WAGNER AS I KNEW HIM
Transcriber’s note: The etext attempts to replicate the printed book asclosely as possible. Obvious errors in spelling and punctuation havebeen corrected. Only a few of the spellings of names, places and Germanor French words used by the author have been corrected by the etexttranscriber. A list of corrections follows the etext. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the text body. |
WAGNER
A S I K N E W H I M
BY
FERDINAND PRAEGER
NEW YORK
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
15 EAST SIXTEENTH STREET
1892
Copyright, 1892,
By CHARLES J. MILLS.
TO
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
THE EARL OF DYSART,
President of the London Branch of the United
Richard Wagner Society.
My Lord:—
If an intimacy, an uninterrupted friendship, of close upon half acentury during which early associations, ambitions, failures, successes,and their results were frankly discussed, entitles one to speak withauthority on Richard Wagner, the man, the artist, his mental workings,and the doctrine he strove to preach, then am I fully entitled so tospeak of my late friend.
To vindicate Wagner in all things is not my intention. He was butmortal, and no ordinary mortal, and had his failings, which will befearlessly dealt with. My sole purpose is to set Richard Wagner beforethe world as I knew him; to help to an honest understanding of the manand his motives as he so often laid them bare to me; and Iunhesitatingly affirm that, when seen in his true character, many ahostile, plausible, and unsparing criticism, begotten of inadequateknowledge or malice, will shrivel and crumble away when exposed to thesunlight of truth.
The daring originality of Wagner’s work could not help provoking violentopposition. Revolution in art as in aught else has ever been wedded tostorm and tumult.
Of all things, Wagner was a thinker. The plot, construction, and logicaldevelopment of his dramas, the employment of those wondrouscharacter-descriptive tone-themes, their marvellous combination, his tenvolumes of serious matter, especially “The Work and Mission of my Life,”emphatically testify to his deliberate studied thinking, and friend andfoe alike readily acknowledge the originality of his thought.
Here then entered the art world, in the person of Richard Wagner, aquite natural subject for discussion. Here was a thinker, an originalthinker, and Carlyle says that “the great event, parent of all others,in every epoch of the world, is the arrival of a thinker, an originalthinker.” No matter for marvel, then, that the air thickened withcriticism as soon as the Thinker proclaimed himself.
The persistency and vigour with which Wagner pursued the end,—an end towhich, primarily, he was unconsciously impelled by instinctivegenius,—the emphatic enforcement of the Gospel it was the sole purposeof his thinking manhood to inculcate, led him to reject worldlyadvancement, to endure painful privation, to utter fierce denunciationagainst pseudo-prophets, and to be the victim of malignant insult andscornful vitupe