Richard Wagner's letters to August Roeckel;

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RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

All rights resirved

Richard Wagner's
Letters

TO

AUGUST ROECKEL

Translated by
ELEANOR C. SELLAR

WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
BY HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN

BRISTOL
J. W. Arrowsmith, ii Quay Street

LONDON
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Company Limited

fc&

WAGNER.

BY

HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN.

PREFACE.

TT is curious to observe how much deeper
the French go in their interest for Richard
Wagner than the English. The English flock
to Bayreuth, that is true, and they flock to
Richter's concerts and to the wretched
parodies of Wagner's operas with which the
metropolis is occasionally gratified; but even
among enthusiasts, hardly one in a thousand
knows anything about Wagner, the man,, nor of
the stubborn battle waged by him during fifty

RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

years against a demoralised and demoralising
stage, and against the perversion of music — or
of what he calls " the Christian Art "—into a
mere accomplishment, a mere trade and handi-
craft. Hardly anyone in England (outside a
small cluster of enthusiasts) takes the trouble
to study seriously Wagner's doctrine of a new
form of Drama which resembles the Opera only
on the principle of " les extremes se touchent."
We simply like his music, or we don't like it, and
trouble our heads no further on the matter. In
France, on the contrary, the literature on
Wagner is almost as voluminous and at least
as valuable as that in Germany. All the
principal Journals and Reviews — the Revue des
deux Mondes, the Revue de Paris, the Revue Bleue,
the Revue Blanche, etc. — have frequent and
interesting articles on Wagner, signed by men
of the highest literary standing, such as Catulle
Mendes, MallarmS, Gaston Paris, Schure,
Wyzewa, not one of whom is a professional

PREFACE. 7

musician, or would ever dream of severing the
composer in Wagner from the poet and the
philosopher. In short, the French have long
since discovered that of which we still remain
ignorant ; viz., that Wagner is not only a
remarkable musician, but a creative genius of
the very first order ; a man so many-sided in
his interests and so lucid and energetic in his
thought, that, quite apart from his music, he
deserves to be studied as one of the most
remarkable minds of this century.

Now, it is no good trying to swim against
the tide, and I fear even Mr. William Ashton
Ellis' admirable translation of Wagner's prose
writings is not likely to do much good until our
interest in Wagner has been aroused. Nothing
is so likely to arouse it as Wagner's letters, for
these show us the man; he seems to step out
of them bodily before our eyes. And this man
is so upright, simple, sincere, and lovable, such
a manly man, that we at once feel under the

8 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

spell and long to know more about him. There
is nothing of the style epistolaire in Wagner's
letters ; they are always written rapidly, and
rarely is there a word struck out or altered.
Spontaneousness was one of the great charms
of Wagner's personal intercourse : it is the
same with his letters. A few of these, read
with the vivid remembrance of his music in our
ears, suffice to make one feel intimate with him.
His extraordinary sensitiveness comes out in
almost every letter. No impressions from
outside are necessary ; whatever subject his
thought rests on, his mind at once adopts a
peculiar complexion, his voice modulates into
the key most fitted to this emotion. In one
and the same letter he is boisterously gay as
a schoolboy, and suddenly, as the picture of a
suffering friend suggests itself, he strikes the
deepest chords of melancholy ; or, again, some
word casually dropped lays bare the underlying
philosophical current, and he launches forth

PREFACE.

into subtle dialectical argument, such as would
do honour to a Petrus Abaelardus. However,
where Wagner is at home, and where we feel
that his words are master words — that is, when
he talks of the Drama and Music, and this, as
the absorbing aim and object of his life, is the
subject of almost all his letters. His interests
are many — politics, philosophy, religion, litera-
ture — but they all centre and culminate in Art
(understood in the comprehensive sense of the
German word " Kunst").

Art is for him, as it was for Schiller, the
source and crown of civilisation ; Art is the
handmaiden of religion. And what Art is for
civilisation, that the Drama is for Art. The
Drama is not only the climax of the inventive
powers of man, but it is the fountain-head
from which the several individual arts originate,
and towards which they again converge ; it is
the heart that propels the life-giving blood
through the entire body, and which gathers it

IO RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

back from each separate member in order to
infuse new life into the whole. There is no
reason, and in fact no possibility, of separating
Wagner's music from his Drama. " Go deep
enough, there is music everywhere," says
Carlyle, in speaking of Dante's Divina Corn-
media. The poet Wagner goes deep, and
what eyes cannot see, nor words utter, finds
shape and language in music such as his.
This is not the music of mere sensual melody
and rhythm that serves as an opiate after toil
and care, or as a pastime to charm away an
idle hour. It is a music akin to that in which
popular instinct had so often given expression
to feelings which the mere words of its ballads
and songs were able to convey but imperfectly ;
it is the music which the genius of Mozart
unconsciously lights upon, thus transforming
frivolous and preposterous libretti into immortal
creations; it is the music of those deepest
depths in which Beethoven lived and moved

PREFACE. II

and had his being. Wagner's music is not
melodramatic, it is not intended to illustrate
the stage action ; with him the music is the drama,
and both the action which we see and the
thoughts that words give expression to are
merely a reflex, an "allegory" of the real
dramatic action, of the action in the "depths"
that Carlyle alludes to, where Music is the one
and only language of man and of all creation.

It was necessary to lay some stress upon
this point, for much in Wagner's letters would
be quite incomprehensible to anyone accustomed
to think of him as a mere musician, in the
ordinary superficial sense of the word. Such
a person would be perplexed to find Wagner
always engrossed in the poem and in the
dramatic action. Wagner, who dislikes theory
in Art, and who writes such books as the
Artwork of the Future and Opera and Drama
merely because this was the only means of
making way for his new conception of the

12 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

Drama, rarely, if ever, in his letters starts
theoretical discussions concerning music. He
is naturally very full of his works, and what he
says is most instructive, both for our knowledge
of his works individually and for a thorough
mastery of his conception of Art and the Drama
in general. However, it will only be found
instructive to those who start unprejudiced, and
with the sincere desire, not of finding fault with
Wagner, but of understanding him and entering
into his way of feeling as regards the organic
relationship between Music and the Drama.

Three collections of letters by Wagner have
been published. One consists of some two
hundred letters to Liszt;* a second, of one
hundred and seventy-five letters to his Dresden
friends, Uhlig, Fischer, and Heine ; t the third

* An English translation of the Wagner-Liszt letters, under
the title Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, by the late Dr.
Hueffer (of The Times), was published by H. Grevel & Co.,
King Street, London.

+ The correspondence with Uhlig, in an English translation
by J. S. Shedlock, was published also by H. Grevel & Co.

PREFACE. 13

collection of letters, those addressed to Roeckel
and here introduced to the English reader, is
comparatively very small — twelve letters only ;
but owing to a peculiar combination of cir-
cumstances, these twelve letters are so full of
varied interest, that perhaps no other publica-
tion exists which is so qualified to serve as a
first introduction to Wagner.

Liszt was, both intellectually and as a musician,
immensely superior to Wagner's other corre-
spondents. But this very superiority, added to
the fact that Liszt was constantly actively
engaged in propagating Wagner's works, and
in pleading his cause before kings and princes
and before the public, rendered it unnecessary
for Wagner to enter into details concerning his
poems in writing to Liszt as he does with
others. What forms the subject-matter of this
correspondence is, on the one hand, debate
and counsel concerning the endless difficulties
which beset his life ; on the other hand, the

.14 RICHARD WAGNERS LETTERS.

outbreaks of passionate love and gratitude on
the part of the poor exile, who feels that but
for this great man's unswerving devotion he
must be lost for ever. The correspondence
with Liszt is thus a mine of biographical facts,
and at the same time one of the most pathetic
documents we possess concerning Wagner.
But, as Liszt says in one of his letters : " One
single chord brings our two hearts nearer to
each other than any amount of verbiage."
Intimacy is seen quite as much in what people
hold their tongues about as in what they say
to each other.

Wagner's letters to Uhlig are of a totally
different nature. Uhlig was a clever and a
refined man, gifted with a singularly receptive
intellect. Liszt never entered into the detail
of Wagner's thought, Uhlig did ; Liszt cared
little or nothing for Wagner's social aspirations
after a regenerated humanity, crowned by a
regenerated Art : he was content to know that

PREFACE. 15

Wagner was a " divine genius," and to serve
him and admire his works. Uhlig, on the
contrary, was the first man to enter into the
spirit of Wagner's doctrine, and to understand
that no more than you can separate his music
from his poems, no more can you sever his
artistic from his social convictions. He was
the first also to acknowledge this publicly, and to
defend in the Press what may be called the
" Wagnerian doctrine." Political and social
questions, also questions concerning the essence
of music and of dramatic art, are thus naturally
and freely dwelt upon in these letters, con-
stituting their great interest.

Now, what causes the peculiarity of Wagner's
letters to Roeckel is precisely the fact that this
correspondent does not submit his judgment to
Wagner's as that of a superior mind, but that
he discusses every point on a footing of
intellectual equality. Uhlig's cleverness showed
itself in nothing more than in the sagacity with

16 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

which he gauged the immense superiority of
Wagner's mind over his own. Roeckel was
certainly gifted enough to feel the same, but he
did not feel it in the same degree. His
intimacy with Wagner dated further back than
that of Liszt and Uhlig, to a period when the
young poet and musician was himself still
hesitating on many questions, still wavering
between the promptings of the inner voice,
which impelled him to revolt, and the enticing
hope that Society, and with it theatrical art,
might be renovated by less radical measures.
Roeckel had been the friend and confidant of
this early period of mental fermentation. Day
after day, during five or six years, he had
discussed all these burning questions with
Wagner, and it is perhaps not advancing too
much if we attribute to RoeckePs high moral
courage and unflinching devotion to truth some
share in that final evolution which led Wagner
to break openly and without hope of return

PREFACE. 17

with a theatre and a social organisation which
he at heart despised. This it was which made
of Wagner the truly great man he was. It
was natural that the friend who had witnessed
the critical phase of this evolution, and perhaps
been instrumental in the triumph of the heroic
principle over the worldly one, should feel more
independence in the presence of this master-
mind than those who encountered it later.
Wagner looked for contradiction and discussion
when he spoke with Roeckel, nor was he dis-
appointed. Moreover, in the hard school of
adversity, during the dreary years of imprison-
ment; Roeckel's mind seems to have acquired
a considerable inflexibility, not to say stubborn-
ness. Wagner pushed on boldly ; once he had
admitted the premises, he followed them out to
their ultimate conclusions. Roeckel refused to
follow him. No doubt Uhlig did not always
understand what the Master meant, and we
may be sure he occasionally differed from him ;

1 8 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

but he did not discuss, his veneration for genius
would not have allowed him to do so. He
simply pointed out what he could not grasp.
Roeckel, on the contrary, although bound to
Wagner by the ties of the most intimate
friendship — a friendship that death alone
severed, — seems to have opposed him at every
point. His letters unfortunately are lost, but
we can guess at their contents from Wagner's
answers, and we have every reason to feel
grateful to Roeckel for the honest consistency
with which he contradicts Wagner about
politics, attacks his philosophy, and criticises
his poems. For it is to this pugnacious-
opposition that we owe the beautiful com-
mentary on the Ring des Nibehmgen and on.
the Drama in general in letter No. 4, the lucid
dissertation on Schopenhauer's philosophy in
letter 6, the inquiry concerning the influence
of philosophy on Art in letter 7, that on the aim
and scope of politics in letter 8, and so on. In

PREFACE. 19

short, the special character and the peculiar
interest of these letters to Roeckel are due to
two causes. On the one hand, to Wagner's
great affection for this particular friend, and
consequent wish to be fully understood by him ;
and, on the other hand, to Roeckel's inability
to see things in the same ligh^ as his illustrious
correspondent, and to his plainspoken acknow-
ledgment of this fact.

Here it may be well to insert a few lines
concerning August Roeckel. The reader will
like to know who this friend was, to whom
Wagner clung so steadfastly. If, as the Latin
proverb says, "a man may be judged by his
friends," to know Roeckel will teach us some-
thing of Wagner also.

August Roeckel's father, Joseph August
Roeckel, was a native of the Palatinate. At
that time, towards the close of the last century,
this province was politically united with

20 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

Bavaria, and it so chanced that Joseph A.
Roeckel, who had begun life in the diplomatic
service, was appointed Secretary to the Bavarian
Charg6 d' Affaires at Salzburg, which brought
him into the neighbourhood of Vienna, at that
time the metropolis of music. Here Baron
Braun, so well known in the history of music
as Beethoven's friend and as director of several
Viennese theatres, happened to hear the young
attache' sing, and was so much struck by his
beautiful voice and musical gifts, that he at once
proposed that Roeckel should take an engage-
ment at Vienna, where they were sorely in need
of a tenor. Diplomacy was a precarious career
at that moment — 1805, — and, after some hesita-
tion, Roeckel accepted Baron Braun's offer,
and exchanged diplomacy for the stage. In
Vienna he saw a good deal of Beethoven : one
of his first parts was as Florestan in " Fidelio."
He also came into contact with all the other
musical men of the day, more especially with

PREFACE. 21

Hummel, who married his sister. Joseph A.
Roeckel later became director of the theatre at
Aix la Chapelle, and, after having acquired the
necessary experience in this branch, he made
proof of both pluck and talent, venturing as
the very first impresario to carry the German
opera to Paris and to London.

The reader will gather from all this how full
of interest must have been the youth of our
August Roeckel. Born at Graz in 1814, he
travelled with his father through Germany
whilst still a boy. He then spent two years in
Paris, where he witnessed the revolution of July,
1830, and afterwards lived for several years in
London. Constantly in the atmosphere of
music and surrounded by musicians, his great
aptitude for this art developed early, and already
at seventeen years of age he was such a
consummate chorus-master that the Theatre
Italien engaged him in this capacity, in the
hopes of bringing their chorus up to the level

22 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

attained at Joseph A. Roeckel's German opera.
This last was conducted for some time by none
less than Hummel. But life in England seems
not to have suited August Roeckel's fancy, and
whilst his brothers, Edward Roeckel and J. L.
Roeckel, settled in England, August returned
to Germany, and joined his uncle Hummel at
Weimar, under whom he studied composi-
tion. After having been for several years
" Musikdirector " at Bamberg, he was ap-
pointed to the same post at Weimar, where,
having married the niece of the celebrated
composer, Albert Lortzing, he spent the
happiest years of his life from 1838 to
1843. In this small town, still alive with
the traditions of the great epoch only just
closed, Roeckel's talent and energy were fully
appreciated, and by none more than by Goethe's
daughter-in-law and her sons, Wolfgang and
Walther, the sincerity of whose friendship for
Roeckel and his family was put to the proof in

PREFACE. 23

the bitter years that were to come. 1843 was
a momentous date in Roeckel's life. He
exchanged the quiet seclusion of Weimar for
Dresden, where the political effervescence was
already beginning to stir up the whole popula-
tion, and here he met Richard Wagner, with
whom he soon became very intimate. Both
these facts, or rather these two facts combined,
had a fatal influence on the rest of his career,
for they ended by throwing him out of the
profession for which he had been bred and for
which he had early shown such great gifts, and
by casting him headlong into the turmoil of
politics. A sorry exchange in any case, and
more especially for a man of such rigid principles,
who was far too honest, too high-minded and
self-sacrificing to be likely to serve his own
interests whilst serving those of the community.
August Roeckel has more than once been
called Wagner's " bad genius," a most absurd
accusation ; it would be much truer to say that

24 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

Wagner's friendship, productive as it was of
deep and life-long happiness, was nevertheless
Roeckel's evil star. As " Musikdirector " to
the Dresden Royal Opera House, to which
Wagner had been appointed " Kapellmeister "
on the ist of February, the same year (1843),
Roeckel became Wagner's colleague : their pro-
fessional duties made them meet every day, and
they soon became intimate. Wagner's " Rienzi,"
performed for the first time on the 20th
October, 1842, on this very Dresden stage,
and his " Flying Dutchman " following rapidly
(2nd January, 1843), had made his name
celebrated throughout Germany. When Roeckel
arrived at Dresden in the spring of 1843, Wagner
was just finishing the poem of " Tannhauser,"
the score of which he at once began. In the
spring of 1845 " Tannhauser " was finished,
but before its first performance (on the 19th
October, 1845) " Lohengrin " was already
begun and the " Meistersinger " sketched ; and

PREFACE. 25

scarcely had Wagner jotted down the last note
of the " Lohengrin " score, in the summer of
1847, when he launched forth into elaborate
historical researches for a spoken drama,
"Frederic Barbarossa," and forged his tetra-
logical musical drama, "The Ring of the
"Nibelung," out of the confused mass of mytho-
logical Sagas and legends of the " Edda" and
the " Nibelungenlied." In the same summer
(1848) in which Wagner wrote the complete
sketch of this opus summum of his life, he also
drew the outlines of his " Jesus of Nazareth,"
which has been described by a Catholic priest
as " perhaps the most successful attempt ever
made to place the divine person of our Saviour
on the stage." This was what Roeckel was
witness to during the years 1843-1849, in
which he was Wagner's almost daily com-
panion. Before the evidence of such stupendous
creative power, his own talent, or rather his
belief in his own talent, vanished. Roeckel

26 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

had written songs and compositions for the
pianoforte, and his appointment at Dresden he
owed to an opera, " Farinelli," which Wagner
(as I am told) thought well of. But how
insignificant and futile was all this compared
to the immortal works which he now saw
springing into existence day by day ! Had
Roeckel been less gifted intellectually, he would
not have recognised Wagner's genius, and had
he been less high-minded, he would have felt
envy, instead of admiration ; or, again, if his
own talent as musician had been more robust
and original, intercourse with Wagner would
have stimulated his creative faculties (as was
the case with Lizst, for example). As it was,
the proximity of genius seems to have blotted
out all Roeckel's ambition in the domain of
Art. Thus Wagner's friendship robbed him of
a life-interest, and almost drove him to con-
secrate his energy to another direction. He
did not give up his place at the Dresden Opera

PREFACE. 27

House, but he became an active politician, a
pamphleteer, the editor of a revolutionary paper,
and a favourite orator at public meetings. His
enemies called him a demagogue, but that was
a base calumny. He was a tribune in the
proudest sense of the word, and no Englishman
who knows what the political state of Germany
was at that period will refuse, his admiration to
the man who, unlike so many other German
revolutionists, risked his liberty and his life for
the cause of the people against their tyrants,
and paid for it by thirteen long years spent in
a dungeon.

