Dear Mother! Here am I alone again and happiness has flown away like a dream! Hope remains to me, but I am hardly young enough now to live on hope! God knows if I can bear it! I can be composed and resigned, but for whose sake? For the sake of my pride. Yet this pride is all I have, my last refuge in a loveless life.
I need not pose before you, though I can say to you openly, I feel very unhappy! Thoughts, wishes, hopes, ah, what are you all compared to reality! I have wrenched myself free of the old tormenting life, but the new life still hovers formless before me. So I am neither dead nor living, the martyr of memory, reluctant to depend on a hope whose fulfilment I cannot and may not actively further, a victim of the torments of imagination, at the mercy of events which I scarcely dare look upon, which I am utterly powerless myself to direct. Only one thing could restore me fully to life if I could myself act and actively sacrifice myself. Now I can do nothing but suffer, gaze into the blue heavens and see misfortune after misfortune pass over me without daring to raise a finger.
Memory comes to me too, memory, that freight of a life without content! Oh, with what anguish I remember! I can only still love my wife just because I can only remember her. I must, then, remember her continually, and every sense of past suffering vanishes when I think of her, only to give place to the greater anguish pity awakes in me. I can only lament for her now, no longer for myself, for every ground of complaint on my side is blotted out by our parting. Poor woman! She was so rich, so endowed, whom could she not have made completely happy! Alas that she lacked just one thing, the one thing without which all love is illusion, all the cares of love a martyrdom, all union torment: the understanding of the one we believe we love, that understanding which alone gives joy in the loved one, which makes us bear all sorrow joyfully. I had to part from thee, that I might be able to love thee again; I had to do it though it destroyed both of us! Now I can weep for thee. So I can regret nothing, for I know that I even in the enjoyment of the greatest new happiness have only become richer in love, for now I can love thee too till my life's end!
How do I live now? Where do I live now? Do I live at all? Yes, you dear women came to me and so I could live! You accepted from the man what the artist gave you, what the man confided in you. Ah, how safe I felt in your love, how calmed, how glad to be one with you. In a year we shall meet again; in a year, too, I hope to see Jessie once more. In a year! God in Heaven! Have we not all experience enough already to know what a year means?
God knows where we are to turn now. Every place is the same to the homeless, for every place is equally bad, equally valueless. I am grieved for Karl. I am dragging him about with me and I am afraid he will not be happy with me much longer. Well, we have experienced many adventures and many disillusionments about places, and we think of going to a larger town, perhaps to Thun, near Berne. In any case it is cheaper to live in a real town than in the small places which are run only for visitors. Moreover, I must now be on my guard. If war breaks out I shall not be safe in Switzerland for a moment, and though I do not rate life immoderately high, I will not make a present of myself to some Austrian corporal. If the worst comes to the worst, I think I may have to flee to London.
Five days ago Karl received a letter from Bordeaux in which Jessie told him, very much in brief, that she meant to break with the immediate past and would throw in the fire unread any letters in my handwriting. He was to burn these lines of hers at once, and just tell me shortly their main contents. In answer to these very summary proceedings against me I might have expressed myself to her with similar brevity, somewhat as follows: That this showed me, anyhow, that I was not capable of inspiring in Jessie love as I understand it, but that I was nevertheless grieved to find that I could not even win the least respect from this woman for me. Herewith, however, I have to place in your hands the testament of a love of which I shall never be ashamed, and which, though now corporeally dead, may perhaps be a source of glad remembrance and emotion to me till my life's end. Therefore understand me aright, dear lady, if, with something less of stoical brevity, I tell you of the antecedents of the catastrophe which has, with such childish brevity, been announced to me.
In any case you understood me when you were staying on Lake Geneva, and I explained to you the feelings that decided me to go instantly to Bordeaux after receiving that letter. Even then I thought I could see by the turn which things took that Jessie had undertaken too much for her strength and was not equal to her project. Jessie could only have carried out her decision as a rebel, not by treaty and agreement with those who would never treat with her. So the news that Jessie could not stand up against the pressure of circumstances, that she might suddenly think it better to make peace and let others dispose of herself and her decisions, evoked in me almost more than a doubt of Jessie's strength and faithfulness in the consciousness of her love. Our relationship had suddenly become something quite different. Before, I was conscious of the power to defend against all the world Jessie's decision when once carried into effect, and even of my capacity to reconcile those hearts most bitterly injured by it, but I knew I was quite without skill in the course of these proceedings to win a mistress for whom I ought not to have to sue to anyone, and whom I ought only to have to defend as a conquest already effected. I was then forced to see that all I could do was to defend my personal honour, of course with the utmost sincerity, against the rough assaults made upon it on this occasion, and openly to avow my love and the inexpressibly high value I attached to its fulfilment, but that all the same I could only leave Jessie to rely on her own strength, since she was in bonds from which she and she alone could free herself.
