OUR PLATES.
Etching, ' The Sower,' by William Strang. Reproduction of Picture, ' Evening in the Gatinais,' by the late Frank O'Meara.
The latter is a decorative picture which was ex- hibited in the Sculpture Gallery at the Glasgow Exhibition, and has been reproduced by the kind permission of James Gardiner, Esq. In the October Number of the Scottish Art Review there appeared an obituary notice of the late Mr. O'Meara, in which the characteristics of his quite original method were described.
WAGNER AND LISZT IN THEIR CORRESPONDENCE.
By an Old Wagnerian.
No. I.— WAGNER.
THE Wagner-Liszt letters recently given to the world by the widow of the one and daughter of the other composer, and made accessible to English readers by the translation, in two volumes published by Messrs. Grevel of King Street, Covent Garden, have been differently spoken of in different quarters. The Wagnerites in Germany and else- whei'e look upon them as the most important docu- ment of musical history in existence, and compare them to the famous correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, with which they have at any rate this in common, that they have been left by Madame Wagner, the editor, without any kind of com- mentary, index, or notes, so much as to say that this is a book for studying, not for reading, and that those who wish to understand it must take the trouble to find out collateral dates and facts for themselves. Hostile critics of course do not agree in this view ; without denying the importance of the letters as historic documents, they say that they reveal a great deal more than was desii-able for the good name of at least one of the correspondents. Liszt, they admit, appears in a very amiable light, liberal to a fault, and used, or rather abused, by his friend and correspondent in the way that liberal and amiable people generally are in this selfish world of ours. They dilate greatly upon the fact that Wagner throughout the correspondence appears in an impecunious and generally helpless condition, that he appeals to his friend for money, and what is worth more than money, intercession with influential friends and theatrical managers, and princes of the empire down to the very police, whom Wagner on one occasion asks Liszt to put on the traces of a felonious waiter who had robbed him of his little stock of money at a Paris hotel.
With all due deference I would ask these virtuous censors to consider what they might have done themselves in similar circumstances ; to confess candidly if they by their own or others'" fault had some day been reduced from a lucrative appoint- ment to absolute starvation, with a cherished and patient wife, and that wifes family dependent upon them, and without any cliance of getting money by honest or dishonest means, whether they also would not have called for help and accepted that help from any friendly quarter that might liave tendered it. The case which I have ventured hypothetically to suggest was realised in its most literal and terrible sense by the condition of Wagners affairs towards the latter end of May 1849. At the beginning of that month the discontent of the Saxons with their king and his ministers had led to open revolt, and that revolt was crushed by the Prussian troops who were called to aid from across the frontier, and took Dresden at the point of the bayonet. Wagner was little of a politician, but the theatrical humdrum routine which he had been compelled to witness and to submit to as the King's Capellmeister was so disgusting to him, that change at any price seemed desirable, and so he allowed himself to be carried away by the revolutionary fever without thinking of consequences. How serious those consequences might have been is sufficiently proved by the fate of his friend and sub-conductor at the Dresden Theatre, Roeckel, who was kept in a Saxon prison for thirteen years, and then released, not by any act of grace, but merely because he had become an