The revolution which broke out in Dresden
in May, 1849, was entirely the doing of the
King of Saxony and his Ministry. By their
vacillation and continual shuffling they drove
the people mad, and, when Dresden rose, the
whole intelligence of the country — the Univer-
sities, the Bar— rose with it, and the then legal
Government of Germany, the Frankfort Parlia-

28 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

ment, openly sided with the Saxon people
against their rebellious Ministers. The Saxon
people, who were perfectly loyal subjects of
their hereditary Monarch, and only claimed
the rights they possessed by law and the
accession of their country to the Constitution
voted at Frankfort, whereby a united Germany
was to be established, would have won the
day. But Count Beust, the King's chief
counsellor, called on the Prussians for aid, who
were, of course, too happy to profit by the
occasion to gain a firm footing in Saxony. The
Parliament at Frankfort stigmatised this armed
intervention as " a scandalous breach of the
Constitution." But in the meantime the
Prussian troops had already reached Dresden,
and had crushed the people's aspirations
after liberty and law in the way military
Powers usually do such things. The horrors
enacted by the soldiers and officers make
one's blood run cold. Roeckel, one of the

PREFACE. 29

few leaders of the movement who retained his
coolness and courage up to the last, was con-
demned to death, a sentence that was commuted
into life-long imprisonment. He never would
consent to do as the others, and petition the
King's indulgence ; having committed no crime,
he needed no forgiveness, nor would he ever
consent to sign a paper pledging his word
never again to engage in politics. On the
contrary, he used to tell his prison authorities
that, as soon as he was free, he would again
attack the Government as it deserved. And
so Roeckel was one of the very last men
to be let out of prison. Not until 1862 did the
Saxon Government grow sufficiently ashamed
of itself to put an end to this persecution.
Soon after, the Prussian army once more
appeared before Dresden and threw up earth-
works (some of which may still be seen) all
round the town, but the Royal Government
had not as much pluck in 1886 as had the

30 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

wretched inhabitants in 1849 ; it thought dis-
cretion the better part of valour, and submitted
without striking a blow to Prussia's conditions.
As for Count Beust, he had proved such a
prodigious diplomatist that he was considered
ripe for Austrian service ; nor did he disappoint
his cunning allies of heretofore.

Before returning to Wagner and to the
letters contained in this volume, it may be well
to finish this brief sketch of August Roeckel's
life. It will not detain us long, for nothing very
remarkable occurred after his release from
prison. Politics absorbed his whole interests,
and journalism was the only means open to
him of serving his political aims and at the
same time that of earning his livelihood. And
so we find him as newspaper editor, first at
Coburg, then at Frankfort, later on (under
Wagner's protection), in 1866, at Munich,
which he soon had to leave, however. He
finally settled in Vienna as editor of the Kleine

PREFACE. 31

Presse. The mere geographical sequence
suffices to show that Roeckel remained up to
the end an irreconcilable enemy of Prussia.
He had longed, and he had fought, and he had
suffered, for a great, united, and independent
Germany, and now that the dream of his life
was accomplished, he shut himself out volun-
tarily from his "Fatherland." Thus we see
him at the close of his life not only sharing the
same fate as the great antagonist of Germany's
unity and his own personal persecutor, Count
Beust, but actually on the best terms with him
— the once enemies united by their common
hatred of Prussia, and Roeckel, the undaunted
Liberal, actually serving to the best of his
abilities a reactionary and anti-German Govern-
ment. It is a singularly melancholy fate, and
doubtless contributed to shorten his days. In
1 87 1 he had a first attack of paralysis ; others
followed. He never recovered to any extent,
and had soon to give up his journalistic work

32 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

and retire to the house of his youngest son,
Richard Roeckel, at Pesth. There he died, on
the 15th June, 1876, two months before the
first performance of his great friend's "Ring
des Nibelungen " at Bayreuth. The only work
of Roeckel's that remains of him is his book
Sachsen's Erhebung und das Zuchthaus zu Wald-
heim (the revolt of Saxony and my prison at
Waldheim). Wagner alludes to it in the
twelfth letter of this collection. It is a most
thrilling narrative, and although the author,
with his great modesty, keeps himself in the
shade, one seems to become quite intimate with
him during those long years of imprisonment.
No one can read it without respecting him and
loving him. Roeckel was the sort of man for
Englishmen to understand and appreciate.

And now let us go back to that other man,
whom it will always be infinitely more difficult

PREFACE. 33

to understand because, as one of the most
perfect types of absolute genius, or, as Carlyle
would have put it, of the Hero as poet, his
intellect moved in obedience to laws different
from those which govern ordinary men.

I have pointed out the absurdity of the
opinion which stamps Roeckel as Wagner's
evil genius and thinks that it was his fault that
Wagner got mixed up in the revolt of 1849.
Years before he and Roeckel first met, Wagner
had declared, " My path leads me to open
revolution against what the present day calls
Art." And as, in Wagner's mind, the Art of a
nation or of an epoch is not a casual excrescence,
but the logical outcome of the whole life of
Society, a corrupt Art is unquestionably indica-
tive of a corrupt Society, and to revolt against
Art is to revolt against the Society from which
this Art springs. In this sense, which, it will
be allowed, admits of no equivocation, Wagner
may be said to have been a revolutionist ever
3

34 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

since 1840, and his very latest writings leave
no doubt that he continued to be a revolutionist
down to the day of his death. But the events
of 1849, which marred and broke poor Roeckel's-
life, have in Wagner's life no importance
beyond that which the increased experience of
men and things signifies for such a mind. As-
a generous man, he could not hesitate on which
side to place his sympathies, and when the
actual conflict came — the fighting in the streets,
the flocking in of the peasantry into the town,
to ward off the foreign enemy and to stake their
lives for their rights, — we are not astonished to
see that his sympathy with the people is
sufficiently marked to awaken suspicion on the
part of the authorities, and to force him to seek
safety in flight. No doubt Wagner felt the
influence of the wave of enthusiasm which
swept across Germany in 1848-49. No doubt
he was at that moment the victim of many
illusions, and set his hope on men and on

PREFACE. 35

popular movements ; but all this remains for
him superficial and external. He is like a rock ;
the waves break at its feet and sometimes cast
their spray up to its very head, but the rock
neither moves nor crumbles. In reality, Wagner
never at any time had any sort of sympathy
with politics properly so called. Politics and
diplomacy, to Wagner's mind, go only skin
deep. They can do no more than settle details,
no more than hurry on events or retard them a
little ; and whilst seeming to lead, they in reality
obey, driven on by deeper currents they have
neither power to stay nor to alter. In regard
to this question, the eighth letter of this
collection will be found particularly interesting.
It was those deeper currents which alone
absorbed Wagner's attention. He was a good
and loyal Saxon, but he never utters a word
against Prussia; later on we find him the confidan t
of the King of Bavaria at a most critical
period of history, but he does not gravitate
3*

36 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

southward, as did Roeckel, for his judgment is
not blinded by political prejudice ; he was a
staunch and enthusiastic German, yet no man
had a keener eye for the shortcomings of his
countrymen, and whilst Germany after 1870
knelt adoring at the feet of the man of blood
and iron, Wagner pointed out how little this
mere politician was in touch with the higher
aspirations of the nation, and how he had
reaped, but could not sow.

I have thought it necessary to insist at some
length on this point, because the difference
between Wagner and Roeckel is not merely one
of degree ; it is not merely that the one is a
genius and the other a man of talent, but it is a
difference which affects the whole man. What
bound them together in friendship was evidently
sympathy of character, and not intellectual
affinity. By this I do not mean to convey that
Roeckel was intellectually inferior to men like
Liszt and Uhlig, but that the natural bent of

PREFACE. 37

his mind led him to diverge from Wagner on
many, perhaps on most, points, and that he
was far too independent a character to be over-
awed, even by genius. He and Wagner were
both high-minded, outspoken, and unselfish
men. Otherwise they were as dissimilar as
possible, and I imagine that this dissimilarity
constituted an additional zest to the friendship
which bound them to each other. Both are
idealists ; but the one is a man who enlists his
enthusiasm in the cause of the wrongs and
sufferings of those who surround him, who
longs to rescue the oppressed and to reform
what is corrupt by practical means, by changing
the form of government, by influencing public
opinion, and so on; in short, he is essentially
a politician, and the practical politician ends by
eclipsing the poet and the artist his inner soul
harboured. The other, on the contrary, is a
creative genius, intensely wrapped up, it is true,
not in Art only, but in all the questions that

38 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

concern the welfare of his country and of
humanity at large, but who is quite incapable
of doffing, even for a single moment, the
artist and the poet, in order to discuss
present events in a matter-of-fact, political
way. When he does get mixed up in politics,
as he did in 1849, and again later in Munich,
he is yet never a party man, for what he aims
at soars high above the conflicting currents of
the passing moment. " The political events of
the day never had any interest for me," writes
Wagner in 1864. What does interest him are
the great currents that sweep humanity on
through centuries, to weal or to woe. In his
Art and Revolution, written (1849) whilst his
contemporaries were discussing the Frankfort
Parliament, the growing influence of Prussia,
and so forth, Wagner traces back the origin of
the present state of society to the age of
Pericles and of the decline of the Greek
tragedy, and the Future he foretells is one

PREFACE. 39

"the poet alone can conceive of." Thanks to
his extraordinary powers of imagination, genius
sees not only the one short passing moment,
with its actors and all the petty influences
which they obey, but grasps the Past out of
which this Present grew, thus discerning in
history Fate and Providence, and dives down into
the depths of the unconscious but none the less
propelling soul of nations, distinguishing with
the keen eye of the poet a future still veiled
to other men. No wonder Roeckel and Wagner
often disagreed.

I do not think a detailed commentary to
these letters is necessary, still less a critical
examination of their contents. In order to
understand them and to enjoy them, it is
sufficient to know who the man was who wrote
them, and who the man was to whom they
were addressed. They will be found full of
varied interest. Those who know nothing
about Wagner will get but a one-sided, yet

4° RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

true and vivid, impression of his remarkable
personality; those who have a superficial
acquaintance with him will realise how little
they knew up to now; the few who would
enrich their mental lives by a comprehensive
knowledge of this great mind and noble
character will read these letters over and over
again, and always find new matter to claim
their attention and captivate their thought.

LETTER I.

My dear Friend,

I have quite recently heard as a fact that
you and your companions in misfortune are
allowed to receive letters, not only from your
nearest relatives, but also from your friends,
provided that those letters merely touch on
personal interests, or at any rate on such
matters as have no reference to politics. Now,
as my desire was, in the first place, to express
my deep and anxious solicitude as to your
fate, and in the second place to inform you
how things had befallen me, I resolved at
once to write to you. But, first and foremost, I
was anxious to know exactly how you were as
regards health. It was, therefore, a great plea-
sure to me to hear from your private doctor that

41

42 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

there was no truth in the rumour of your having,
through impatience and insubordination, for-
feited the favour of being allowed to occupy your
time in literary work, and, further, that you were
bearing up well under the circumstances, and
that your vigour was undiminished. I admit
that it is only since hearing this account of you*
that I feel able to write to you as I should like.

You will readily believe that ever since we
parted I have anxiously striven to have news of
you, and, as far as was possible, I have kept
myself informed as to your fate. Soon after
we last met, it chanced that your wife and I
were in the same town ;f but owing to a peculiar
combination of circumstances, it was quite
impossible for me to call upon her. Soon after
I heard that your brother Edward had offered

* See Wagner's letter to Uhlig, dated May ioth, 1851.

t In Weimar. What prevented Wagner's calling on Frau
Eoeckel was the news of the "Steckbrief " (police notice),
and his having to escape over the frontier to Switzerland as
•quickly as possible.

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 43

her a home, and that he was taking care of her

in a truly fraternal way. I wrote to him not

long ago, and received no answer; but as I

addressed my letter in a haphazard fashion to

Bath, it is quite possible that it never reached

him ; consequently I should be very glad to have

his right address. I hope you will be able to

write to me very fully concerning yourself and

your wife. I look forward with keen sympathy

and with eager impatience — hoping for the best

— to your letter, and in the meantime I feel

that the best thing that I can do, knowing your

interest in me and my affairs, is to tell you

shortly how things have fared with me.

The external circumstances of my life are

easily told. After our separation, or rather at

the close of the disastrous events J when we

last met, I went first to Paris, but there I felt

everything was at once repugnant to me ; and

% This is in allusion to the political troubles in Dresden
from 3rd to 9th of May, 1849.

44 RICHARD WAGNEM'S LETTERS

though I was only remotely brought into contact
with the artistic world, its whole conditions so
repelled me that, after a very short stay, I left
and went to Switzerland, and at Zurich I
speedily found amongst the Swiss a circle of
devoted, loyal, and sympathetic friends. This
beautiful Alpine land at once revived me. I
trust that you have sufficient fortitude not to
be cast down by hearing this in your captivity.
After I had lived down the painful impressions
made on me by recent events, by the contrari-
ness of present circumstances, and more especially
by the fate of many of my friends, I felt my
individual life quickened and restored to warmth
and fulness by deliverance from the fetters and
constraints of an impossible position. It is
not necessary for me to tell you that I look on
my release from the post of conductor of the
Dresden opera as a providential piece of good
fortune. With my whole nature, both as man
and artist, in absolute opposition to my work

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 45

and my position, the only hope of deliverance
was in a complete severance of my bonds.
From the moment of that severance I felt that I
had an important part to play ; I realised that I
was the only artist who as such had grasped the
movement of the times. On this subject — i.e. on
Art and its relation to life — I spoke out my views
publicly as an author. Of course I do not know
if you were allowed to see my writings. The first
publication was a short pamphlet, entitled Art
and Revolution, in which I denied to everything
that passes muster as Art in the present day
the true quality of Art. In a small book that
appeared shortly after, The Art-work of the Future,
I demonstrated the impotence of modern Art,
resulting from its disintegration into different
branches, which constitute the sole artistic life
of the present day. And to this I opposed the
Art of the future, the only Art that is truly in
touch with life and penetrated with vital force,
and represented it in such a way that it stood

46 RICHARD WAGNERS LETTERS

out in sharp contrast to the merely academic,
or merely fashionable, Art of the present
day.

