both animal lovers, and were virtually never without a dog or a bird. These beloved animals, as Wagner more than once tells us, counted for much in their childless home. Fips had been a present from Frau Wesendonck. He died somewhat suddenly and inexplicably in June 1861, during the sojourn of Wagner and Minna in Paris. Apparently a legend has grown up in certain quarters that as the dog was Frau Wesendonck\'s present to Wagner, Minna poisoned it to gratify her hatred and jealousy of that lady and of Wagner. Mr. Ellis, at any rate, propounded this theory in his English edition of the letters to Mathilde Wesendonck. Wagner\'s account of the death of the dog may here be quoted in Mr. Ellis\'s own translation:

"At the last there even died the little dog that you once sent me from your sick bed; mysteriously suddenly! It is presumed he had been struck by a cart wheel in the street, injuring one of the little pet\'s internal organs. After five hours passed without a moan, quite gently and affectionately, but with progressive weakness, he silently expired (June 23)."[71]

Mr. Ellis, in some "valedictory remarks" at the end of the volume, asks why only fourteen of Frau Wesendonck\'s letters to Wagner have been preserved, and of course finds the explanation in the wickedness of Minna. "Looked at from whichever side [sic], I am forced to the conclusion that Minna destroyed the whole bundle just before laudanuming Mathilde\'s living present, Fips—a doing to death so plainly hinted page 273."[72]

The reader is now invited to turn once more to the above citation from Wagner\'s letter, and to discover, if he can, where this "laudanuming" of Fips is "so plainly hinted." We know that Minna used to take laudanum to alleviate her heart trouble, but where in the letter is the barest suggestion on Wagner\'s part of her having made away with Fips by means of that poison? It is safe to say that this theory that Mr. Ellis believes to be "so plainly hinted," would never have occurred to a single reader of the letter if it had not been put into his head by Mr. Ellis.[73] Apart from this, it is interesting to see that Mein Leben (which was published seven years after the Wesendonck letters) gives no support to this wild charge. But though there is not a hint in Mein Leben of an insinuation against Minna in connection with the dog\'s death, there is a curious discrepancy between the account given there (English edition, p. 781; German edition, p. 765), and that in Wagner\'s letter of July 12, 1861. In the latter, as we have seen, he says that "it is presumed he had been struck by a cart-wheel in the street." There is not the barest hint here of the barest suspicion of poisoning. Mr. Ellis conjectures that the vermütlich ("it is presumed") is really vermeintlich ("allegedly") in the manuscript of the letter. It is a wild conjecture, but let us accept it. It at least makes it clear that Minna had "alleged" that the dog had been struck by a cart-wheel, and that Wagner accepted the statement. But in the autobiography we get this surprising sentence: "According to Minna\'s account, we could only think that the dog had swallowed some virulent poison spread in the street." On Wagner\'s own showing, this had not been "Minna\'s account"; and for a true version of that account one would rather trust a letter written within a few days of the event than an autobiography written some seven or eight years later. Does it not look as if the laudanuming legend had grown up in the interval, among people who made detestation and denigration of Minna a fundamental article of the Wagnerian faith? But there is a further mystery to be solved. "Though he" (Fips) "showed no marks of external injury," says the autobiography, "he was breathing so convulsively that we concluded his lungs must be seriously damaged." Why in the name of common sense should he show any marks of outward injury, or should anyone look for such marks, if it was suspected that the dog had been poisoned? The curious thing is that if we omit the sentence in the autobiography, quoted above, about the "virulent poison," the account there agrees with that of the letter of July 12, 1861, in attributing the accident to some external injury received in the street. It looks as if the "poison" theory had been spatchcocked into the paragraph later on, without its being observed how it clashed with the context. In any case it is satisfactory to see that not only is there not a hint even in Wagner\'s later and fuller account of any suspicion of Minna having caused the dog\'s death, but it is clear that she was as grieved about it as he was. "In his first frantic pangs after the accident,"[74] says Wagner, "he had bitten Minna violently in the mouth, so that I had sent for a doctor immediately, who, however, soon reassured us as to her not having been bitten by a mad dog."[75] The dog could not have bitten Minna in the mouth unless she had had her face very near his, probably against it, caressing and comforting it; and one leaves it to common sense to decide whether a woman who had been brutal enough to poison a dog out of hatred of her husband and another woman would have been foolish enough to put her face near the teeth of the writhing animal. And, by the way, would laudanum have brought on "frantic pangs"? Is it not pretty clear that the laudanum has only been suggested because it is known that Minna became addicted to that drug as her heart disease developed?

It only needs to be added that although Fips had been given to Richard and Minna by Frau Wesendonck, it had always been Minna\'s dog rather than Wagner\'s. "A special bond of understanding," he says, "had been formed between them [Minna and Mathilde] by the gift from the Wesendoncks of a very friendly little dog to be the successor of my good Peps. He was such a sweet and ingratiating animal that it very soon gained the tender affection of my wife: I too was always much attached to him. This time I left the choice of a name to my wife, and she invented—apparently as a pendant to the name Peps—the name Fips, which I was willing he should have. But he was always in reality my wife\'s friend, for ... on the whole I never again established with them [i.e. any later animals] the intimate relations I had had with Peps [a previous dog] and Papo [a parrot]."[76]

On examination, then, of this theory that Frau Wesendonck had given Wagner a dog, which dog Minna had poisoned in her fury against the pair, it turns out (1) that the dog had always been Minna\'s pet rather than Wagner\'s; (2) that while no reason is given for her suddenly becoming inflamed with hatred against it, Wagner himself makes it clear that she was distressed at its dying; (3) that Wagner\'s account of the affair in his letters (written from two to nineteen days after the event) agrees with that in Mein Leben (not written till some years after), with the exception of that one sentence, in the latter, as to Minna having said that the dog had swallowed poison in the street; (4) that this sentence obviously makes nonsense of the remainder of the account in Mein Leben; (5) that the inference is (a) that the poisoning theory was an after-thought on Wagner\'s or some one else\'s part; and (b) that the "plain hinting" of Minna\'s guilt that Mr. Ellis sees in the letter of July 12, 1861, but that no other living being can see there, was not suggested to him at all by that letter, but that he is indebted to some other source for it.