In the end they marry. Wagner was twenty-three and a half, Minna twenty-seven. At the altar, he says, he had the clearest of visions of his life being dragged in different directions by two cross-currents; but he accounts for the levity with which he chased away these thoughts by the "really heart-felt affection" he had for this "truly exceptional girl," who "gave herself so unhesitatingly to a young man without any means of support."

Almost immediately after the marriage, whatever little idyll there had been in it is shattered. In a few months new financial troubles have accumulated. Minna cannot resign herself to them so easily as he does. The less he is able to provide for the necessities of the household, the more does she feel compelled to take upon herself the duty of supplying them. This she does, to his "unbearable shame," by "making the most of her personal popularity." He was unable to bring her to see the matter from his point of view; and as usual, all attempts at an understanding were frustrated, as he admits, by the bitterness and violence of his words and manner.[130] What he means by "making the most of her personal popularity" it is not easy to say. On the surface it suggests infidelity to Wagner; but a letter of his to Minna of 18th May 1859 makes this hypothesis more than doubtful. Ultimately there appears on the scene one Dietrich, a rich merchant, of whom Wagner is obviously jealous. On the 31st May 1837 Minna leaves her home while Wagner is at the theatre. She has fled to Dresden, Dietrich accompanying her a small part of the way. Wagner half-recognises that she has done no more than flee from a desperate situation, and he reproaches himself for being the cause of her despair. He finds her on the 3rd June under her parents\' roof in Dresden; there she confesses that she regarded herself as badly treated by him, and thought him "blind and deaf" to the misery of her position.

Matters grow brighter for a time, but Dietrich turns up once more, and Minna again disappears with him. In time she writes Wagner "a most affecting letter," in which she confesses her infidelity, but pleads that she had been driven to it by despair. She has been deceived in the character of her seducer; now, again in despair, ill and wretched, she begs Wagner\'s forgiveness, and assures him that she has only now become truly conscious of her love for him. He writes back, taking on himself the chief blame, and declares that there should never again be any mention between them of what happened,—a pledge, he says, which he can pride himself on having carried out to the letter.

He was unquestionably generous on this occasion;[131] no doubt his conscience told him that he himself was largely answerable for the distracted state of Minna\'s mind. Her flight was no romantic love affair, but the mere willingness to accept any outstretched hand that would help her to escape from her husband and the disillusionment the marriage with him had brought her.

His own view of their early married life is further given in two later letters to Minna. They are both instructive. We have to bear in mind, in reading them, his inveterate tendency to dramatise and idealise himself, and his actor\'s gift of plausible expression. Making the necessary deductions on this account, the story in the letters agrees with that told here. He brings passion to the marriage, Minna brings merely sympathy,—which only makes her sacrifice of herself the more remarkable. Both letters are much too long for quotation here, and extracts can give only an imperfect idea of them. They must be read in full. In the first letter, written, as we have already seen, as a sort of farewell to her before going to the East with Madame Laussot, he paints the picture of their early married life as he saw it,—he all pure, unquestioning love, she possessed merely with an ideal of duty. "It was duty that bade you bear with me all the troubles we endured in Paris." (It apparently did not strike him that it must have been a remarkable sense of duty—hardly distinguishable in its effects from love—that made his wife endure such torments for his sake.) The cue of the more inflexible of the Wagner partisans has always been that Minna was incapable of appreciating her husband\'s genius. She may not have been able to follow the later flights of it; how many even of his musical contemporaries could, for that matter? But there is evidence enough that whatever doubts she may have had about him as a man, she had a sincere admiration for his gifts as a composer. After the Wesendonck catastrophe in 1858, when Minna was living apart from her husband in Dresden, and had no reason to be particularly well-disposed towards him, she wrote to a friend: "Lohengrin was at last given on the 6th of this month, at the Court Theatre in Dresden, for the first time. I am very fond of this opera.... I have often to refresh and strengthen myself with Richard\'s works, or else I could not write to him in a friendly tone. He certainly has in me an ardent worshipper of his earlier works. I have a feeling as if I had created them with him, for during that time I looked after him and took all the household cares on my own shoulders alone. How different it has been during the last few years of our union!"[132] And in the grievous Paris days we find her writing to Apel for help for her husband, and declaring her willingness to bear her weary burdens cheerfully in order that his genius might have a chance of coming into its own. "What to do now is at the moment a chaos to me; but even if I had the means of leaving Paris, I would never leave Richard in this position, for I know he has not fallen into it through levity, but the noblest and most natural aspiration of an artist has brought him where unfortunately every man perhaps must come without special help." And the poor woman, whose great desire in life is to live with bourgeois honesty, is reduced to making a piteous appeal to Apel to rescue her husband by a further loan of money. The same cry is wrung from her in a letter of three weeks later. "I am perhaps better fitted than Richard to plead with you to make a sacrifice on his behalf, as I speak for another rather than for myself. I can put myself in the same category as you, for I too have brought him sacrifices; I have given up my own peaceful, independent lot in order to bind myself to his, for it seems to be appointed that only through the most violent storms and trials will he reach his goal. Therefore I am fulfilling now a holy duty; perhaps, indeed, I sacrifice myself in writing to you again [for money, after Apel\'s declared unwillingness to give any more]. You say in your letter to Richard that it is impossible for you to do more for him than you have done. That you have given this much shows your good and noble will; and I must believe, since you assure me it is so, that without overstepping your usual expenses it is impossible for you to make a greater sacrifice for him. Let me, however, without any desire to boast, tell you what I did as a girl for my brother, who perhaps in certain relationships stood less closely to me than Richard to you. He was to have studied in Leipzig, but my parents could not support him; so I undertook to do so, at a time when, owing to the wretched state of the finances of the theatre, I had not even four groschen for my dinner. I pawned my ear-rings and such things—which were often indispensable to me at the theatre—sent the money to my brother for his studies, and kept for myself only three pfennigs for a bit of bread which I ate for my dinner while out walking, having pretended to the hotel people that I was invited out to dinner somewhere. Now should it be only the poor and needy to make sacrifices of this kind?... In Richard there is a fine talent to be rescued, that will be brought nigh to ruin, for already he has nearly lost heart, and if that happens his higher destiny is lost...."[133]