When I had completed this work, I had
occasion, early in 1850, to return to Paris.
During the interval Liszt had been working
hard in my interests. He and my other
friends were convinced that my one hope of a
career lay in making my mark in the Paris
Opera House. In spite of a sense of despair,
I forced myself to yield the point to them. I
sketched out a scenario, and started once more
for Paris. The effort nearly cost me my life.
My detestation of the artistic world of Paris,
and the constraint that I had to put on myself,
had such a powerful influence on me and
affected me so strongly that it brought on com-
plete nervous prostration, and from that prostra-
tion I only recovered by a tremendous effort of
will — a sort of act of desperation — which con-
strained me to turn my back on all my friends and

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 47

to seek refuge amongst, utter strangers. At that
very time — I was in Bordeaux — I learnt through
a French newspaper that you and Bakunin*
had been condemned to death. I wrote you a
letter, hoping that it would reach you in time
to bid you both a last farewell. Soon after I
discovered that the rumour had been a false
one, and the letter which I had sent to Dresden
to be forwarded to you was, naturally enough
under the circumstances, detained. My intention
to fly from my friends was frustrated by the great
sympathy and affection evinced for me by a certain
family. This household, composed almost entirely
of women, lived some considerable time in Dres-
den, and is known to you, if I am not mistaken,
through your brother. I owe more than I can
say to them.t But, first and foremost, let me

* Bakunin was the famous Russian revolutionist who with
•Huebner and Tzschirner had commanded the insurrectionists
at Dresden. After the repression of the revolution he had
been taken prisoner at Chemnitz.

f This refers evidently to Frau Julie Ritterand her family.

48 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

mention Liszt ; his love for me and his untiring
devotion to my interests are almost incredible.
Whatever in my nature remains incompre-
hensible to his mere logical reasoning, he
succeeds in entering into by an ardent intuitive
sympathy, the force of which is astounding.
He has had my " Lohengrin " performed at
Weimar, and in a manner that made it a real
success — so much so, that they now speak of
giving the opera at Dresden, but to this proposal
I have made the most decided objections, and
for many reasons. There is something to me
ludicrous in the idea, which I hear maintained
by many people, that it would be possible to
bring about a reconciliation between my present
self and the old condition of things. You see,
my dear friend, how little one is understood,
especially if one has the soul of an artist.

Lately I have once more given expression to
my convictions as a man and as an artist-poet,
— in the first place, and at some length, on the

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 49

subject of my own dramatic Art, in a book
entitled Opera and Drama, and upon my own
individual relations to Art ina "Communication
to my Friends," which will appear as the preface
to an edition of my three poems, The Flying
Dutchman, Tannhauser, and Lohengrin. The
first-mentioned work will shortly be brought out
by Heber ; the second by Breitkopf and Hartel.
How I wish that I might be allowed to send
you these books. HarteFs firm are engraving
the pianoforte score of " Lohengrin," and —
as you will be astonished to hear — they also
mean to print the full score of the opera.
From this you will see that public opinion
has taken me into high favour as " artist " ;
but in the said "Communication" I have made
it very clear that I care for no sympathy from
those who distinguish between the "man" and
the " artist," and I have pointed out the folly
of making such a distinction. How unworthy
— how, to put it frankly, absolutely contempt -
4

SO RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

ible — our " Art " of the present day is, has at
last become apparent now that it has cast
aside all sense of shame and openly acknow-
ledges that its one concern is to be a paying
business. You may imagine how unhappy
a man of my stamp feels under such circum-
stances. With open eyes, I have to abandon
myself to illusions, in order to find my justifica-
tion for a creative activity, conscious all the
time that my activity merely serves to deceive
me as to the general rottenness of things.

To continue theorising would be repugnant
to me, and Liszt has stimulated me to a new
work of Art. I have done the poetic version of
Young Siegfried, which I confess has been a
source of great happiness to me. My hero, a
child of Nature, has grown up in the forest
under the care of a dwarf (Mime, the Nibelung)
Who has brought him up in the hope that he
may become the slayer of the dragon — the
guardian of the treasure. This treasure of the

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 5 1

Nibelungs constitutes a very important element
in the poem. Every sort of crime is connected
with it. Siegfried is a being much like the
youth in the fairy tale who goes out into the
world that he may learn what fear is, which
he quite fails to do, owing to his healthy
natural instincts and his inability to see things
otherwise than as they actually are. He
slays the dragon, and kills his foster-father
the dwarf, who for the sake of the treasure
was secretly plotting to murder him. Sieg-
. fried, in whom the longing to escape from
loneliness has awakened, is led by the voice
of a bird — intelligible to him from the moment
when he accidentally tasted the dragon's
blood — to the fire-girt rock where Brunhilde
lies in a deep sleep. Siegfried penetrates
the flames, kisses Brunhilde, and the woman
in her awakens to the raptures of love. I
cannot enlarge farther on the subject now ;
possibly I may be allowed to send you the poem
4 :

•52 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

itself. Only one word more : in our ardent
discussions together we have already touched
on this subject — It is not possible for us to
attain to all that we can be and should be,
so long as the woman is unawakened. But
why do I harp upon this string to you, my
poor friend ? Believe me, I too am sad that
I can do nothing beyond harping and singing.
I shall finish my Young Siegfried, but not for
one moment shall I be deceived about it, or fail
to see that it is a beautiful illusion and that
reality is the one thing that matters. It often
seems to me that our invisible bonds have a
more constraining power than the actual fetters
by which others are bound. And yet, this I
know, and this comfort I can offer you — do not
be vexed with me, for it is the one hope by
which we can all encourage one another, — let
us strive to be and to keep healthy and
natural, lor therein lies, everything' — hope,
comfort, confidence.

TO, AUGUST ROECKEL. 53

And now, my poor dear friend, I beg you, if
you are allowed to write, to send me news of
yourself, and as much in detail as possible; I
shall always answer you, if permission to do so is
granted, to the best of my powers, in the hope
that my letters may cheer you and give you
courage to endure with patience and fortitude.
Farewell ; and when you are feeling sad, think
with affection of

Your faithful friend,

Richard Wagner.

LETTER II.

Zurich,

12th September, 1852*

Your letter, my dear friend, has rejoiced me

more than I can say. It was both unexpected

and unhoped for ; and it gives me such strong

evidence of your cheerful and patient courage,

that no better news could have come to me,

and certainly nothing more fitted to raise my

own spirits and encourage me. My health is

not of the best, and though physically I appear

sufficiently robust, my nervous system is in a

very depressed state, gradually growing worse —

the result of my self-abandonment to that feverish

and excessive sensitiveness, in virtue of which I

* This letter was sent to Liszt to forward (see letter to
Liszt of same date).

54

RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS. 55

am the artistic being that I am. The nerves of
my brain especially have been so worked upon by
this constant dwelling in a world of imagination,
with no reality to balance it, that now I am
only able to work at long intervals and with
frequent breaks, otherwise I should certainly
fall into a state of constant and protracted
suffering. I was in that condition when your
letter reached me ; its contents, taken in con-
nection with your situation, formed a striking
contrast to my situation and to my state of
mind. It confirmed the feeling I have often
had before, that a state of semi-liberty is more
humiliating and oppressive than complete
bondage ; but I fear it would not be quite easy
to make clear to you what I mean. My published
writings testify to my want of freedom as an
artist ; the lash of compulsion alone forced me
to become an author, and nothing was further
from my thoughts than to write " Books." Had
it been otherwise, the chances are you would

56 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

not have had cause to complain so much of my
style. But the time for literary work is past
with me ; to have gone on with it, would have
killed me. On the other hand, I have embarked
on a great artistic undertaking, namely, the
completion of a poem consisting of three dramas
with a separate prologue, which I shall then set
to music, and which — God knows when, where
and how — I mean some day to have put on the
stage. The whole poem will be called The
Ring of the Nibelung ; the prologue, "The Theft
of the Rhine-gold ; " thejirstpart of the drama will
be "The Walkure;" the second part, "Young
Siegfried;" and the third part, "Siegfried's
Death." The three dramas are completed ; but I
have still to put the prologue into verse. By the
end of this year, I hope to be able to submit
the printed poem to my friends. The working-
out of the whole subject (in my present state of
health) will, of course, need a great deal of
time; as to the performance, that must be

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 57

relegated to a nebulous "future." With regard
to the scheme, you will receive full information,
in the very detailed "Communication to my
Friends," in which I treat of my own artistic
development. This "Communication" forms
the preface to my three "opera poems" — The
Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, and Lohengrin.
The book appeared at the beginning of this
year, and I gave orders for a copy to be sent
to you: probably you were forbidden to see
it;, but should this not be the case, let me
know, and I shall see th^t the matter is put
right. Instead of the pianoforte score of "Lo-
hengrin," which you expected from Hartel, I
am sending the full score of the opera which
Hartel has just brought out, to your dear wife;
she will ascertain if she may forward it to you.
I am sure you will find the full score the more
satisfying of the two. I am also sending you
some shorter papers, on questions of art, which
I have written at different times as the occasion

58 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

demanded. The most recent was a book of
instructions for the performance of my "Tann-
hauser." For you must know that at the present
moment a considerable number of German
theatres are preparing to bring it out ; even the
Berlin Court theatre is making arrangements
for its performance, and I anticipate that ere
long this opera will have been given in all our
theatres. Unfortunately, this prospect can no
longer give me pleasure — in every respect it
comes too late ; and besides, I know that the
work will never be performed as I meant that
it should be. Possibly, performers and public
may appreciate the softer, more emotional parts
of the work; but they will never realise the
energy of passion that underlies it. I also
greatly doubt whether this unexpected and
growing fame will pave the way for a per-
formance at a future day of my Nibelung
dramas; for, in my opinion, the possibility of
such a performance depends on conditions quite

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 59

alien to the prevailing ideas on life and art.
The most painful thing to me — in spite of
apparent success — is to recognise that I owe
the greater part of this success to a misunder-
standing of the true meaning of my work ; on
this subject I have no further illusions.

If you are once more allowed to occupy your
time with literature, let me know whether I may
send you books from time to time. I am sure
you would find Feuerbach's writings most stimu-
lating. I should also like to introduce you to
a poet who has lately struck me as being the
greatest of all poets — I mean the Persian poet,
Hafiz, of whose writings we now possess an
admirable German translation by Daumer.
Truly, his poems have struck terror into my
soul. We, with our pompous European culture
and intellectuality, must stand abashed in the
presence of this product of Oriental genius,
stamped with such unerring mastery, such lofty
serenity. I feel sure that you would share my

60 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

astonishment. To my mind, the only merit of
recent European development is to be sought
in a kind of universal disintegration ; whereas
in the work of this Oriental I recognise a
precocious striving after individualism.

I mean shortly to write to your dear wife a
long letter ; how I wish that I could say any-
thing to comfort and cheer her. My own affairs
are shaping themselves pleasantly enough, and
I am thankful to be relieved from pressing
anxiety as to the more immediate necessities of
life : but I am very lonely ; I miss sympathetic
surroundings, and more than ever I am painfully
conscious that what in me is exceptional and
peculiar acts like a curse, separating me from
my kind, and cutting me off from the ordinary
enjoyment of life. A prisoner would not
understand why I so constantly am downcast
and longing for death ; and yet I feel it
so strongly, and understand so clearly whence
it comes. But enough on this subject. You

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 6 1

will laugh at me, and indeed I cannot dispute
your right to do so. One thing I long for,
and that is, that you may receive permission
to write to me often ; if you can hold out that
hope, you will indeed give me a great pleasure.
Farewell, and may you go on bearing up in
your misfortune as bravely as hitherto. This
is the earnest wish of your

Affectionate friend,

Richard Wagner.

LETTER III.

Dear Friend,

A short time ago I at length received long-
expected news of you. From your letter I
gathered that some books which I despatched
for you had not yet reached you ; so I applied to
your excellent wife, but owing to her being ill
it was some weeks before she could reply to me,
and ever since then I have been deeply engaged
in absorbing work. From all these causes there
has been some delay in my answer, for which
you must pardon me : hence, too, this feeble
preface to my present letter.

I sent my new poem, "The Nibelung's Ring"
(of which only a few copies are printed for
private circulation among my intimate friends
and acquaintances), in February of this year to

62

RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS. 63

Weimar, in order that your wife might forward
it to you. You do not mention it ; but your
wife maintains that the copy was sent to
Waldheim : should it not yet have reached you,
the omission must be due to causes which
would make the despatch of a second copy
quite useless. Therefore I think it better to
trouble you once more in the matter : you
might make definite enquiries. In the event of
the book having been lost, let me know at once,
as in that case a second shall be forthwith sent
to Waldheim. In the meantime, and till I
hear from you that you have read the book,
further discussion of it is useless.

I had also destined for you at the beginning
of last year my " Three Opera Poems, together
with a Communication to my Friends " (Leipzig :
Breitkopf und Hartel), but from your letter I
gather that the book never reached you; I
therefore send it to your wife, in order that she
may convey it to you. I have put up with it

€4 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

two other works that you expressed a wish to
have, Hafiz (in two volumes) and Feuerbach's
Lectures on the Nature of Religion.

It seems to me, and I rejoice to think it,
that you are in the mood and frame of mind
when these books will be a real refreshment to
you. I trust that you are well, and that you
have succeeded in preserving that disposition of
mind which allows one to be solaced by the
inspiring influences of the Beautiful, even
though doomed to the forced resignation of a
captive. But in this respect you are, perhaps,
no worse off at the present moment than the
rest of us. As things are just now, the really
Beautiful can only exist for us in a theoretical
vision ; that it could exist, that it will some day
actually exist, and be apprehended and enjoyed
by beings absolutely like unto ourselves in
feeling — that thought alone can comfort us, as
it must comfort you. Truly, this is our only
consolation ; and in sympathy with a future

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 65

generation, we already experience a quickened
sense of well-being and gain. Therefore I do
not hesitate about sending you Hafiz,

Feuerbach's book is to a certain extent a
risumt of all that he has hitherto done in the
field of philosophy. It is not one of his really
celebrated works, such as The Essence of
Christianity, or Thoughts upon Death and Im-
mortality, but it is a short-cut to a complete
knowledge of his mental development, and
of the latest results of his speculations. I
should be glad to think of you as strengthened
and encouraged by contact with his clear,
vigorous mind.

I also enclose a programme of some musical
performances which I organised recently at
Zurich; they will interest you. But you will
wonder why I brought myself to consent to a
concert performance of such a fragmentary
selection from my operas. The matter is
easily explained. In the first place I had an
5

66 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

intense longing to hear something out of
"Lohengrin," more especially the orchestral
prelude. Jn order to get together a sufficiently
large orchestra for the performance, it was-
necessary to arrange for a regular concert,
therefore I added other selections. The for-
mation of this orchestra (consisting of about 70>
musicians) cost not less than 9,000 francs,
which sum, however, when I made my project
known, was secured by guarantees. Any one
who knows Zurich and its excellent bourgeois
and Philistine community cannot fail to be
astounded by this fact ; and I confess that this
proof of exceptional trust and unwonted affection
touched me very deeply. The performances were
perfect ; I had brought the best musicians all
the way from Germany, and the result was one
1 of great and increasing artistic significance for
Switzerland. For I do not doubt that — when
I am ready for it — means will be provided
here for an adequate performance, according to

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 67

my own ideas, of my dramatic works. To bring
this about it will be necessary that I should
devote myself for some years exclusively to
the education of a company such as I require.
When that is achieved I shall have all my
operas, above all my Nibelungen drama, per-
formed during a whole year in a theatre specially
erected for the purpose, built of light materials,
but adapted to the true needs of dramatic
representation. I shall then have attained, if
not my ideal, at least all that mortal man can
aspire to. In the meantime I must save my
strength and health — often very feeble — in order
to accomplish the music of my Nibelung drama.
This will take me at least three or four years.

