I have given the erotic history of Wagner in such detail not only because of the enormous part the erotic played in his life and in the shaping of his character, but because to know him thoroughly from this side is to have the key to his whole nature. Nowhere and at no time was a middle course possible for him. It was all or nothing. To that extent he was consistent: yet viewed in detail he was a bundle of inconsistencies,—at once a voluptuary and an ascetic, a hero and a rogue, a saint and a sinner, always longing for death, yet always fighting lustily for his life, despising the public and pining for seclusion, yet unable to live anywhere except in the very centre of the stage and the full glare of the limelight. Frau Wesendonck once reproached him very gravely and wisely with his inconsistency in this last regard: "The wretchedness of your state of mind froze my blood. I felt I could do nothing. I was to tell myself that all the gifts of nature, even the most glorious, are wasted if they are not crowned by empty external success; that they are futile in and for themselves, and he who has them above others possesses only the right to be more wretched than they! It made me almost bitter to think you would have me believe that.... It is quite incomprehensible to me how anyone can at once despise and seek mere success, i.e. applause. It seems to me that only the sage, who asks nothing of the world, may despise it; the man who uses it becomes its accomplice by mere contact with it, and can no longer be its judge. You are at once a knower (Wissender) and accomplice in the last degree. You hurriedly grasp at every new deception, apparently to wipe out from your breast the disappointment of previous deceptions; and yet no one knows better than yourself that it never can or will be. Friend, how is this to end? Are fifty years\' experience not enough, and should the moment not come at last when you are wholly at one with yourself?"[233]

He knew no law of life except the full realisation, of himself at the moment. He was by turns Christian and Freethinker and Christian again, republican and royalist, lover of Germany and despiser of Germany, anti-Semite (in theory), and pro-Semite (in practice);[234] but in each of his many metamorphoses he was sincerely convinced that he was not only right as against all the world, but right as against the Wagner of earlier years. Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Hafiz, and heaven knows who besides, were in turn the one great philosopher the world has known. In later life he becomes a vegetarian: it therefore went without saying that all mankind should forthwith abjure meat. He has the sense to recognise that a flesh diet is imperative for most people in a climate like that of Northern Europe. But a little difficulty of this kind does not daunt him; all that European humanity has to do, he tells us, is to migrate into other parts of the world.[235] He gives us, in 1851 and 1856, two divergent interpretations of the philosophies that underlie Tannh?user and the Ring. He of course explains it all by the fact that in his "intellectual ideas" he was at first working in opposition to his "intuitive ideal." The truth is that in 1851 he was still something of an optimist, while in 1856 he had become a pessimist with Schopenhauer.[236]

The many contradictions of his character have of course made him the easy butt of the satirists.[237] In 1877 there were published in the Vienna Neue Freie Presse[238] a series of letters of his to the milliner Bertha, who made him his wonderful lace shirts and satin trousers[239] and dressing-gowns, and decorated his Penzing rooms (and later his house at Tribschen) with the soft luxurious stuffs and colours he so loved. The witty editor of the Letters, Daniel Spitzer, twitted him on the inconsistency between his acts and his opinions, between his art and his life. Who would believe, he asks, that the man who indulged in these effeminacies was the same man who used to sneer in his books at the seductions of Paris: who, in his Opera and Drama, reproached Rossini with "living in the lap of luxury," called him the "luxurious son of Italy," and even, in a moment of towering virtue, styled him an "ausgestochene Courtisane"; or that the Wagner who, in the deplorable squib he wrote upon the French nation after its downfall in 1871, sneered at the French for their passion for bouquets, was himself ordering bouquets and rose garlands of the most extravagant kind from the Putzmacherin?

The man, in truth, who wrote with such a comic rage against the rich and their luxury, was himself the most luxurious of mankind. He may have admired the Spartan virtues of the poor, but he had not the least wish to practise them himself. He could not exist without a certain amount of pampering both of body and of soul, even in the days when, unable to make both ends meet, he was living on the charity of certain friends and borrowing at every opportunity from others. "It is with genuine desperation that I always pick up art again," he writes to Liszt on the 15th January 1854; "if I am to do this, if I am once more to renounce reality,—if I am to plunge again into the woes of artistic fancy in order to find tranquillity in the world of imagination, my fancy must at least be helped, my imaginative faculty supported. I cannot live like a dog; I cannot sleep on straw and refresh myself with bad liquor. My excitable, delicate, ardently craving and uncommonly soft and tender sensibility must be coaxed in some ways if my mind is to accomplish the horribly difficult task of creating a non-existent world."[240] A few days after it is the same story; he must have money by hook or by crook. Liszt will understand him,—though it will be "impossible for a Philistine to comprehend the exuberance[241] of my nature, which in these and those moods of my life drove me to satisfy a colossal inner desire by such external means as must seem to him questionable,[242] and at all events unsympathetic. No one knows the needs of men like us: I myself am often surprised at regarding so many \'useless\' things as indispensable."[243]

He grew more and more luxurious in middle age. The scale of expenditure revealed in the Putzmacherin letters, and a stray piece of information or two from other quarters, give us a hint of his recklessness in the early \'sixties,—a recklessness that brought him so near the verge of absolute ruin that it is terrible to think what might have happened to him had not King Ludwig come to his rescue. For the Christmas of 1863 he had, as is usual in Germany, a Christmas tree loaded with gifts for his friends. For a man without any income to speak of, very dubious prospects, and a grievous load of debt, his presents were magnificent. "The mad Wagner," says Cornelius in a letter to his sister Susanne (Vienna, 11th January, 1864), "had a great Christmas tree, with a royally rich table beneath it for me. Just imagine: a marvellous heavy overcoat—an elegant grey dressing-gown—a red scarf, a blue cigar-case and tinder-box—lovely silk handkerchiefs, splendid gold shirt studs—the Struwelpeter—elegant pen-wipers with gold mottoes—fine cravats, a meerschaum cigar-holder with his initials—in short, all sorts of things that only an Oriental imagination could think of. It made my heart heavy, and the next day I gave away half of them, and only then was I happy,—to Seraphine the gold studs, to Ernestine a lovely purse with a silver thaler, to Gustav Sch?naich a sash, to young Ruben the cigar-holder, to Fritz Porges the pen-wiper, something t............