encumbrance to the authorities in the altered cir-
cumstances of the time. There is not the slightest
doubt that the same fate would have been in store
for Wagner had he been caught, for the king was
naturally incensed at the eccentricities of his way-
ward Capellmeister ; and although he was unable to
deprive him of his liberty, kept him in dreary
exile, and cut oft from all personal connection with
his art for exactly the same term that poor Roeckel
languished in prison. It was not till 1861 that the
King of Saxony yielded to the warm pleadings of
the Grand Duke of Baden and other German princes,
and allowed the composer, with whose fame at that
time Germany was ringing, to re-enter his father-
land, and to witness amongst other things a per-
formance of his Lohengrin.
Fortunately Wagner had withdrawn himself from
the tender mercies of his sovereign by timely flight
to Weimar, where he stayed with Liszt for a few
days, and saw a reliearsal of his Tannh'duser under
the superintendence of his incomparable friend, and
whence he was smuggled across the Swiss frontier
by the aid of a passport lent to him at considerable
risk by a distinguished member of the Weimar
circle.
The twelve years, from 1849 to 1861, which he
spent in banishment, and over which this corre-
spondence extends, were filled up with ceaseless
suffering, arduous struggle with an adverse fate,
brightened only by a very few glimpses of good
luck, but fruitful of the most important results
nevertheless. None of the critics of the correspond-
ence has so far defined the true character of the
book, which is that of a tragedy as deeply pathetic
as provocative of the Aristotelian.' fear and pity ' as
any penned by ^Eschylus. The dramatis persona
were indeed not unlike those of one of the greatest
trilogies of Greek myth. We see on one side the
fettered Titan, the Prometheus vinctus, chained to
the rock of physical want and misery, and yet
boldly defying the existing powers whose dreary
secret he had unveiled only too successfully. I
doubt whether a more melancholy line could be
culled from all the tragic poets of Greece, or
from Shelley, tlian the following simple appeal :
' Consider everything, dear Liszt, and, before all,
manage to send me soon — some money. I want
firewood, and a warm overcoat, because my wife has
not brought my old one on account of its shabbi-
ness. Consider ! ' — or that plaintive question found
in the same letter : ' How and whence shall I sret
o
enough to live ? Is my finished work, Lohengrin,
worth nothing . Is the opera which I am longing
to complete worth nothing ? Let us indeed, in
AVagner's words, consider for a moment what the
situation really was, what were its causes, what its as-
pects. By doing so we shall widen the import of the
aforesaid tragedy ; we shall raise it from the personal
to the general level ; we shall see that its hero is a.
type, that his suffei'ings correspond to an immutable
law, and exemplify an eternal truth. That law is
the passive resistance which successful and well-to-do
mediocrity opposes to genius from an instinct of
self-preservation ; that truth, the same which is laid
down in the well-worn Latin proverb. Per aspera ad
astra. ' Consider ' Lohengrin two years after its com-
position worth nothing, and vainly waiting for a
performance which probably would never have taken
place but for Liszt's initiative. ' Consider,' on the
other hand, the Pinafore, or some wretched French
operetta without the wit of the Pinafore, worth
untold thousands to its autlior, who had perhaps
bestowed upon the whole score a quarter of the time
and thought that Wagner gave to twenty bars of
his Lohengrin. Does not such a comparison teach
to aspiring composers the wholesome maxim to
leave high art alone, and to enjoy comfortably such
gifts as the gods in their wisdom may have granted.^
The fact that at this moment Lohengrin is regarded
to be one of the wonders of the musical world, and
would perhaps be its greatest wonder, were not
Tristan und Isolde in existence, and the certainty
that these works will live long after the Pinafore
and its congeners have gone the way of all pretty
and fashionable things, count for very little.
Wagner himself in these letters has a long and
eloquent tirade against posthumous fame, of which
it is my firm opinion he did not believe a single
word, and Pope long ago assessed the comparative
merits of solid pudding and empty praise at their
true value.
It is a mistake to think that that solid pudding
would have been within the reach of Wagner ; that
he might have written Pina/ore*, or at least Rienzis,
by the dozen, pocketed the money, and lived happy
ever after without troubling his friends. The gift
of popularity is as distinct a gift as any other,
and composers who think that they can catch the
ear of the public merely by descending to the level
of that public are entirely out in their reckoning, as
Mr. Corder discovered to his cost when he thought
that any work could succeed on the lines of poor
stupid old Balfe, and in an evil hour penned Nordisa.
Neither would it have been possible for Wagner to
continue in the well-trodden paths of Rienzi ; the
rigid fetters with which he plays in that remarkable
juvenile opera had become more irksome to him than
the material chains with which his friend Roeckel
was loaded. He had outgrown these ligaments, he
could not have resumed them if he had tried, and he
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