The performance on different stages in
Germany of my " Tannhauser," and shortly of
my " Lohengrin," have no interest whatever for
me ; I know that for the most part they leave
my intention and meaning unexpressed, and that
they in no essential way rise above the level
5*

68 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

of ordinary operatic performances. Although
from time to time I make surprising discoveries,
and am especially astonished, by the effects
produced in smaller theatres by these operas,
thanks to the enthusiastic efforts of young
conductors ; yet, take it all in all, and in view of
the general deplorable state of things, I cannot
feel other than cold and unmoved; and I
confess that the spread of my works is only
valuable to me in regard to material advantages.
Thanks to the improvement in these matters,
my position has become much more tolerable,
and especially do I enjoy the privilege of having
no longer to work absolutely with a view to
money. No matter what I undertake here, I
decline to be paid for it (which indeed I should
do even if I were entirely destitute of means ;
Art-producing for the sake of mere money is
the one thing that would alienate me from Art,
as indeed it is the cause of the confusion
existing in so many minds on the truer nature

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 69

of Art and all its works). Thus I might say
that my life is pleasant enough were I only
different to what I am. As it is, not only do I
feel the degradation of the general condition
of things more keenly than others do ; but as
regards my own personal life, it is only in the
last few years that I have realised — alas ! too
late — that I have never rightly lived. But on
this subject I will not trouble you ; such
complaints were not meant for your ears. But
this much I must say to you : my art is be-
coming more and more like the song of a
captive nightingale haunted by illusions and
longings, and it would suddenly lose all meaning
if I were allowed to grasp at the realities of life.
Yes, where life ends, Art begins. In youth we
turn to Art, we know not how or why ; and only
when we have gone through with Art and come
out on the other side, we learn to our cost that-
we have missed Life itself- If I could deceive
myself with fresh illusions, all would be well ; if

7° RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

it were in me to be proud and vain, how happy
might I not be at this moment. My fame is
ever on the increase ; I am looked upon as an
unheard-of phenomenon, impossible to classify ;
pamphlets and magazine articles innumerable
are written about me; misapprehension and
admiration reciprocally work each other up.
How unspeakably indifferent I remain to it all !
Nothing would induce me to return for a
moment to quill-driving, I am so discouraged by
constant misapprehension of my writings, and
disheartened by realising that the inner meaning
of my whole being and of my views remains a
closed book. One thing alone could avail to
comfort me. Not only am I admired, I am
also beloved — where criticism ceases, love steps
in, and many hearts have been brought closer
to me. But this very sympathy remains a
thing apart, aloof from me ; it only touches my
life indirectly, and that life having taken the
bend it has, I can only contemplate this wealth

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 71

of love as from a great distance. If I could
become a thorough egoist it would be better for
me ; but there is no help for it, and, like you, I
feel it is only by resignation that I can be true
to myself.

Dear friend, I have been speaking to you
about myself, and there are still many things of
all kinds that I should like to tell you, but I
cannot unload all my freight at once. I do
wish that you could obtain leave to write to me
more often; frequent communication is needed
to keep up a flow, which otherwise gets stopped
up by a certain restraint. I cannot write to
you about yourself, for you alone can enlighten .
me and give me the key to your present
existence ; I do not even venture to tell you my
opinion of yourself and of your position. What
I think of you and feel towards you I must
keep to myself, otherwise I should incur the
suspicion of wishing to make you vain. All
that I can say to you about yourself is, that I

72 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

should seem to myself very absurd if I were to
attempt to give you advice ; but if you can
suggest any way in which the advice or counsel
of a true friend could be of use to you, you
would confer a happiness on me. If you think
of anything let me know ! I hope that my
packet of books will reach you ; I am with you
in spirit while you read them. Let me know
whether you have received the "Ring of the
Nibelung," and, if not, whether you will be
allowed to have it. It is the climax of my
present artistic achievement. Answer this as
soon as possible. And now, farewell for the
present. If you are not able to write at an
early date, let me know through your wife
whether you will be allowed to receive another
letter from me. I shall then take up the thread
of much that I have left untold, as I have a
great dislike to sitting down more than once to
a letter, and at present my brain is quite dried
up. Farewell. Keep up your courage and your

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 73

patience — we none of us can pull through
without the one and the other.
Your

Richard Wagner.

Zurich,

June 8th, 1853.

LETTER IV.

Zurich,

25th January, 1854.

How I came to leave your letter unan-
swered for almost four months is a matter
easily explained to myself; but it will be more
difficult to make it clear to you, my dearest
friend. Anyhow, the chief blame is due to the
importance and interest of your letter. To
answer it in any way adequately was not so
much a question of my will as of my power to
do so. All last summer I was very unsettled.
Liszt paid me a visit in July ; later, I went to
St. Moritz in the Grisons (6,000 feet above the
sea) ; in the end of August to Italy — at least to
such parts of it as are open to me,* — Turin,

* Owing to Wagner's exile from Saxony, the Austrian
provinces were interdicted to him.

74

RICHARD WAGNER'S lETTERS. 75

Genoa, Spezzia : from there I intended to go to
Nice and to remain there for some time ; but in
a strange land my sense of solitude so over-
whelmed me that suddenly, and partly in con-
sequence of a purely physical indisposition,
I fell into a state of melancholia, and set out
with what speed I could across Lago Maggiore
and the St. Gothard, and came straight home.
While I was recruiting here your letter reached
me, and at the same time I heard from Liszt
asking me to meet him in Paris. I spent the
month of October there, which caused the
newspapers to infer that Liszt and I had the
intention of bringing out my operas on the Paris
stage. During all this confusion I was unable
to answer your letter, and meant to do so on
my return to Zurich. But once there, I was
overcome with such an intense longing to get
to work at the music of my " Rheingold " that
I was not in a proper frame of mind to reply to
your critical remarks on my poem. No ! really

76 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

I could not. So I threw myself passionately —
after an interval of six years — into music, and
determined not to write till I had finished the
composition of "Rheingold." Well, that is
done, and now I understand my own reluctance
to answer you sooner ; for now, the work being
accomplished, I am in a quite different position
to reply to your criticism, or rather not to reply
to it — that doubtless were best, for you are
right in criticising ; but I, too, am right in con-
ceiving and carrying out the work as best I can
and may. Therefore, I shall not quarrel with
you about it, but I should like to talk it over a
little with you.

But in the first place, and in regard to my
actual letter, let me tell you what a boon you
conferred on me by the accounts you sent me of
yourself and of your well-being. I come back
to it : you strike me as being almost happier in
your position than I am in mine. Every line of
your letter bears witness to your perfect sound-

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 77

ness and sanity. Now I admire you for this.
The fact that you are allowed to write me a
letter of five sheets proves that there has been
an improvement in the actual conditions of your
life, for which I am indeed thankful ; though
I must confess I can imagine circumstances
under which I might have to forego every
alleviation to existence, without suffering a pang
on account of that which I was called on to
renounce. One thing is paramount — freedom !
But what is freedom ? Does one mean by it —
as our politicians seem to hold — lawlessness ?
Certainly not ! Freedom is sincerity. He who
is sincere — that is, true to himself, in perfect
harmony with his own nature — he is free.
Outward constraint is powerless unless it suc-
ceeds in destroying that sincerity in its victim,
and inducing him to dissemble, and thus attempt
to make himself and others believe that he is
something different to what he really is. That
alone is true servitude. But one need never

78 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

submit to that. Let a man be actually in
bondage, if he preserves this sincerity of soul,
he keeps his essential freedom intact, at least
in a higher measure than another who has
ceased to feel that constraint — active every-
where in the world — simply because he has
submitted wholly to its power, and for its sake
has consented to play the hypocrite.

I believe that this sincerity (Wahrhaftigkeit)
is in fact no other than what philosophers and
theologians mean when they talk of truth
(Wahrheit). Truth is an idea, and by its nature
is nothing else than sincerity in concrete form.
The simple meaning of this sincerity is nothing
else than reality (Wirklichkeit), or, better still,
the Real, the Actual (das wirklich Seiende) ; and
that only is real which is appreciable to the
senses (sensuous), whereas what is non-appreci-
able to the senses is unreal and merely abstract
and imaginary. If, therefore, I am right in
considering sincerity as the most complete mani-

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 79

«

festation and expression of reality, Truth is
nothing else than the abstract idea of this
feeling, at least that is what it has become in
philosophy. And yet this idea is as far removed
from reality as sincerity, as I conceive of it, is
akin to this latter, and consequently from all
time no word has given rise to so much error
as this word Truth, which gradually has become
the source of every sort of fallacy, till finally
the idea — as must always be the case with mere
abstract ideas — has become nothing but a term
(word), and out of terms one can always build
up a system ; but it is a very different matter to
lay hold on reality. We have no certain expe-
rience of reality except through feeling, and
feeling, be it remembered, is once and for all
an affair of the senses.

It is clear that in using the word senses, the
idea to be conveyed is not mere animal senses,
as the term is contemptuously applied by philo-
sophers and theologians, but the human senses

So RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

capable of reaching to the stars and of measuring
their courses.

Having established this, I think we shall be
at one in our views concerning the "World" (in
so far as it is the domain for the exercise of this
feeling of sincerity) if we allow ourselves to be
guided exclusively by the one genuine source of
experience, namely, sensation, and only pay
attention to impressions derived from this
source. Man, acting in conformity with his
organisation, has recourse to endless expedients
in order to grasp the Universe as a whole : these
expedients in all their endless complexity are
simply a group of concepts ; and in our pride at
having thus attained to a concept of the world
in its entirety, we lose sight of our true position,
forgetting that after all we have grasped nothing
but the concept, and that consequently we are
simply taking pleasure in the instrument of our
own making, while all the time we remain
further removed than ever from the reality of

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 8 1

the world. But the man who can find no lasting
delight in the phantasms of this illusion at last
becomes conscious that his own mind rebels
against its tyranny. He recognises the unreality
of this barren illusion, and feels impelled to
turn to reality and to approach it by means of
feeling. Then the question arises : how is this
to be done, seeing that reality conceived of as a
whole can only be made intelligible to the
intellect, and cannot be brought into relation
with feeling ? It can only be done by recognising
that the essence of reality consists of infinite
multiplicity (Vielheit) . This inexhaustible multi-
plicity, incessantly renewed and renewing, can
only be apprehended by feeling, as the one ever-
present though ever -varying element. This
variability is the essence of the real ; the unreal,
or that which is imagined, alone being invariable
and immutable. Nothing but what is variable
can be real. To be real — to live — what is it
but to be born, to grow, to bloom, to wither

82 RICHARD WAGNERS LETTERS

and to die ? Without death as a necessary-
concomitant, there is no possibility of life : that
alone has no end which has no beginning ; but
nothing real can be without beginning, only
abstract ideas.

Therefore to be at one with truth is to give
oneself up as a sentient human being wholly
and entirely to reality — to encounter birth,
growth, bloom, blight and decay frankly, with
joy and with sorrow, and to live to the full this
life made up of happiness and suffering — so to
live and so to die. This is " to be at one with
truth." To make such a consummation possible
we must entirely renounce the pursuit of the
Universal. The Universal is made manifest to us
only in separate phenomena, for of such alone
can we in the true sense of the word take
cognizance. Now we can only fully grasp a.
phenomenon if we can at one and the same
time completely absorb it, and be absorbed by
it. Where must we look for the most complete

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 83

example of this marvellous process ? Ask

Nature. We must look to love, and to love

only. All that I cannot love remains outside

myself, and I remain outside of it — a condition

in which a philosopher perhaps, but not a sincere

man, may imagine that he grasps phenomena.

Love in its most perfect reality is only possible

between the sexes ; it is only as man and woman

that human beings can truly love. Every other

manifestation of love can be traced back to that

one absorbingly real feeling, of which all other

affections are but an emanation, a connection,

or an imitation. It is an error to look upon

this as only one of the forms in which love is

revealed, as if there were other forms co-equal

with it, or even superior to it. He who after

the manner of metaphysicians prefers unreality

to reality, and derives the concrete from the

abstract — and, in short, puts the word before

the fact,— he may be right in esteeming the idea

of love as higher than the expression of love,
6 *

84 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

and may affirm that actual love made manifest
in feeling is nothing but the outward and visible
sign of a pre-existent, non-sensuous, abstract
love ; and he will do well to despise that love
and sensuous function in general. In any case
it were safe to bet that such a man had never
loved or been loved as human beings can love,
or he would have understood that in despising
this feeling, what he condemned was its sensual
expression, the outcome of man's animal nature,
and not true human love. The highest satis-
faction and expression of the individual is only
to be found in his complete absorption, and that
is only possible through love. Now a human
being is both man and woman, and it is only
when these two are united that the real human
being exists, and thus it is only by love that
man and woman attain to the full measure of
humanity. But when nowadays we talk of a
human being, such heartless blockheads are we
that quite involuntarily we only think of man.

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 85

It is only in the union of man and woman, by
love (sensuous and super-sensuous), that the
human being exists ; and as the human being
cannot rise to the conception of anything higher
than his own existence — his own being, — so the
transcendent act of his life is this consummation
of his humanity through love. He can only
renew it, the whole of life being after all but a
constant renewal of the multiplicity of vital
phenomena ; and it is this renewal which alone
explains the true nature of love, approximating ,
it to the ebb and flow of the tide — constantly
changing, and ceasing only to begin afresh. It
is therefore a grievous error to look upon that
power in love, by virtue of which it constantly
renews itself, as a weakness ; and, on the other
hand, to glorify as the real, lasting love that
abstract, imaginary feeling, centred on God
knows what, which after all is but the spectre
of real love. The mere possibility of its indefi-
nite continuance proves the unreal nature of

86 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

this abstract sentiment. Eternal, in the true
sense of the word, is that which annuls finite-
ness (or, better, the idea of finiteness). But
between the real and finiteness there is no con-
nection to be established, for the real — namely,
that which is characterised by change, reno-
vation, and multiplicity — is the negation of
what we imagine to ourselves as finite. The
infinity of the metaphysician is eternal unreality.
Finiteness is a mental image, which sure enough
has power to strike terror into our souls ; but it
can only do this if we have lost our hold on
reality. If, on the contrary, we are possessed
by a sense of the reality of love, that terror
vanishes, for love annihilates the notion of
limitation. To sum up, only that which is real
can be eternal, and it is through love that we
attain to the most perfect manifestation of
reality; therefore Love only is eternal. The
fact is, egoism ceases at the moment when the
" I " passes into the " Thou." But it is impos-

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 87

sible to keep a firm hold on the " I " and
*' Thou " if one is bewildered by notions of the
Universal. " I " and the " Universe " merely
mean "I" my own self; and the Universe is
only then real to me when it passes into the
" Thou," and this can only happen through the
medium of the loved one. This process can be
renewed through the medium of child, or of
friend ; but in order to love child or friend with
a perfect love, a man must have first known
what it is to lose himself in an all-absorbing
feeling, and this he can only learn through his
love to a woman. At the best, this feeling for
child and friend is only a makeshift, a fact of
which those are most conscious who have most
fully realised the ecstasy of mutual love as
between man and woman. All other affections
are merely a proof of the multiplicity of our
human nature, which brings to light strange
anomalies, sometimes of an absurd, but equally
often of a tragic, kind.

88 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

But enough ! I venture to intrude on your
solitude with this confession of faith, for I feel
sure that there is no fear of your saddening
yourself by agreeing with me. Not only you,
but I — indeed, each one of us — live at the
present moment under circumstances and con-
ditions which we can only look upon as stop-
gaps and makeshifts ; for each of us the only
true, the only real life can only exist in the
imagination as an unattained ideal. I had
reached the age of thirty-six before I had
divined the true meaning of my creative im-
pulse ; up till then Art had seemed to me to be
the end, life the means. But the discovery had
come to me too late, and the result of following
this new bent could not be other than tragic.
A wider outlook into the actual world forces
home the conviction that for the moment Love
is impossible. It has come to this, that one of
my friends, in addressing himself to Germans,
could affirm with truth : " You do not know

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 89

what Love means. How should men be capable
of loving who have no initiative of Character ?
The thing is impossible." Therefore if we must
put up with a makeshift, it seems to me it were
best frankly to accept things as they are, and to
abide by this acknowledgment of the truth,
even if this avowal bring us no other good
than the proud consciousness of having gained
a knowledge by means of which we may be
enabled to guide the wills and aspirations of
mankind into the way of redemption. It is
true that in doing this we are working for
humanity as a whole ; but we are driven to it
by realising the fact that the individual cannot
be happy by himself, but only when all are
happy can he obtain perfect satisfaction. As
you perceive, this is quite your point of view ;
only for me it is not a final standpoint — merely
a temporary platform, a means to an end. This
end is still ignored by the majority of mankind ;
but I have indicated above what I understand it

go RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

lo be, namely, the perfect consummation of love
as the fullest, most complete perception of
reality, of truth; but not an abstract, ideal, non-
sensuous love (such as alone is possible in the
present state of things), but the love of the "I"
and the " Thou."

