It was not very long after he had been disappointed in Jessie Laussot, and at a time when Minna had ceased to minister to his mental life, that he made the acquaintance of Mathilde Wesendonck. They first met in February 1852. The young wife was fascinated by the man of genius, and woman-wise pitied his evidently forlorn state. He, for his part, found in her the mental and moral sunlight his work needed at the time. Their affection for each other deepened month by month. Writing to his sister Clara on 20th August 1858, he speaks of having been "for six years supported, comforted and strengthened to remain by Minna\'s side, in spite of enormous differences between our characters and natures, by the love of that young woman, who drew close to me [mir sich n?herte] at first and for a long time timidly, hesitatingly, and shyly, then more and more decidedly and surely."[160]

In the summer of 1854 he sketched the Valkyrie prelude, placing on the manuscript the letters "G.......s...M.......," which Frau Wesendonck afterwards declared to represent "Gesegnet sei Mathilde" (Blest be Mathilde!). Hornstein, who saw a good deal of Wagner and his household in 1855, speaks of him as having "long ceased to love his wife" and being "consumed with passion for another."[161] By September 1856 Mathilde is apparently sufficiently conscious of her love to be distressed at the idea of Wagner settling in Weimar; so she persuades her husband to lodge the composer in a house near them. He takes up his residence in the "Asyl," adjoining the Wesendonck\'s house, the "Green Hill," in April 1857.[162] Otto and Mathilde themselves move into their now completed villa on 22nd August. "Not one of Wagner\'s brief notes before that date suggests the faintest shadow of a passion shewn," says Mr. Ellis. On 18th September 1858, however,—i.e. after the catastrophe that made it impossible for Wagner to accept Otto\'s hospitality any longer—he writes to Mathilde that exactly a year ago he had finished and brought to her the poem of Tristan. Then, he explicitly says, she confessed her love to him.[163] Are we to suppose, then, that their "passion" had grown up in three weeks—from 22nd August to 18th September? Mr. Ellis pontifically declares that "we may dismiss F. Praeger\'s observation \'during my stay I saw Minna\'s jealousy of another\' ... as on a par with his usual unreliability." Why? Is not Hornstein\'s evidence conclusive as to what was happening under everybody\'s eyes as early as 1855?[164] A letter of Wagner\'s own to his sister Clara, however, (20th August 1858), puts it beyond question that there was something going on in the Wesendonck household to which the friends of the pair could hardly be blind. "His wife\'s frankness could have no other effect than soon plunging Wesendonck in increasing jealousy. Her greatness consisted in this, that she constantly kept her husband informed of what was going on in her heart, and gradually brought him to the fullest resignation as regards herself. It can be imagined what sacrifices and combats it took to bring this about: her success was only rendered possible by the depth and grandeur of her attachment (in which there was no trace of self-seeking), which gave her the power to exhibit herself in such strength (in solcher Bedeutung) to her husband that the latter must stand aside from her even if she should threaten her own death, and prove his unshakeable love for her by upholding her in her care for me. It became a matter of preserving the mother of his children, and for their sakes—who, indeed, formed an insuperable barrier between us twain—he resigned himself to his r?le of renunciation. Thus, while he was consumed with jealousy, she succeeded in again interesting him in me to such an extent that he often came to my support; and when at length it became a question of providing me with the little house and garden I desired, it was she who, by dint of the most unheard-of struggles, persuaded him to buy for me the lovely piece of land adjoining his own estate. The most wonderful thing, however, is that I actually never had a notion of these combats that she endured for me: for her sake her husband had always to appear friendly and easy towards me: not a frown was to enlighten me, not a hair of my head was to be touched: serene and cloudless were the heavens to be above me, smooth and soft was my path to be. So unheard-of a success had this glorious love of the pure and noble wife."[165]

It all rings very false. Wagner is simply writing what the French contemptuously call "literature." He can see nobody in the universe but himself. He pours out his spurious commendations upon Wesendonck for his "renunciation,"—a word that obsessed Wagner at that time: but it never occurred to him to practise a little renunciation on his own side, and to refrain from driving a wedge between the young husband and wife.[166] In any case, one would have at least expected him to speak kindly of the man who had made such unexampled sacrifices for him. This is how he deals with Wesendonck in Mein Leben:

"I had often noticed that Wesendonck, in the honest openness of his nature, was disturbed at my making myself so much at home in his house: in many things, such as the heating, the lighting and the hours for meals, consideration was shown me which seemed to him to encroach on his rights as master of the house." That is clear enough: what follows is less clear. "It needed a few confidential talks on the matter to establish a half-silent, half-expressed agreement, which in the course of time assumed a doubtful significance in the eyes of others. Thus there arose with regard to our now so close relations a certain circumspection [Rücksicht] which occasionally afforded amusement to the two initiated parties." This passage, with its apparently designed obscurity, tells the practised student of Wagner nothing more than that he is deliberately concealing more than he is revealing. This suspicion is strengthened by the sentence that follows: "Curiously enough, the epoch of this close association with my neighbours coincided with the beginning of the working out of my poem Tristan and Isolde."[167] The "curiously enough" is a stroke of genius, the splendour of which will be appreciated by everyone who has read his ardent correspondence with Mathilde, and knows how inseparable she and the new opera were in his mind. Only once again did he achieve such a masterpiece of trail-covering,—when he spoke of Minna\'s "coarse misunderstanding of my merely friendly relations" with Frau Wesendonck.[168] And Mein Leben really would have served to cover up his tracks in more than one critical place, had he not been imprudent enough to leave so many letters behind him.

How he repaid Otto\'s kindness to him, once he was settled in the "Asyl," may be guessed from other passages in Mein Leben. At the beginning of 1858 he was very melancholy. He attributes his condition to overwork on Tristan: but we may reasonably assume that his passion for Mathilde had something to do with it. "Even the immediate and apparently so agreeable proximity of the Wesendonck family only increased my discomfort, for it became really intolerable to me to give up whole evenings to conversations and entertainments in which my good friend Otto Wesendonck thought himself bound to take part at least as much as myself and others. His anxiety lest, as he imagined, everything in his house would soon go my way rather than his gave him moreover that peculiar burdensomeness [Wucht] with which a man who thinks himself slighted throws himself into every conversation in his presence, something like an extinguisher on a candle."[169] That at any rate is candid, and gives us a hint of the delicacy of his behaviour to the husband who had shown him so many kindnesses, and with whose wife he was openly in love. But what a way to speak of the generous and unhappy man who had done and suffered so much for him! Wagner could remember everything, apparently, but the necessity for gratitude.

The crisis in his "merely friendly relations" with Mathilde had come, as we have seen, three or four months earlier,—on that day in September 1857 when he had brought her the last act of the poem of Tristan, and she had placed her arms around him, and "dedicated herself to death that she might give him life."[170] Apparently there was trouble between Minna and Mathilde about this time. Kapp quotes from a letter of Minna\'s in which she says, "I had to say what was in my heart once more to young Frau Wesendonck. She all at once became very haughty and absurd, so that I refused her invitations, but she again asked my pardon, and now I am again friendly for Richard\'s sake."[171] Evidently the situation was an intolerable one for Minna,—her husband openly calling Frau Wesendonck his "Muse," thinking of nobody but her, and running across the garden every few hours to sun himself in her presence. And it is equally evident that Wagner himself was in despair. We have seen him confessing, in Mein Leben, to being woefully out of tune in the winter of 1857-58, though he does not tell the reader the real cause. There is no reason to suppose that his relations with Mathilde had been anything else but ideal. At this juncture, however, he seems to have felt the impossibility of an indefinite continuance of these "merely friendly relations." Early in January 1858 he wrote a feverish, despairing letter to Liszt:

"You must come to me quickly. I am at the end of a conflict in which everything that can be holy to a man is involved. I must decide, and every choice that I see before me is so terrible that when I decide I must have by my side the friend who alone has given me heaven."[172] Liszt, however is not to come to Zürich but to meet him in Paris. He follows this letter up by another on the 13th,[173] in which he again speaks of his need of a temporary absence from Zürich. "I have not lost my head, and my heart is still sound. Nothing will help me but patience and endurance."[174] That Liszt understood is evident from his reply of the 15th: "Write me soon, saying what is in your mind and what you intend to do. Does your wife remain in Zürich? Are you thinking of returning later? Where is Madame W——?"[175]

Wagner goes to Paris, and at a distance from Mathilde becomes resigned to the impossibility of possessing her. He sends Liszt a fantasia on his favourite theme of resignation.[176] He reads Calderon, finds supreme inward peace, and asks Liszt for some more money.