Surely here was a character of which one who was a poorer composer but a better man might have made something finer than Wagner did. In the light of these letters and the self-sacrifice they reveal, read now the sublimely egoistic lines in which Wagner speaks of these Parisian days in his letter to Minna of April 17, 1850:

"Since our reunion after the first disturbance of our married life [i.e. the Dietrich affair] it was really only duty that controlled your conduct towards me,—it was duty that made you bear with me all the miseries we suffered in Paris, and even in your last letter but one you only speak of duty in connection with those days,—not love. Had you had real love for me in your heart then, you would not be giving yourself credit now for enduring those miseries, but, in your firm belief in me and what I am, you would have recognised in them a necessity in which one acquiesces for the sake of something higher; when one thinks only of this higher thing, and is happy in the consciousness of it, he forgets lower sorrows."

This is the magnificent spirit that created Bayreuth; but it is hardly the spirit for a happy married life, or the way in which to talk about the hunger your wife has endured for you, the trinkets she pawned for you, and the lodger\'s boots she has cleaned for you.[134]

So the letter runs on. Wagner reviews their life in Dresden,—always, as it seems to me, pleading his case for posterity as much as stating it to Minna, who probably listened to it with a melancholy curl of the lip: how often before had she not had to listen to these panegyrics of himself!

Let us be fair to him also, however. The business of criticism—at any rate a generation after the actors in the drama have become dust—is to try to see the case for each of them through his own eyes. Occasionally one\'s anger or contempt may be stirred at some particularly unpleasant manifestation of character; but on the whole, as Oscar Wilde says, "Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius or censuring C?sar Borgia. These personages have become like the puppets of a play.... They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval." It is quite true, as Wagner goes on to say, that everything he did in Dresden was the inevitable outcome of his artistic nature; without being untrue to his faith as an artist he could not have acted otherwise. With her inartistic clearness of vision, Minna saw all along whither his idealism was leading them both,—to poverty and a repetition of the distress of the Paris days. He admits that she gave him "bodily tending," but complains that what "a man of his inner excitability" needed most—"mental tending"—was withheld from him. But before we blame Minna for not fully understanding the Wagner of this period and seeing the future ruler of musical Europe in him, let us ask how many even of his musical associates were capable of that feat. After the Dresden catastrophe everyone must have been of her opinion,—that he was an excitable and ill-balanced man of genius, with a fatal gift for making the worst of life, who had by his own folly sacrificed for ever his chance of making an honourable livelihood. Nobody could judge him fairly, because no such man as he—no man so possessed with the idea that anything was permissible to the artist that was necessary for his self-realisation—had ever come within the ken of any of them. To the careful housewife, who had endured so much for him only to see all the hardly-won comfort of the last few years imperilled for ever, he could only appear an impossible wastrel to whom life could never teach prudence. How deep was her anger with him is shown by her long-continued refusal to go to him after his flight. She wrote to him that "she would not join him till he could support her abroad by his earnings." Evidently she had not his gift for living complacently on charity or debts. It is impossible not to be moved by this letter of Wagner\'s, however conscious we may be that it is merely a dexterous piece of special pleading. The situation between them had evidently become hopeless, yet neither realised that it was so. Minna\'s hope was that he would again become the Wagner of the early Dresden days, working patiently to provide an honourable livelihood for them both. He had done with all this; henceforth nothing existed for him but his dreams. We can now see that as an artist, he was, as usual, right; but what wife, seeing her husband cease from musical composition for six years and apparently waste his time in writing argumentative books that few people read and fewer still understood, would have judged him and their position otherwise than Minna did? It was his great grievance against her at this time that she insisted on his doing all he could to get a contract for a new opera for Paris[135]—a project that became every day more distasteful to him. "You stand before me implacable," he cries bitterly: "you seek honour where I almost see disgrace, and feel shame at what is to me most welcome." He apparently could not realise that to Minna the thought of living on other women\'s bounty and perpetually staving off hungry creditors was as horrible as the idea of sinking back into the filth of the ordinary operatic world was to him.