It follows that I look on all the prodigious
efforts of the human race, and on all our actual
science, as ways and means towards an end,
which in itself is a very simple, but a very
divine thing. I, therefore, respect all these
•efforts; I recognise a necessity in every onward
step, and I rejoice heartily at each new
advance ; but personally I cannot take part in
all this striving (which, strangely enough, is
ignorant of its gain), seeing that the simple end
to which it all tends stands out so prominently
before me that I cannot turn my eyes away
from the object to the means.

Only the pressure of a great movement could
bring about such an act of self-denial on my

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. gi

part; and I should hail that with joy as the
sole means of redemption for me.

And now, you must not take it ill if I only
smile at the advice you give me to tear myself
away from dreams and egoistic illusions, and to
devote myself to what alone is real to life itself,
and its aspirations. For I, on the contrary,
believe that I am devoting myself to absolute
Reality, in the most effective, deliberate, and
determinate way by carrying out my own views,
even those that entail the most suffering, and
by dedicating every one of my faculties to this
end. Surely you yourself must agree with me
if, for example, I deny to Robespierre the
tragic significance which hitherto he has had
for you, or only admit it with considerable
qualifications. This type is peculiarly un-
sympathetic to me because in individuals
constituted as he is there is no trace to be
discovered of that which constitutes the true end
and aim of humanity since our degeneracy from

92 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

Nature. The tragic element in Robespierre's
character really consists in the spectacle he
offers of utter helplessness, when, at the goal of
his highest aspirations to power, he stands
confronted by his own incapacity to make any
sort of use of this power that he has attained.
It is only in the confession of this helplessness
that he becomes tragic, and in the fact that his
own downfall is brought about by his inability
to achieve anything towards the happiness of
mankind. I am thus of opinion that his case is
the precise converse of what you conceive it to
be. He had no high end in view for the sake
of which he condescended to unworthy means ;
on the contrary, it was to disguise this absence
of any such end, and to conceal his own want
of resource, that he had recourse to the ghastly
paraphernalia of the guillotine, for it has been
proved that the "Terror" was carried out
purely as a means of government, and in
maintenance of authority, without any sort of

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 93

genuine passion ; it was conducted on purely
political grounds — that is to say, in an ambitious
and selfish spirit. In the end, this miserable
being, who at last had no other resource than to
advertise his inept "vertu," put the means in
place of the end,, as happens with all these
purely political heroes, who duly come to grief
from their own incapacity with such uniformity
that it is to be hoped the whole class is shortly
destined to disappear from history. On the
other hand, I maintain that my " Lohengrin,"
according to my own conception,* symbolises
the most profoundly tragic situation of our age,
namely, the longing which besets us to descend
from the highest heights of mortal contempla-
tion and to plunge into the depths of human
affection — the desire to be immersed in feeling
— that desire which modern reality is as yet
powerless to satisfy.

On all this I have enlarged sufficiently in my

* That is to say, not "Lohengrin " pruned down and
distorted for the use of Opera Houses.

94 RICHARQ WAGNER'S LETTERS

preface. It would only remain to indicate
what, situated as I am, I feel impelled to do in
furtherance of the aim of bringing both myself
and mankind nearer to that which I recognise
as the goal of human endeavour — a goal from
which I, as an individual, am cut off, because
the rest of mankind as yet deliberately cut
themselves off from it — unless I were to have
recourse to means which I can now no more
bring myself to use. Here my art must come
to my aid, and the work that I conceived under
this influence is no other than my Nibelung
poem; I am inclined to think that it was not
so much the obscurity of my version of the
poem, as the point of view which you persist-
ently adopted in opposition to mine, which
was the cause of your failing to understand
many important parts in it. Such mistakes are
of course only possible in the case of a reader
who substitutes his own ideas for those of the
poet, while the simple-minded reader, perhaps

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 95

unconsciously to himself, takes in the matter

more easily, just as it is. For myself the poem

can only be interpreted in the following way : —

Presentment of reality in the sense in which

I have interpreted it above. Instead of the

words —

"A fateful day is dawning for the gods ;
And wilt thou not deliver up the ring ?
Then be assur'd thy race ere long shall end —
Thy noble race — in shameful overthrow."

I now make Erda say merely —

•• All that is — ends :
A fateful day dawns for the gods :
I counsel you beware of the ring."

We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest
sense of the word. The fear of the end is the
source of all lovelessness, and this fear is only
generated when love itself begins to wane.
How came it that this feeling which imparts
the highest blessedness to all things living was
so far lost sight of by the human race that at
last it came to this : all that mankind did,

96 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

ordered, and established was conceived only in
fear of the end ? My poem sets this forth. It
reveals Nature in her undisguised truth, with
all those inconsistencies which, in their endless
multiplicity, embrace even directly conflicting
elements. But it is not the repulse of Alberich
by the Rhine-daughters — the repulse was inevi-
table owing to their nature — that was the cause
of all the mischief. Alberich and his ring would
have been powerless to harm the gods had
they not themselves been susceptible to evil.
Wherein then is the root of the matter to be
sought ? Examine the first scene between
Wotan and Fricka, which leads up to the scene
in the second act of "The Walkiire." The
necessity of prolonging beyond the point of
change the subjection to the tie that binds
them — a tie resulting from an involuntary
illusion of love, the duty of maintaining at all
costs the relation into which they have entered,
and so placing themselves in hopeless opposi-

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 97

tion to the universal law of change and renewal, •
which governs the world of phenomena — these
are the conditions which bring the pair of them
to a state of torment and mutual lovelessness.

The development of the whole poem sets forth
the necessity of recognising and yielding to the
change, the many-sidedness, the multiplicity,
the eternal renewing of reality and of life.
Wotan rises to the tragic height of willing his
own destruction. This is the lesson that we
have to learn from the history of mankind : to
will what necessity imposes, and ourselves to bring
it about. The creative product of this supreme,
self-destroying will, its victorious achievement, is
a fearless human being, one who never ceases
to love : Siegfried. That is the whole matter.
. As a matter of detail, the mischief-making power,
the poison that is fatal to love, appears under
the guise' of the gold stolen from Nature and
misapplied— the Nibelungs' ring, never to be
redeemed from the curse that clings to it until
7

98 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

it has been restored to Nature and the gold
sunk again in the depths of the Rhine. But it
is only quite at the end that Wotan realises
this, when he himself has reached the goal of
his tragic career; what Loge had foretold to
him in the beginning with a touching insistence,
the god consumed by ambition had ignored.
Later in Fafner's deed he merely recognised the
power of the curse ; it is only when the ring
works its destroying spell on Siegfried himself
that he realises that only by restoration of
what was stolen can the evil be annulled,
and he deliberately makes his own destruction
part of the conditions on which must depend
the annulling of the original mischief.

Experience is everything. Moreover, Sieg-
fried alone (man by himself) is not the complete
human being : he is merely the half; it is only
along with Briinhilde that he becomes the
redeemer. To the isolated being not all things
are possible ; there is need of more than one,.

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 90

and it is woman, suffering and willing to sacrifice
herself, who becomes at last the real, conscious
redeemer : for what is love itself but the "eternal
feminine " (das ewig Weibliche).

So much for the broad and general lines of
the poem, which may be taken as summing up
its more particular and special features.

I cannot believe that you have misapprehended
my meaning and intention : only it seems to me
that you have attached more importance to the
connecting links and parts of the great chain
than they, as such, deserve ; and as if you had
been bound to do this, in order to read into my
poem your own preconceived ideas. As a whole
I do not agree with your criticisms with regard
to a certain want of lucidity and distinctness of
statement : on the contrary, I believe that a true
instinct has kept me from a too great definite-
ness ; for it has been borne in on me, that an
absolute disclosing of the intention disturbs true
insight. What you want in drama — as indeed

100 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

in all works of Art — is to achieve your end, not
by statement of the artist's intentions, but by
the presentment of life as the resultant, not of
arbitrary forces, but of eternal laws. It is just
this that distinguishes my poetical material from
all the poetical material which alone absorbs
poets' minds at the present day.

For example, by insisting, as you do, that the
intention of Wotan's appearance on the scene
in "Young Siegfried" should be more clearly
defined, you are prejudicing in a marked manner
the fateful element in the development of the
drama, which to me is so important. After his
farewell to Briinhilde, Wotan is in all truth a
departed spirit ; true to his high resolve, he
must now leave things alone, and renouncing all
power over them, let them go as they will.

For this reason, he is now only the "Wanderer."
Look well at him, for in every point he resembles
us. He represents the actual sum of the Intelli-
gence of the Present, whereas Siegfried is the

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 101

man greatly desired and longed for by us of the
Future. But we who long for him cannot
fashion him ; he must fashion himself and by
means of our annihilation. Taken in this way,
Wotan is, you must acknowledge, highly inter-
esting; whereas he would seem to us most
unworthy if he appeared as a subtle intriguer,
which indeed he would be if he gave counsel
apparently against Siegfried, though in reality
favourable to Siegfried and consequently to
himself. That were a deception worthy of our
political heroes, but not of my jovial god, bent
on his own annihilation. Look at him in his
juxtaposition to Siegfried in the third Act. In
presence of his impending destruction, the god
has at last become so completely human that —
contrary to his high resolve — there is once more
a stirring of his ancient pride, brought about by
his jealousy for Brunhilde — his vulnerable point,
as it has now become. He will, so to speak,
not allow himself to be merely thrust aside ; he

102 RICHARD WAGNERS LETTERS

chooses rather to fall before the conquering
might of Siegfried. But this part is so little
premeditated and intentional, that in a sudden
burst of passion the longing for victory over-
powers him, a victory moreover which he admits
could only have made him more miserable.
Holding the views I do, I could only give the
faintest and subtlest indication of my design.
Of course I do not mean my hero to make the
impression of a wholly unconscious creature :
on the contrary, I have sought in Siegfried to
represent my ideal of the perfect human being,
whose highest consciousness manifests itself in
the acknowledgment that all consciousness
must find expression in present life and
action.

The enormous significance that I attach to
this consciousness which can scarcely ever find
adequate expression in mere words, will be
quite clear to you in the scene between Siegfried
and the Rhine-daughters. Here we see that

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 103

infinite wisdom has come to Siegfried, for he
has grasped the highest truth and knows that
•death is better than a life of fear : knowledge of
the ring, too, has come to him, but he does not
leed its power, for he has something better to
do ; he keeps it only as a proof that he at least
has never learnt what fear means. Confess, in
the presence of such a being, the splendour of
the gods must be dimmed.

What strikes me most is your question, "Why,
seeing that the gold is restored to the Rhine, is
it necessary that the gods should perish ? " I
feel certain that, at a good performance, the
most simple-minded spectator will be left in no
doubt on that point. Certainly the downfall of the
gods is no necessary part of the drama regarded
as a mere contrapuntal nexus of motives.
As such, indeed, it might have been turned,
twisted, and interpreted to mean any conceiv-
able thing — after the manner of lawyers and
politicians. No, the necessity for this downfall

104 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

had to arise out of our own deepest convictions,
as it did with Wotan. And thus it was all-
important to justify this catastrophe to the feel-
ings of the spectator ; and it is so justified to
any one who follows the course of the whole
action with all its simple and natural motives.
When finally Wotan gives expression to this
sense of necessity, he only proclaims that which
we have all along felt must needs be. At the
end of " Rhine Gold " when Loge watches the
gods enter Walhalla and speaks these fateful
words: "They hasten towards their end who
imagine themselves so strong in their might,"
he, in that moment, only gives utterance to our
own conviction ; for any one who has followed
the prelude sympathetically, and not in a hyper-
critical, cavilling spirit, but abandoning himself
to his impressions and feelings, will entirely
agree with Loge.

And now let me say something to you about
Brunhilde. You misunderstand her, too, when

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 105

you attribute her refusal to give the ring up to
Wotan to hardness and obstinacy. Can you
not see that it was for love's sake that Brun-
hilde sundered herself from Wotan and from
all the gods, because where Wotan clung to
schemes^ she could only — love ? Above all, from
the moment that Siegfried had awakened her
she has no other knowledge than the knowledge
of love. Now the symbol of this — after Sieg-
fried's departure — is the ring. When Wotan
claims it from her, one thing only is present to
her spirit — what it was that originally alienated
her from him, her having disobeyed for Love's
sake; and this alone she is still conscious of,
that for Love she has renounced her god-
head. She knows also that one thing alone is
god-like, and that is Love; therefore let the
splendour of Walhalla fall in ruins, she will not
give up the ring (her love). Just consider how
poor, avaricious and common she would have
stood revealed to us, if she had refused the ring

106 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

because she had learned (possibly from Sieg-
fried) of its magic, and the power of gold.
Surely you did not seriously think such a thing
of so grand a woman ? But if you shudder
because, being the woman she is, she should
have preserved as a symbol of love just this
ring on which the curse lay, then you will have
penetrated my meaning, and will have under-
stood the curse of the Nibelungs in its most
terrible and tragic significance ; then you will
admit the necessity of the whole of the last
drama of " Siegfried's death." That had to be
compassed in order that the malign influence of
the gold should be fully revealed. How did it
■come about that Brunhilde yielded so readily to
the disguised Siegfried ? Simply because he
had wrested the ring from her, in which her
whole strength lay. The terror, the fatality
(das Damonische) that underlie the whole of
that scene seem entirely to have escaped you.
Through the fire which it had been foreordained

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 107

that none but Siegfried should pass, which
actually none but he had passed, another has
made his way to her with but little difficulty.

Everything totters round Briinhilde, every-
thing is out of joint ; in a terrible conflict she is
overcome, she is "forsaken of God." And more-
over it is Siegfried in reality who orders her to
share his couch ; Siegfried whom she (uncon-
sciously and thus with the greater bewilderment)
almost recognises, by his gleaming eye, in spite
of his disguise. You must feel that something
is being enacted that is not to be expressed in
mere words — and it is wrong of you to challenge
me to explain it in words.

Well, I have certainly expanded pretty freely ;
the fear of doing so was really the cause of my
delay in writing. I was perturbed to find that
you had so completely misunderstood certain
features of my drama. This has made clear to
me, that only in its complete form and under
favourable circumstances would the work be safe

108 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

from misapprehension, and as I was seized with
a violent longing to begin the musical composi-
tion, I gladly gave myself up to my desire, before
writing to you. The completion of the music of
" Rhine Gold," at once so difficult and so
important, has restored my sense of security, as
you perceive. I now realise myself how much
of the whole spirit and meaning of my poem is
only made clear by the music ; I cannot now
for my life even look at the words without the
musical accompaniment. In the course of time
I hope to send you the score. For the present,
all I need say is that it has worked up to a
perfect unity; there is scarcely a bar in the
orchestra which is not developed out of pre-
ceding motifs. But it is difficult to enter fully
upon this in a letter.

What you say as to the carrying out and per-
formance of the whole work meets with my full
approval ; on these points your judgment is
infallible. I shall certainly follow your advice.