The end, however, was nearer than he thought. He returned to Zürich at the beginning of February, and apparently the unlucky pair drifted helplessly into the coils of circumstance again. The crash came in April, when Minna intercepted a letter from her husband to Mathilde. The true story of the catastrophe and the events that led up to it has hitherto been only imperfectly known: we have had to construct them as best we could out of the incomplete Wesendonck correspondence and Wagner\'s own letters: and needless to say he is not to be accepted as the most detached of witnesses when addressing the court in his own defence. Further light has recently been thrown on the history of this period by Kapp, who is able to quote from a number of Minna\'s letters that had hitherto been unknown.

"Madame Wesendonck," Minna writes, "visited my husband secretly, as he did her, and forbade my servant, when he opened the door for her, to tell me that she was above. [Minna occupied the ground floor of the house, Wagner the first floor.] I let it all go on calmly. Men often have an affair; why should not I tolerate it in the case of my husband? I did not know jealousy. Only the meannesses, these humiliations, might have been spared me, and my ludicrously vain husband must conceal it from me."[177] In another letter of the 30th April 1858 she refers to the gossip of the place that had come to her ears, which at first she did not believe. But it struck her that Wagner "went over too often when the good man [Wesendonck] was not at home," and she was annoyed at the daily exchange of correspondence between the "Green Hill" and the "Asyl," and the secret visits. "On the 6th they were both with us. On the 7th I noticed that Richard was strangely restless:[178] at every ring he came out; he had a big roll of papers in his hand [sketches for Act I. of Tristan], which he wanted to send to Frau Wesendonck: but he would not part with it when I wanted to look after it for him, and he hid it awkwardly. All this astonished me a little. When he could wait no longer, he called our servant. I was there by chance when the latter passed, and I asked him for the roll of music. I undid it, and took out the thick letter that was enclosed in it, opened it, and read the most jealous love letter, from which I will give you a couple of passages. After a wild night of love that he had had, he writes to her: \'Thus it went on the whole night through. In the morning I was rational again, and from the depth of my heart could pray to my angel, and this prayer is love! Love! Deepest soul\'s joy on this love, the source of my redemption. Then came the day with its evil weather, the joy of seeing you was denied me, my work would not go at all. Thus my whole day was a struggle between melancholy and longing for you,\' &c. The letter ended in this way: \'Be good to me: the weather seems mild: to-day I will come again to your garden as soon as I see you. I hope to find you undisturbed for a moment. Now my whole soul to the morning greeting. R. W.\' What do you say to that? At mid-day I told my husband that I had opened and read his fine letter; he was rather alarmed, but I said I would not suffer this deception towards the poor man: I would go away, but he must call this woman his own for ever. Richard wanted to justify himself with his wonderful gift of the gab,[179] but I would not have it.... Richard tried to force me to be silent, and to persuade me of the purity of his relations. How ridiculous! I abide by my conviction."[180]

Now let us look at the letter in which Wagner gives his sister Clara his version of the catastrophe. After narrating the sacrifices Otto had made for him,[181] and declaring that although he and Mathilde loved each other they had been forced to recognise the necessity of resignation, he continues:

"My wife seemed, with shrewd feminine instinct, to understand what was going on: certainly she often showed jealousy, and was scoffing and disparaging: but she tolerated our intercourse, which never violated morals, but simply aimed at the possibility of knowledge of each other\'s presence. Therefore I assumed that Minna would be sensible and understand that there was really nothing for her to fear, since there could be no question of a union between us, and that therefore the most advisable and best thing for her to do was to be indulgent. I had to learn tha............