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Rh 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 Fortunately Wagner had withdrawn himself from the tender mercies of his sovereign by timely flight to Weimar, where he stayed with Liszt for a few days, and saw a reliearsal of his Tannh'duser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