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 109

How I am ever to bring about a complete repre-
sentation of the cycle is still a grave problem.
But when the time comes I shall attack it, for
otherwise I should be deprived of my one serious
aim in life. I believe there would be no difficulty
about the merely mechanical part of the under-
taking ; but how about my performers ? The
very thought makes me groan. Of course I
must look to young artists who have not been
already entirely ruined by our present Opera
system. I don't even in my dreams think of so-
called "stars." How I am to educate my young
company is the question. What I should like
would be to have my whole troupe together for
a year, without allowing them to perform once
in public. I should in that way have daily inter-
course with them, and train them both on their
human and their artistic side, thus allowing
them gradually to ripen for their task. So under
the most favourable conditions I could not count
on a first performance before the summer of 1858.

no RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

But no matter how long it lasts, I feel some-
thing inspiring in such concentrated activity,
for the sake of an object that is entirely of my
own creation, which makes life worth living.
As for the rest, I must turn a deaf ear to all
your life-precepts and counsels ; over these things
one has no control — they come of themselves.
Believe me, I too was once possessed by the
idea of "the agricultural life." In order to
become a radically healthy human being, I went
two years ago to a Hydropathic Establishment ;
I was prepared to give up Art and everything if
I could once more become a child of Nature.
But, my good friend, I was obliged to laugh at
my own naivete when I found myself almost
going mad. None of us will reach the promised
land — we shall all die in the wilderness. Intellect
is, as someone has said, a sort of disease ; it
is incurable. In the present conditions of life,
Nature only admits of abnormities. At the best
we can only hope to be martyrs ; to refuse this

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. Ill

vocation is to put oneself in opposition to the
possibilities of life. For myself, I can no longer
exist except as an artist ; since I cannot com-
pass love and life, all else repels me, or only
interests me in so far as it has a bearing on Art.
The result is a life of torment, but it is the only
possible life. Moreover, some strange experiences
have come to me through my works. When I
think of the pain and discomfort which are now
my chronic condition, I cannot but feel that my
nerves are completely shattered : but marvellous
to relate, on occasion, and under a happy stimu-
lus, these nerves do wonders for me ; a clearness
of insight comes to me, and I experience a
receptive and creative activity such as I have
never known before. After this, can I say that
my nerves are shattered ? Certainly not. But
I must admit that the normal condition of my
temperament — as it has been developed through
circumstances — is a state of exaltation, whereas
calm and repose is its abnormal condition. The

112 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

fact is, it is only when I am "beside myself"
that I become my real self, and feel well and
happy. If Goethe felt otherwise, I do not envy
him on that account ; as indeed I would not
change places with any one, — not even with
Humboldt, whom you look on as a genius, an
opinion I cannot share. No doubt you feel just
as I do, and are not prepared to change with
any one ; wherein you do wisely. I, at least,
admire you sincerely.

After all, I am not so much out of touch with
Nature as you seem to think, even though I am
no longer in a position to have scientific dealings
with her. In these matters I look to Herwegh,
who lives here, and has for long been a profound
student of natural science. From this dear
friend I have learnt many beautiful and inspiring
things about Nature, and they have influenced
me on many and vital points. But rather than
let Nature take the place to me of real life —
namely of love, — I would let her go by the board.

TO AUGUST ROECKEL.

In this respect I am like Briinhilde with the ring.
Better to die, — to live without thought of joy, —
than renounce one's belief. You must not think
because I reply in this manner to your advice,
that I am ungrateful to you for it ; how could I
be ungrateful for the love that prompts you?
No ; indeed I rejoice in that love, and cannot
tell you how deeply I am touched by it. This
feeling of gratitude is only equalled by a sense
of admiration for the strength and at the same
time for the gentleness of your spirit.

One thing I wish, and that is a speedy per-
formance of the work which you tell me you
have written. Can the thing not be managed ?
Send me more details about it, in case I could
help you. Have you heard nothing from the
Publisher Avenarius at Leipzig ? Unfortunately
he is the only one with whom I have any
influence ; for with my own publishing firms I
have only had dealings through others, and

never satisfactorily to myself. As soon as I
8

114 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

received your letter I wrote to him and begged
him to correspond directly with you about
terms, offers, etc. In spite of a second letter, I
have had no answer from him.

I don't know what to send you just now that
would be of interest to you. I myself have got
quite out of the habit of reading; but if I come
upon anything striking, I will pass it on to
you.

My " Tannhauser " is being performed almost,
everywhere in Germany ; especially has it been:
taken up by the small theatres. The large ones,,
from reasons which one quite understands, still
hold aloof. As regards the performances, I
hear that they are for the most part wretchedly
bad, so I do not quite know where the pleasure
comes in. As I do not see them, I have ceased
to be sensitive about this prostitution of my
works; though a recent first performance of
" Lohengrin " at Leipzig did make a very pain-
ful impression on me. I hear it was incredibly

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 1 15

bad. Amongst other things, not one word was
clearly declaimed throughout the evening, except
by the heralds. It has come to this, that 1
regret ever having given my works to the public.
In Boston they have got the length of having
Wagner nights, — concerts where nothing is given
but my compositions. They want me to go to
America ; if they could provide me there with
the necessary means, who knows but that I
should do so ? But to tour about as a giver of
concerts, even for large sums of money, is what
no one need expect of me.

And now, my dearest friend, I must stop. If
necessary I could fill a folio of paper; there
would be no lack of matter ; but we must keep
it for some other occasion. It is to be hoped —
and see that you do it — that you will not keep
me waiting so long for your letter as I kept you
for this answer. Tell me much about your
writings. If I have forgotten anything, I can

retrieve it in my next letter. Now good-bye,

8 *

Ii6 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

dear old friend. Hope, — for even I am not
without hope.

Yours,

Richard Wagner.

Zurich, 26th Jan., 1854.

To August Roeckel,
Schloss Waldheim,
Saxony.

LETTER V.

Dear Friend,

I have this minute received your letter, and
have put my work aside in order to reply to
you at once and thus carry out an intention I
have postponed for a year. A letter to you has
burdened my conscience for long, and I can
hardly understand why it has been so long
unwritten; most probably the mood of the
moment never set in the direction of writing,
for on my lonely walks I have often written to
you in my thoughts. But I have developed into
a thorough-going pedant, and I am a prey to a
sort of brooding, which makes all expansion
impossible, and from which I seek refuge in
work. But I won't waste time on excuses of
this nature.

I have been comforted lately by news of my

117

Il8 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

wife's visit to you, and by the accounts she
sends me of you. From her report it seems to
me that any anxiety on your account was
indeed uncalled for. Don't take me up wrongly.
Your father, too, who came to see me here, put
me in quite good spirits about you. In his
clear, sensible, definite way, he gave such a
quaintly reassuring account of you, that, I
confess, we several times laughed heartily over
it. The consequence of which is, that there is
not much left to me to write to you about but
myself, and in dealing with this subject there
are various hindrances.

But to come to the point — and in the first
instance as regards outward circumstances, —
I continue to lead a life of the utmost seclusion,
absolutely and entirely given up to my great
work, the composition of my Nibelung dramas.
In Germany my operas are steadily making
their way ; but it is still a slow business.
"Tannhauser" is given more or less every-

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 119

-where except in Berlin, Brunswick, Vienna,
Munich, Stuttgart, and the smaller theatres of
Bavaria and Austria ; in Prague and Gratz, how-
-ever, it is given. " Lohengrin " follows suit, and
is in high favour in the Rhine provinces and in
Breslau; and in certain places the "Flying
Dutchman " is being given. As regards the
performances, I am quite convinced that they
are poor, and that they would only distress me
if I were to be present at them. I am
particularly concerned about " Lohengrin,"
performed as it is without my having been able
to show what I meant, by first putting it on the
stage myself. The report that reached you
as to its being given in Paris was certainly a
canard. I have heard nothing of it, and even
were it on the cards I should most probably
forbid it. On the other hand, something quite
new has turned up. The old Philharmonic
Society in London has asked me to conduct
their concerts this season. When their invitation

120 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

reached me, I felt as if I had dropped from the
clouds. I had never troubled myself the least
in the world about London, and had calmly
accepted the fact last year that at these very
concerts my "Tannhauser" overture was not
only massacred, but actually hissed. As I
hesitated about accepting their invitation, they
went so far as to send one of their directors to-
Zurich to secure me. At length I consented,
as I felt that it was a case of repudiating, once
and for all, any further connection with the Art
public, or of accepting the hand they stretched
out to me. The pay is not large, and as I do
not contemplate any private speculation, I am
merely going out of curiosity, in order to see
what the people in London are about. If I
had any ulterior design, it would be to get
together, at some future date in London, a first-
rate company in order to give all my operas,
and more especially "Lohengrin." Well, the
event will prove !

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 121

I start at the end of this month. The first
concert is on the 12th of March, the last on the
35th of June. I expect to be back in the
beginning of July on the Seelisberg, by
the Lake of Lucerne, my favourite spot in
Switzerland. There I shall recover from the
worries of London, and hope to compose my
" Young Siegfried." I have finished the composi-
tion of the " Walkure," amid much anguish of
spirit, of which no one knows anything, least of
all my excellent wife. Peace to the subject ! I
will complete the instrumentation in London ;
up to now I have only commenced it.

I only finished the fair copy of " Rheingold "
last autumn. I at once sent the score to Dresden
to have it copied by my old copyist there.
Liszt, however, urged me so strongly and per-
sistently to allow him to see the original, that I
was obliged to interrupt the copying in order to
let him do so. Liszt has only now returned
the score to Dresden ; as soon as the copy is

122 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

ready, either it or the original shall be sent to
you provisionally. The upshot of all will no
doubt be that you will improve (?) the whole
thing out of existence. So much the better.
I shall be delighted to see some specimens of
your music. Possibly you will succeed better
than I have done.

But now to deeper subjects. I do not mean
to philosophize with you to-day, but shall let
another do so in my stead. I have just sent an
order to Leipzig to forward you a copy of
Arthur Schopenhauer's book, The World as
Will and Idea.

I hope you will be allowed to read this book,
as there is nothing in it that has any objection-
able bearing on your position. As you will get
to know the book for yourself, I need tell you
nothing about it, but I will give you some
account of its author. Schopenhauer is at
present 62 years old ; he lives and has been for
some time past in complete retirement at

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 123

Frankfort. Briefly, this has been his career.
His chief work appeared as early as 1819 ; and
in 1844 he published a fuller edition of it, with
an extra volume. He took up his position as
the direct heir of Kant, and this simultaneously
with Hegel's appearance on the scene. Schopen-
hauer's philosophy, which completely demolishes
the nonsense and charlatanism of the Fichte-
Schelling-Hegel view, was absolutely ignored
for forty years by the professors of philosophy,
and this of purpose and intention. No one
knew anything of him. At long last he was
discovered by an English critic, and introduced
to the world in a long article in the Westminster
Review. This writer expresses his astonishment
that a mind of Schopenhauer's eminence should
have remained unnoticed for nearly half a
century, though, naturally enough, he recognises
that the philosophy was of a kind which forced
these professors to seal up Schopenhauer
hermetically, and shut him off from the world

124 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

at large, unless they meant to cut away the
ground from under their own feet. The said
article was translated into a Berlin paper, since
when it has been impossible to ignore Schopen-
hauer, and now the miserable impotence of
German philosophy since Kant has been laid
bare and openly declared. The importance of
the book is incalculable, but in a sense that will
be far from satisfactory to many. For myself,
I confess my experience of life had brought
me to a point when only Schopenhauer's
philosophy could wholly satisfy me and exercise
a decisive influence on my whole life.

In accepting unreservedly the profound truths
of his teaching I was able to follow my own
inner bent, and although he has given my line
of thought a direction somewhat different
from its previous one, yet only ' this direction
harmonized with the profoundly sorrowful con-
ception I had already formed of the world.

I am sure that the book will have a great and

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 125

decisive influence on you ; it may even be that
you will find in it, should you require it, the
unique consolation of which strong spirits more
than others stand in need. I will say nothing
further to you on the subject, but I feel that
from henceforth we have a new and sublime
interest in common on which we may exchange
our ideas. In reading Schopenhauer I thought
of you constantly, and it is with a feeling at
once deep and solemn that I send you this
work, which at a critical moment of my own
inner life gave me courage to endure and
strength to renounce. Do read it ; I can confer
no greater benefit on you. When you have
finished it, write to me, and we can then
discuss it. Address your letter to London, care
of Ferdinand Praeger, 31 Milton St., Dorset
Square. Your father, who has been most kind
to me, recommended me to Praeger : I shall
lodge with him on arrival. I shall anxiously
await your next letter. For to-day you must

126 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

be satisfied with these few pages. As regards
outward events I have nothing to tell, and for
the things of the spirit I send you Schopen-
hauer. From London I shall write often and
fully.

Farewell, dearest friend. Trust ever in me
and in my affection. Kindest regards from my
wife.

Your

Richard Wagner.

LETTER VI.

22 Portland Terrace,

Regent's Park,

London.

Dear Friend,

I have just read your letter, and feel prompted
to answer it at once, or rather to send in
exchange for it some of the ideas which came
into my mind while reading it; for I cannot
attempt to answer it in detail ; to do so would
lead me astray into too much hair-splitting. I I
perceive that you continue to be an obstinate
optimist; and that, like unto your friend the
Apostle Paul, Judaism in particular is still
deeply rooted in your nature.

As regards myself, for long past it has been
only with the greatest difficulty, and by per-

127

128 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

sistent rejection of the teaching of experience,
that I had succeeded in maintaining an opti-
mistic attitude towards life. It was thus a
mere remnant of Hebrew superstition that had
still to be cast out when I encountered the
prodigious force of friend Schopenhauer's genius.
Only with much travail was this superstition
finally exorcised, but in the end there was
comfort and that peace which comes to a man
who has once for all done with self-deception
and has attained the full measure of freedom
that is possible to mankind. The deepest truth
of Schopenhauer's doctrine, the truth that only
the greatest minds have been able to grasp,
rests on Kant's important discovery of the
subjective character of all phenomena. We,
too, must have fully grasped this truth before
we can take one step further towards the com-
prehension of the "thing in itself" (Das Ding
an sich) ; held, as you know, by Kant to lie
outside the sphere of our knowledge, but

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 1 29

designated with convincing force by Schopen-
hauer as Will. I cannot pretend that I am at all
times able to follow the process of the solution
of this mighty problem, still less to expound it
clearly. The clear realisation of the subjective
character of time, space, and causality, as mere
forms of perception, argues a mental process of
so sublime a nature that, as Schopenhauer
proves beyond dispute, it can only be possible
to an abnormally organised brain, and under
conditions of peculiar excitement. But no
sooner have we comprehended this truth than
all the illusions which have hitherto darkened
our judgment vanish as if by magic, and of a
sudden even words fail us to make our position
plain ; for our words hitherto have been adapted
to the service of a far different knowledge than
that to which we have now attained. The
difficulty now is to communicate our ideas
through this confused medium of word-symbols,
without every moment giving occasion for mis-

9

130 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

understanding. It is therefore wisest to start
from the simplest phenomena, namely, from,
those that lie nearest to our common experience.
To have achieved this kind of clearness is
Schopenhauer's extraordinary merit. But it is
only to those who are capable of following him
through those first and most important stages-
of his reasoning process that his meaning-
presents no stumbling-block; and it is just in
that initial step that the difficulty lies. The
following point, however, must be perfectly
intelligible to any mind of a superior order, for
it has been unanswerably demonstrated, and in
fact serves as the point of departure of our
modern natural sciences.

In normal man, all his senses, and more
especially his organ of perception, namely, his
brain, is entirely in the service of his Will. The
emancipation of this faculty of perception from
the service of the Will is thus an abnormal
act, and can only take place with abnormal

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 1 3 1

organisations (having in a sense the stamp of
monstrosity). In this exceptional condition
which we recognise in its highest development
as genius, the faculty of perception becomes
conscious in the first instance of its normal
condition, and, being thus liberated from the
service of the Will, recognises the state of
bondage to which it has been hitherto subjected,
and asks itself : How does this dominating all-
controlling Will manifest itself up to this point,
when in an abnormal condition of liberated
perception it ceases to assert itself ? In answer
to this question we have to admit, with a deep
sense of shame, that this Will has sought nothing
but to live, namely, to nourish itself by the
extermination of others, and to reproduce itself
by propagation. We can discover nothing in
Will beyond this blind instinct.

Now in the abnormal condition in which this
truth has become clear to us, we are forced to

ask ourselves whether there is not some risk in
n *

132 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

subjecting ourselves to the service of a Will so
constituted, and we seek to penetrate further
into the meaning of this phenomenon. We
then recognise that this Will is identical in all
perceptible manifestations, and that conse-
quently all isolated phenomena are nothing but
individuations of the same Will, recognisable as
such by our faculty of perception, according to
its fundamental forms of cognition — individual
manifestations, that is to say, of an entity that
is continually engaged in self-consumption and
self-reproduction. This entity thus appears as
something that is perpetually at variance with
itself, something that subsists in a discord, of
which the only fruit visible to us is pain and
suffering.