The same note of eager self-justification is sounded again in the interminable letter of 18th May 1859. There is the same inability to see the problem from any angle but his own. He once more admits that Minna has suffered greatly for him, especially in those ghastly years in Paris. But she should regard her sufferings as part of the game. He was a man of genius, who had to follow his star or die. If her path was not a happy one, she should regard it as "a necessity in which one acquiesces for the sake of something higher."

Let us look a moment at this second letter, in which the clever actor is even more apparent. Minna has taken offence at the passage in Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde relating to their marriage; and he writes very sensibly and tactfully on this point, doing all he can to soothe the poor woman, who was by this time hopelessly ill both in body and in mind, and, as even her enemies admit, not to be held answerable for the suspicions by which she was obsessed. He discourses with his customary wordiness upon the nature of love; like Wotan and some of his other characters, he could never stop talking when once he had been wound up on the subject of his wrongs. Like Wotan, Lohengrin and the rest of them, he always has a grievance, and is always misunderstood; hence the need for such lengthy explanations. But there is a touch of meanness in his unnecessary reminder to Minna of her flight from him in their early married days.[136] In Mein Leben he is candid enough, as we have seen, to admit that he was chiefly to blame for this lapse on her part.[137] His thesis now is that she did not love him then, or she would not have run away; whereas although he had behaved badly to her, it was all out of the greatness of his love! The sophistry of it all is too unconscious, too na?ve, for us to do anything but smile at it; but we may doubt whether Minna, with her keen eye for facts and her impenetrability to words, admired the performance as much as he did.

Then he puts into her mouth a long imaginary description of her own conduct and psychology, and the sort of plea he was always making for himself and desirous that she should make for him. He reminds us irresistibly of his own Wotan:

"Wouldst thou, oh wife,
In the castle confine me,
As god this boon thou must grant me,—
Though in the fortress fettered,
Yet to my rule the whole world I must win.
Ranging and changing
All love who live;
This sport I cannot desist from."

So says the self-justifying god to his wife in the Rhinegold. And again in the Valkyrie:

"Nought learnedst thou
When I would teach thee,
What ne\'er thou canst comprehend
Till clear in daylight \'tis shown.
Only custom canst thou understand;
But what ne\'er yet befell
Thereon fixed is my thought."

So would Wagner have poor Fricka-Minna regard him. He obligingly writes out for her at length the confession he would like to hear her recite:

"With Richard\'s individuality, that on the one hand qualified him for the production of such important works and in the end for such unusual successes, it was inevitable, on the other hand, that heavy shadows should thereby fall on our life. I am not thinking of the constant outward care and trouble, although they taxed my vital powers most severely; it could not be otherwise than that his original artistic nature, the peculiarly emotional and wildly moving quality of his works, should keep him in the same state of excitation as they created in others,—inevitably causing disturbances of my own repose. An artist so significant as Richard, one perpetually at work with such passionate artistic tools, retains all his life a certain youthfulness, which must no doubt often cause anxiety to the wife at his side; and whereas this wife remains close to him in the accustomed narrow circle of the household as an old possession, which one often does not notice any longer just because one is so sure of it and so intimate with it from of old, from without there may present themselves new figures, towards the effect of which the anxious wife will probably have to show forbearance."[138]

Wotan, in fact, was to do all the ranging and changing. For Fricka the cue was to be forbearance. Incidentally I may observe that this was also to be the cue for the masculine heads of the households,—those of Bülow, Wesendonck, and Laussot for example,—in which Wotan was to indulge freely in the sport he could not desist from.

It was a simple and lucid philosophy of married life, granting the premisses. Minna\'s misfortune was to dispute the premisses. The egregious self-satisfaction of this letter, and its pose of the wronged but forgiving husband, apparently provoked her ............