The question then arises : To what height can
this Will attain under the most favourable
circumstances? Just to that point which we
have reached when we recognise the possibility
of the emancipation (that is to say in an

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 133

abnormal case) of one of its organs, namely, of
the faculty of perception, from the service of the
Will, and thus to a recognition of its essential
character. And in acknowledging this, what do
we gain? Clearly we gain the knowledge of
the essential, the awful nature of this Will, and
at length through this knowledge we attain
to sympathy — i.e., compassion with suffering
(Mitleiden), for it is characteristic that we have
no word to express sympathy with joy. At
this point perception gains a moral import
which hitherto had been ignored. Under the
highest and most favourable conditions we
attain to a sympathy with all things living, and
by reason of their life, in unconscious bondage
to the service of the Will. In this perfect
unison with all that has been kept apart from
us by the illusion of individuation lies the root
of all virtue, the true secret of redemption.
This has at all times been the point of departure
of religion. But what deliverance is there from

134 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

the infinite pain of such a sympathy ? Is it to
be sought in an endeavour to make things
easier, to mitigate to a certain extent by humane
means this eternal conflict of the Will with itself,
this terrible and increasing instinct towards
self-consumption and self-reproduction ? The
man who could believe this and desire it has
completely missed the perfect knowledge of
which we have spoken ; his perception would
still be in complete bondage to the Will, as to
whose true nature — thanks to the illusory effect of
individuation — our enslaved faculties are still
deceived. True insight (and it is this that is so
difficult to grasp) has only come to us when —
in an abnormal condition — we have renounced
our individual Will, and thereby repudiated and
denied the service of the Will. And there
follows as the highest product of this knowledge
the recognition that for him who has attained
universal sympathy, redemption is to be found
only in the deliberate negation of the Will — that

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 135

is, in realisation of its corrupt nature, and of the
necessity of release from participation in its
service. And in the first place the only con-
ceivable and practicable way towards this
liberation that is open to us lies in the renun-
ciation through sympathy of our individual Will.
And that amounts to nothing short of the com-
plete negation, in fact to the annihilation, of the
Will. Well, I must confess that this philosophy
appeals profoundly to my heart and head — I
can conceive of no loftier or truer teaching.
All misapprehensions of the apparent disagree-
ment between the individual Will and the Will
of all things living outside myself, result from
the defective understanding of the subjective
character of our perceptions, in so far as they
are conditioned by the fundamental forms of
our cognition (Time, Space, and Causality). The
man who has mastered this profoundest of all
problems, to whom Time, Space, and Causality
are no longer realities, has also grasped the

I3 6 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

truth that his individuality based on these forms
of perception is no reality, and he sees that not
in the creation of these notions of Time, Space,
and Causality, but in self-renunciation is to be
sought the highest act of the Will. It does not
occur to Schopenhauer to draw utilitarian and
practical conclusions from the truth, or to
formulate theories ; for he knows that it is not
the business of philosophy to conjure up new
spirits, but that its mission is, on the contrary,
to destroy as far as may be — seeing that our
perception is still in bondage — the old phantoms,
of our enslaved perception. He is in no wise
concerned to interfere with the peace of a man
who, in order to enjoy life quand mime, busies
himself with the creation of fresh illusions ; he
only addresses those who truly desire to know.
It follows that Philosophy, the sum total of all
the sciences, can only end in negation, whereas
all other speculation being in the service of the:
Will seeks truth in affirmation. This affirmation.

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 137

carried out to its logical conclusion at all costs
is nothing more nor less than Judaism, grown
so powerful again at the present time, and
embodying, as it does, the most miserably
narrow-minded conception of the world that
has ever been imagined.

From all time the minds that have attained,
thanks to their abnormal organisation, to a
clear perception have turned to the minds of the
multitude still in bondage to the Will, and,
having compassion on them, have sought a
means of communication with them. Foremost
among these enlightened spirits have been the
founders of religions, and it has been their
tragic destiny that they were forced to make
use of such a language and of such symbols as
are alone intelligible to ordinary unenlightened
minds.

Certainly the Indian Prince Buddha spoke
the language which most nearly gives expression
to that lofty enlightenment. Thanks to recent

I38 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

oriental studies, the scales have fallen from our
eyes, and we can form an independent judgment
of this wonderful personality, no longer seen
through the distorting medium of the Hindoo
religion of the present day. If we are to speak
in terms understanded of the people of this
highest perception, it can only be done under
the form of pure and primitive Buddhist
teaching. Especially important is the doctrine
of the transmigration of souls as the basis of a
truly human life — a life whose sympathy extends
even to the inconscient animal and vegetable
world. Surely this doctrine is the happiest
inspiration of a sublimely sympathetic spirit.*

The latest scientific inquiries have estab-
lished beyond dispute that the idea underlying
Christianity has its origin in India. The
enormous difficulty, nay, the absolute impossi-

* It is barely necessary to remind the reader that Wagner
was mistaken in attributing the ancient Indian doctrine of
the transmigration of souls to Buddha, as if it were an
invention of his.

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 139

bility of grafting on to the barren stock of
Judaism this sublime truth, which has as its
central thought contempt of the world and
negation of the will to live, has alone been the
cause of all those contradictions which hitherto
have so sadly distorted Christianity that its
pure image can scarcely be recognised. For
the quintessence of Judaism is that heartless
unreasoning optimism, to which all things are
right so long as purse and stomach are well-
filled ; and for this there is no lack of opportunity,
provided one sets about it in the right way,
accepting the world as it is, and twisting all
things to one's own advantage. In contrast to
this, how divine is the recognition of the vanity
and nothingness of this world manifest in the
faith of primitive Christianity, and how sublime
is Buddha's doctrine, which makes us one
through sympathy with all things living!

In judging other details of Schopenhauer's
philosophy — for instance, his treatment of the

140 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

penal code, — you must remember, as I have
already said, this philosopher never makes
postulates, nor does he express approval or
disapproval, but he rests satisfied with establish-
ing the essential character of all phenomena.
For instance, he demonstrates what the State
is, what justice is, and so on ; but not what they
ought to be. Far from it, and if you are not
satisfied with things as he shows them to be, by
so much the more are you at one with Schopen-
•hauer, who turns his back on the whole business,
saying, as it were : " See, so much is within
your reach, these are the makeshifts which allow
you to continue affirming your will to live. It
is on sophistries of this nature that are founded
what you are pleased to call humane methods
for the difficult task of preserving the human
race, though you are quite well aware how much
'justice ' is in them ; but don't imagine that you
impose upon me, and, above all, don't prate to
me, forsooth, of a State philosophy and similar

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 141

nonsense." From all which it follows that if

we would fain allay the divine thirst for sympathy

aroused in us by the clearer insight that has come

to us, we must seek satisfaction elsewhere than

in any conceivable social and civil institutions.

By-and-by I will send you Schopenhauer's

minor writings, among which there is a very

exhaustive treatise on Somnambulism, etc.

From this you will see with what rare and

profound insight this philosopher has dealt with

this problem, and how from a phenomenon,

in which we are aware of an activity implying

a second intuitive faculty, he deduces convincing

proof of the subjective character of our ordinary

methods of cognition,* of the unity of the Will

in all things that have life, and of the illusive-

ness of the sense of individuality, so that the

problem of the denial of the Will at once

becomes intelligible.

* i.e. that we are deluded in thinking we have any direct
knowledge of the external world. Each of us knows only a
reflex inside his own head.

142 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

But enough of this. The object of my
demonstration was not so much to teach you
(for- certainly you will do this best yourself), as
to clear the whole subject up once more for
myself, for I must tell you that this profound
philosophy colours my mental processes from
day to day, and that I now contemplate the
world from a point of view which allows me to
recognise facts of deep and irresistible signifi-
cance — facts in relation to which I used formerly
to practise systematic self-deception, in the vain
endeavour to remain true to optimistic delusion.

Especially am I deeply moved by contempla-
tion of the position of animals, so shamefully
ill-used and ill-treated by mankind, and I am
glad to be able to give way without shame to
the strong sense of pity which I have always
felt, and no longer to have to seek about for
sophistries to whitewash the wickedness of men
in this respect.

As for the rest, if anything could increase my

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 145

contempt of the world, it would have been my
expedition to London. Suffice it to say briefly,
that I have bitterly atoned for my own folly
in allowing myself, in spite of experience, and
through mere foolish curiosity, to be beguiled
into accepting the present engagement. What
more can I say ? At the best, I have nothing
to hope for here, and my presence as conductor
of these concerts can only lead to fresh mis-
understandings. I have not even had the
satisfaction of giving really beautiful perform-
ances of Beethoven's works, for each time it
has only been possible to have one rehearsal;
and even had the orchestra been better, that is
not enough to establish a thorough under-
standing with the players. That the Jewish
press here should cut me up is a matter of
profound indifference to me ; I am all the more
glad that other journalists, and particularly my
own audiences, do not let themselves be led
astray, and do justice to me, in so far as they

144 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

are able. But I recognise that it is not now
possible for them to do so fully, and consequently
I heartily repent having come here. Now, I must
hold out till the end of June. It is useless to
think of having a German opera here (that is,
a good one); and even if it were possible, I
should not wish for a performance of my own
operas. It would not be possible — and what
would be the good ? It is only the work itself
that can interest me now, not its success.
Besides, I am always depressed here, and my
work gets on very slowly. I see a great deal of
Praeger here — a good, crazy fellow. Lately
Edward * was here on a visit. I am going to
him at Bath for a few days' holiday. Did we,
or did we not, speak much of you ? For the
rest, I avoid new acquaintances, but I mean
to look up N. S. Tulk. Thanks for the sugges-
tion. "Tannhauser" is actually going to be
given at Berlin, but without Liszt, as I was not
* Edward Roeckel, brother of August.

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 145

in a position to insist upon it, and could no
longer do without the fees. That I intended to
conduct it myself was a mere canard; I have
heard nothing to that effect, and in all probability
shall hear nothing. In summer I return — via,
Paris — to my beloved Switzerland, which I do
not mean ever to leave again. Retirement,
beautiful scenery, and work — these constitute
the element in which alone I can live and move
.and have my being, and from which I will never
again be dragged away. Excuse more to-day ;
perhaps I shall soon write again, as there may
be something to add on various points. Fare-
-well, and be as ever of good courage.

Your

Richard Wagner.

10

LETTER VII.

Zurich,

August 23rd, 1856.

Your letter, my dearest friend, far from
rousing a combative spirit in me, has only
confirmed me in the belief that in this world
nothing is gained by discussion. , That in us,
which is essentially and fundamentally our own,,
is not our conceptions (Begriff) but our intuitions
(Anschauung). These, however, are so inalien-
able a part of our being, that we can never
wholly express them, never adequately com-
municate them ; for even the most complete
attempt in this direction — the achievement of
the artist, the work of Art — is apprehended by
others purely in accordance with their own
intuitions. How can an artist expect that what

146

RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS. 147

he has felt intuitively should be perfectly realized

by others, seeing that he himself feels in the

presence of his work, if it is true Art, that he is

confronted by a riddle, about' which he too

might have illusions, just as another might?

Now, would you suppose it possible for an artist

to be helped to a clear understanding of his

own work by an intelligence other than his

own ? As to this, I am in a position to speak,

as on this very point I have had the strangest

experiences. Seldom has there taken place in

the soul of one and the same man so profound

a division and estrangement between the

intuitive or impulsive part of his nature and his

consciously or reasonably formed ideas. For

I must confess to having arrived at a clear

understanding of my own works of Art through

the help of another, who has provided me with

the reasoned conceptions corresponding to

my intuitive principles.

The period during which I have worked in
10 *

148 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

obedience to my intuitions dates from "The
Flying Dutchman." " Tannhauser " and
" Lohengrin " followed, and if there is any
expression of an underlying poetic motive in
these works, it is to be sought in the sublime
tragedy of renunciation, the negation of the will,
which here appears as necessary and inevitable,
and alone capable of working redemption. It
was this deep underlying idea that gave to my
poetry and my music that peculiar consecration,
without which they would not have had that
power to move profoundly which they have.
Now, the strange thing is, that in all my in-
tellectual ideas on life, and in all the conceptions
at which I had arrived in the course of my
struggles to understand the world with my
conscious reason, I was working in direct
opposition to the intuitive ideas expressed in
these works. While, as an artist, I felt with
such convincing certainty that all my creations
took their colouring from my feelings, as a

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 149

philosopher I sought to discover a totally
opposed interpretation of the world ; and this
interpretation once discovered, I obstinately
held to it, though, to my own surprise, I found
that it had invariably to go to the wall when
confronted by my spontaneous and purely
objective artistic intuitions. I made my most
remarkable discovery in this respect with my
Nibelung drama. It had taken form at a
time when, with my ideas, I had built up
an optimistic world, on Hellenic principles;
believing that in order to realize such a world,
it was only necessary for man to wish it. I
ingeniously set aside the problem, why they
did not wish it. I remember that it was with
this definite creative purpose that I conceived
the personality of Siegfried, with the intention
of representing an existence free from pain.
But I meant in the presentment of the whole
Nibelung myth to express my meaning even
more clearly, by showing how from the first

15° RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

wrong-doing a whole world of evil arose, and
consequently fell to pieces in order to teach us
the lesson, that we must recognise evil and tear
it up by the roots, and raise in its stead a
righteous world. I was scarcely aware that in
the working out, nay, in the first elaboration of
my scheme, I was being unconsciously guided
by a wholly different, infinitely more profound
intuition, and that instead of conceiving a
phase in the development of the world, I had
grasped the very essence and meaning of the
world itself in all its possible phases, and had
realized its nothingness ; the consequence of
which was, that as I was true to my living
intuitions and not to my abstract ideas in my
completed work, something quite different saw
the light from what I had originally intended.
But I remember that once, towards the end, I
decided to bring out my original purpose, cost
what it might, namely, in Briinhilde's final
somewhat artificially coloured invocation to those

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 151

around her, in which, having pointed out the
^vils of possession, she declares that in love
alone is blessedness to be found, without
{unfortunately) making quite clear what the
nature of that Love is, which in the develop-
ment of the myth we find playing the part of
-destructive genius.

To this extent was I led astray in this one
passage by the interposition of my intellectual
intention. Strangely enough, I was always in
despair over this said passage, and it required
the complete subversion of my intellectual
-conceptions, brought about by Schopenhauer,
to discover to me the reason of my dissatis-
faction, and to supply me with the only adequate
Jkey-stone to my poem* in keeping with the
whole idea of the drama, which consists in a
simple and sincere recognition of the true

* This new version of the final verses of Goetterdaemmerung,
to which Wagner here refers, was later on cancelled as the
first had been ; the poem was allowed to finish without any
irace of moral reflection and doctrine.

152 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

relations of things and complete abstinence
from the attempt to preach any particular
doctrine.

My reason for imparting to you this mental
process, which cannot be considered devoid of
interest, is to make my own position clear to
you. Once this problem of the difference
between intellectual conceptions (Begriff) and
intuitions (Anschauung) had been solved for
me by Schopenhauer's profound and inspired
penetration, I ceased to think of it as a mere
abstract idea, for I realised it as a truth, which
was borne in on me with such convincing force
that, having fully recognized its nature, I was
satisfied to accept it for myself, without com-
mitting myself to the presumptuous mistake of
attempting to force it on others by means of
dialectic. I am profoundly conscious myself
that I should never have been convinced by
such means, unless my own deepest intuitions
had been satisfied ; and therefore I see that if

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 153

the truth of which I have spoken is to be
brought home to any one, he must have felt
it intuitively before he can grasp it intellec-
tually.

We can form no abstract conception of a
thing unless we have previously grasped it as a
living intuition ; if a man realizes that clearly,
especially if he feels himself as little of a
philosopher as I do, he will not have much
inclination to pose as a dialectician. My only
language is Art. Nevertheless, I ask you, in
order to sum up the whole matter, can you
conceive of a moral action of which the
root idea is not renunciation ? And what
is the most ideal holiness, namely, full
and perfect redemption, if it is not the
recognition of this truth, as the basis of all
our action ?

But even with these simple questions I go
too far, and become more abstract than is
advantageous to myself. Therefore let me tell

154 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

you a few more things about my concrete
personality.

I am an Artist, nothing else, and that is at
once my blessing and my curse; otherwise I
should have wished to have been a saint and to
have ordered my life in the simplest way. As
it is, fool that I am, I strive and struggle to
achieve rest, by which I mean the completed
rest of an undisturbed, tolerably comfortable
life, in order that I may have nothing to do but
to work and to be an artist.

To attain this is so difficult, that in my
constant pursuit of rest I am often obliged to
laugh at myself. Since last I wrote to you I
have been pretty wretched. The London
expedition was a foolish inconsistency on my
part, for which I have patiently submitted to
punishment, even to the extent of remaining to
the end of my engagement. While there, all
power of work left me. I had meant to finish
the score of "The Walkiire," but my memory

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 155

of what I had meant it to be vanished. I
returned to Zurich ill, and in the course of the
winter, during repeated attacks of erysipelas,
completed the "Walkiire" with difficulty (but,
between ourselves, it is well done). In the
beginning of summer I went to the neighbour-
hood of Geneva, where, under the direction of
a first-rate doctor, I underwent a most beneficial
course of hydropathy, which I have just
completed, and have returned here, where I
found your letter awaiting me. It was too soon
to think of commencing the composition of
" Young Siegfried." Liszt is going to visit me
at the end of September: I shall go through my
two finished scores with him ; and then I hope
to start on " Siegfried " refreshed and inspired,
and to present it finished to the world by the
end of next year.

That is all I have to tell you of myself.
With sore difficulty I got, while in London last
year, a finished copy of " Rhine Gold " from

156 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

Dresden. I left it behind with a young friend
and gifted musician, Klindworth, in order that
he might make a good pianoforte arrangement
of it. He had the misfortune to be ill himself
for a long time, and has only recently returned
me the full score and the completed arrange-
ment for the pianoforte ; a fair copy of the
latter must be taken here, and for this purpose
the copyist must have the score on account of
the annotations. When the copy is finished I
can do what I like with the score, and I
promise that you shall have it after Liszt's
visit. As yet no copy has been made of the
"Walkiire," as I have only one good copyist
here, and he has not much time. I am so
unwilling to let my original scores out of my
hands that I shall not send the " Walkiire " to
Dresden to be copied ; not so much for fear of
its loss, though that would be serious enough,
as because I need to have it at hand in order to
go on with the work. So you must kindly

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 157

excuse delay in the receipt of my works, and
attribute it to above-mentioned circumstances.
I will get you Schopenhauer's minor works.
There is so much that is new and important in
them, that I can promise you pleasure from
them, in spite of the undeniable asperities and
prejudices of a pronounced misanthrope which
may occasionally repel you. At the same time
I will send you the score of my " Faust "
overture, which, owing to an unexpected
suggestion, I retouched. In its present form it
seems to me not unworthy of myself. But the
books must be sent from Leipzig. As regards
the external events of my life, the German
theatres continue giving my operas very badly,
and none the less with a persistent success
that fills me with humorous amazement.
Efforts are being made to procure permission
for me to return to Germany, especially on the
part of the Grand Duke of Weimar, who has
interested himself actively in the matter, but

:58 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

without, so far, a favourable result. For my
part, what I chiefly desire for myself is health
to carry out all the schemes of which I am full ;
unfortunately, more full than need be, for,
besides the Nibelung dramas, I have got a
"Tristan and Isolde" (in which Love is treated
as a power of anguish) in my head, and also a
wholly new subject, " The Conquerors " (a
Buddhist legend concerning final Redemption).
I am so possessed by both of them that it
requires some steadfastness of purpose to force
them into the background in favour of the
"Nibelungs."

Now, dearest August, you see in black and
white what I, who am still in need of rest,
could do at one bound. Keep up your cheerful
spirits and your clear-headedness, and suit your
philosophy to your needs. At the best we can
only know what we desire to know; for you
must allow that, in spite of our knowledge, we
are nothing more or less than embodiments of

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 159

will, and as such the most powerful, if not the
wisest, of things created. Farewell, and believe
me,

Your

Richard Wagner.

LETTER VIII.

To Mr. August Roeckel,
Weimar.

Biebrich, March 6th, 1862.

You will easily believe, dear friend, by how
many and what varied feelings I am moved
each time I think of the Past we had in common,
of your imprisonment, and now at last of your
liberation. Accept my sympathy on this last
turn of events, and above all let me congratulate
you, if you are able truly to enjoy your liberty. It
is not easy to make clear what I mean by this.
Anyhow, you are at present in an enviable
position. It is as if you were awakened from a
long winter's sleep ; thanks to your incredibly
vigorous nature, your powers are strengthened,
and at the same time have kept their freshness.

1 60

RICHARD WAGNER' S LETTERS. l6r

You have suffered much, but your sufferings

now may pass for dreams : they have not

changed you in any way ; for, as I can see from

your printed report, not only have you remained

the same in all respects, but your desire to take

things up exactly where you left them has

strengthened. It is nothing short of a miracle,

and it does not occur to me to pity you, for I

should not know where my condolences would

come in. As you have chosen open political

agitation for the field of your future activity, it

follows that you are full of hopes for the future

of events. With so wide a field of vision

before you, cares for your home and family

must seem to you secondary considerations.

Your nature demands a sphere of activity which

shall bring you into touch with men and

things, and you will have no difficulty in

gratifying your desire. In short, everything

that has become a burden to me, and all that I

avoid on principle, appears desirable to you and
ii

162 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

attracts you, and the freshness which you have
kept, thanks to your long privation, will save
you from a too speedy disillusionment and
disgust. As for me, I shall watch you with
great interest, and shall rejoice that a man of
such parts and so good a fellow as yourself
should have been preserved in full vigour for a
work which I recognise as necessary, though
personally feeling no vocation for it. When I
tell you further that I ask nothing of the world
but that it should leave me unmolested, granting
me only what is necessary to my happiness —
namely, leisure and peace of mind for my work ;
when I add that, with a willing servant and a,
dog, I have all that I want, and can get on
perfectly well ; and that, with the exception of a
really clever friend (whom I entertain as an
angel), I can exist without seeking intercourse
with anyone, you will understand with what
peculiar feelings I shall contemplate you attaching
yourself once more actively to a party and

TO AUGUST ROECKEE. 163

cheerfully associating yourself with blockheads
and riffraff of all sorts. But that is your affair.
To give you fuller particulars about myself,
I must tell you that I have with infinite difficulty
established myself here in great privacy and
retirement, in order to produce a new work.
My wife, to my surprise, came from Dresden to
belp me. She remained here ten days, and it
was during the early part of her visit that your
letter arrived. As regards the Art World and the
Theatre, I mean in the future to have as little as
possible to do with either of them ; in this way,
I shall perhaps succeed, as you succeeded in
prison, in thinking better of the world than it
deserves (though a single visit to the Weimar
Theatre promptly dispelled all your illusions).
Therefore I am striving to shut myself up in a
similar prison, if possible, in solitary confine-
ment. Believe me, my imprisonment is not
less involuntary than yours was. There is not

much difference in the matter of constraint ; in
11 *

164 RICliARD WAGNERS LETTERS

fact, brutal constraint such as you were subjected
to may agree better with an energetic nature
than does the fate which forces me into seclusion.
But I will not deny that I should most probably
have submitted just as little as you did to
the constraint imposed on you. Sometimes,
indeed, I used to wish that you might freei
yourself at whatever cost, and I used to urge:
your people to go through with all the neces-
sary forms. I now see that you could not
have done it, and I feel the utmost admiration :
for your behaviour towards your tormentors^
Clearly your conscience must be your only
reward. But if you mean to pursue politics, I
am curious to know how you will begin. In my
opinion, it would be wisest if you were to seek'
office in some Liberal service, for I am almost
convinced that nothing can be achieved in-
politics save in a practical way, and armed with
power. And this is, after all, the one essential
thing in a sphere where obviously you can do

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 1 65

no more than deal with the urgent necessities
of the moment, undertaking from time to time
necessary repairs, without which there would
be confusion and an absolute block. According
to my experience, to be political means always
to have nothing else in view but what is possible
in an immediate future, for then only can you
hope for results ; and political activity, without
results, is sheer nonsense. Ideas belong to the
domain of Philosophy, but have no meaning to
the majority of mankind, with whom any higher
form of thought at once becomes superstition
or folly.

Well, I hope we may meet before long ; a
trip eastwards is not an altogether impracticable
idea to me, and most gladly in that case would
I stop at Weimar. You will, I hope, find me
quite unchanged; indeed, more accessible as
regards hopefulness and belief in progress than
I could wish, which only means that one will
always be an ass. I am glad just now to be

166 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

engaged on a work which gives me pleasure.*
Would to God I had got well into it. Once
more, thanks for your letter, and do not mis-
understand me in any respect. I am a suffering
mortal — nothing more. Farewell ! Be heartily
welcome amongst free -ranging bipeds, and
believe with what genuine envy I look on you.
Best remembrances to your people.

Yours,

Richard Wagner.

* Wagner was just finishing the poem of the Meistersingw
when he wrote these lines.

LETTER IX.

To Mr. August Roeckel,
Weimar.

Biebrich-on-the-Rhine,
April 5th, 1862.

Dearest Friend,

I have a friend here, a most gifted young

musician from whom I look for great things,

and who is attached to me with a most touching

devotion; he would feel happy for the rest of

his life if he could secure a really fine poem for

an opera. I have spoken to him about

"Wieland."* Now, great politician, tell me,

* A detailed sketch of a lyrical drama, which Wagner
wrote in 1849, but never attempted to carry out ; he offered
it to Liszt, Berlioz, and Roeckel. It will be found in the
3rd volume of his writings.

167

168 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

do you ever mean to compose opera again ?
Frankly, I don't believe it. You have not said
anything to me about the scheme of the
libretto. I doubt your doing it ; probably you
have some reason against it. Anyhow, it
would amply satisfy my young friend if he
could try his skill as a musician and develop his
talents on a really poetical subject. So if you can
swear to me with your hand on your heart that
you do not believe you will ever use "Wieland,"
I will frankly ask you to return the manuscript
to me here. Assuming that this is so, I should
be very glad. Therefore, think over it, ponder
it well, and decide.

I have a feeling that you may have taken my
last letter amiss. If so, you did wrong. It so
happened that I was in an evil mood just then.
Now things begin to look brighter. I am
suffering from an old complaint, which uses up
half my vital energy to no purpose.

But enough. My wife has obtained for me a

TO AUGUST EOECKEL. 169

complete pardon and permission to enter Saxony
freely. But I shall remain here unmoved, where
I am quite comfortably established, and where
I have had — up till now — perfect peace for work.
For the present this work rules my life des-
potically; in every respect, both from within
and without, it is the one thing necessary for
my self-preservation. I absolutely do not know
where to lay hands on a Thaler, unless next
winter I have something new to launch "for
the theatre." Therefore, for the present, judge
me according to this my necessity. Write to
me, or, better still, come to the Rhine. This
summer I shall not budge from this place. I
must not.

Farewell. Best regards to all your people,
and send me soon good accounts of yourself.
Affectionately yours,

R. Wagner.

LETTER X.

To August Roeckel,

Weimar.

Biebrich,

April 23rd, 1862.

Dear Friend,

Your letter has brought vividly to mind the
old days. There was a peculiar " something "
about that time when we were together. I, too,
long to be with you once again. Tell me,
could not we tryst your brother here on the
Rhine when he has his holidays, and all be
merry together like boys for a week ? Here
we should be perfectly undisturbed, which, so
far as I am concerned at least, would not be so
easy elsewhere. I hope, towards the end of

170

RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS. 171

May, to pass through Weimar, and to spend a
day with you. When the time approaches let
me know where you will be. But if you feel
inclined to visit me first for a couple of days, do
come ; it so happens that I am in a position at
present to pay your travelling expenses.

In summer (June and July) the Billows are
coming here.

Such things are the only joy in life, and I
would give all the world to be able always to
have a friend staying with me. If one lives
near each other all one's life in a large place, it
does not come to the same thing: one can
never thoroughly enjoy one's friends by seeing
them in snatches. Therefore, decide quickly.
I had rather not come to Weimar to see you.

Farewell. Be wise, and come.

Yours,

W.

LETTER XI.

To Mr. August Roeckel,

Weimar.
Biebrich, June 17th, 1862.

Dearest Friend,

I was delighted to hear from you again. Be
sure you make out the visit. I remain here the
whole summer. If it suited you, I should prefer
that you came to me early in July. About that
date the Biilows are coming here for some
time. I shall have forthwith to read them
"The Meistersingers," and I should like to
read it to you as well, but as I have several
times had to do so already, I have lost
some of the freshness for such undertakings,
and it always takes it out of me ; therefore
172

RICHARD WAGNERS LETTERS. 173

I should be very glad if you would com-
municate with the Biilows (Hans von Biilow,
12 Schoneberger Strasse, Berlin), and, if
possible, fix the same date for your arrival at
Biebrich. Billow might then inform Schnorr
{in Dresden) of the date, for he proposes to
pay a visit about that time to submit to the
same ordeal.

As a rule I live in such solitude and retirement
that I greatly look forward to this combined
outburst. It will do me a world of good.
Another reason for choosing this time is, that I
shall be then in a position to let you hear my
new things to some advantage. Hans will play,
and Schnorr, who is a very good musician, will
help with the singing, of which I nowadays can
make but little. Of course Edward will be
heartily welcome.

I am very anxious and curious to see you
again. It seems strange to me that I should
go on living, when I have outlived so much in

174 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS

myself and my surroundings, and on the whole,
alas ! to feel so unchanged, that I often appear
to myself like a ghost. Heaven knows, when
thinking of you, I often quite forget the
incredibly long episode of your imprisonment,
and go back in thought to the time of our
Dresden walks. And yet your appearance
must have changed considerably. The en-
closed will show you what I looked like two
years ago.

Well, we shall see !

Yesterday I caught myself once again in a
burst of political rage. I felt strongly moved
to write to the Swiss advising them not to
come to the Frankfort Rifle Meeting : those
asses having behaved in such a compromising
way to the Italians. It would have been an
excellent lesson to them and well-deserved.
Perhaps you will write. However, you
have a political position and must keep up
appearances — it stands to reason one has

TO AUGUST ROECKEL. 175

sometimes to be prudent. The Devil take
you politicians !

However, au revoir. Make all the necessary
arrangements.

Heartily yours,

R.W.

LETTER XII.

To Mr. August Roeckel,

Editor of the Frankfort Reform,
Frankfort-on-the-Main.

My dear Old Friend,

Your book * is terrible !

It is all written with such modesty, such
restraint, such unwavering love of humanity,
and at the same time it excites one to the pitch
of madness.

You certainly are one of the most extraordinary
of men, and God knows what you may yet do.
With your faith you might remove mountains —
there can be no doubt of that.

It would be hard to quarrel x with you ; I have
not the least intention of doing so.

I simply devoured your book.

* The Revolution in Saxony, and my Imprisonment in Waldheim.
176

RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS. 177

I feel much as you did in prison. How am I
to escape? I need rest and concentration to
fulfil my mission, which no other man can do
for me. But — how to get rest ? When lo ! of
a sudden, a young man appears, as if from
heaven, destined for me by the stars.* He
knows me, and understands me as if by in-
spiration, as no one else has done. He thanks
Fate that has called him so young to the
throne, in order that he may befriend me, and
realise my ideal. This is his one aim and
object. There ! And now, on the other hand,
just conjure up before your fancy Bavaria ! —
Munich ! — and you will be able to imagine the
rest. What I long for above all is, rest — for I
can bear it no longer, and a general sense of
disgust overwhelms me !

But what am I to do ? I long to get away to
some beautiful corner of Italy, to live as a
stranger — a lazzarone — and to rest my shattered
* Reference to Louis II. of Bavaria.

178 RICHARD WAGNER'S LETTERS.

nerves. But how can I desert this young King,
who clings to me with his whole heart, and
leave him to his disgraceful surroundings ?
That is my position. What will become of me ?
What can I do? That is what I ask myself,
and no answer comes— no human being can tell
me — I am too tired !

As to you, I have no fears. You have your
vocation, and you will fulfil it. You have even
sufficient sense of humour to stick to the
Frankfort newspaper.

Accept my best thanks. You have once more
done excellently, and your book is worth fully
as much as your imprisonment.

Farewell; and keep your affection for me, as I
shall ever be heartily true and attached to you.

Your

R. W.

Munich, March 7th, 1865.

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Richard Wagner's letters to August Roeck

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