After this last experience I had almost sufficient reason to despair of her strength to do this; nevertheless, I did what it lay in me to do, and I assure you I acted with utter indifference to the danger of receiving a bullet through the brain from the injured husband. You will recollect now our conversation at Villeneuve, when I entirely agreed with your view that for the present there was little or nothing to be done for Jessie from without, that only she herself could help herself. She alone could render vain the plots which would quite naturally be directed by those about her against her feeling for me, by unshakable persistence and strength. Well, now she has abandoned and betrayed the only power which could have helped her, the power of love. She is lost to herself, for she is weak! The woman to whom we sought to bring deliverance has proved herself a child. Forgive me, but I can only find her pitiable.
I do not know what lies they told her about me, or whether she herself may suddenly have become so stupid, pardon me the word! as to put a wrong construction on certain passages in my letter to Madame Tailor. I eventually wrote to this lady that, great as was my love for Jessie, immeasurably valuable as its fulfilment must seem in my life, I could yet, in the pride of my soul, renounce the hope of it altogether were I to discover that Jessie's love for me had not the irresistible force which could alone influence her mother in her favour; for I desired not to have to woo her, but to receive as an unhoped-for, highest bliss, the gift of herself from herself. Could Jessie's understanding of love have become so purblind all at once as grossly to misunderstand this expression of feeling on my part? It was just that that was the inexpressible charm of Jessie's love: she understood me in everything so quickly, so clearly, so surely, could not discover the cloud of the least little inveterate, narrow-minded prejudice in her, such as appeared, or, if it did appear, the lightest breath of mine dispersed it forthwith. Or have they, and this is the supposition which gives me strength to act, have they gone to my poor wife to discover whether I am separated from her by parsons and jurists under all the penalties of the law? They may perhaps have got from her the for them welcome disclosure that I had concealed from her that I was wooing another, richer woman, and was therefore putting her off? With this evidence in hand they may suddenly have succeeded in persuading Jessie that my intentions towards her were not true and honourable?
So everything lies in ruins about me! I could almost shudder at any new touch of emotion, for it seems to me as though there were a curse upon it, and that whatever I approach in my need for love must needs show itself to me, shivered to fragments, its hollowness and inadequacy revealed. There is only one thing to be done now. Distasteful as is the occasion, I could almost bid it welcome as an opportunity for showing that I can act, for a deep sense of duty drives me to do so. From Jessie's laconic style I conjecture that something quite apart from your letters or mine must have occurred and, as I mentioned before, my presumption almost amounts to certainty that Jessie's prudent mother, who found no support of her views in you, has been in correspondence with my wife. If this is so, if she has turned to my wife for assistance in rescuing her daughter, she can only have done so, since keeping up appearances is what chiefly interests her, by misrepresenting my relationship to Jessie. It follows, according to my very natural suspicions, that she will have represented the case as though I had more or less seduced her daughter, for it would of course seem to her a scandal that it was Jessie who, of her own free impulse, offered me deliverance. She will have pressed my wife to tell her whether we have an actual legal separation, whereupon my wife will naturally have answered that I told her with sorrow and pain that I would never come back to her; that we must henceforth live apart; that I implored her to regard my decision as necessary and final and to put off inquiries after me, since, in order to avoid useless anguish, I wished for a time to lie concealed from her, or rather from well-meaning but uncomprehending friends. My wife will also have said that I left it expressly to her alone as to whether she might think it advantageous to herself under the circumstances to secure a judicial separation from me, a thing that was to me personally distasteful and horrible. Out of self-respect, and perhaps, too, to justify me against the accusation of having plotted beforehand to get possession of Jessie, my wife may very probably have mentioned a second letter also, which I wrote from Geneva early in May.
In Montmorency, just at the time indeed that Jessie candidly revealed her feelings to me, I learned that certain Zurich friends who knew my affairs were seeking me out in Paris. It was, I may almost say, physically impossible to engage in lengthy discussion of the reasons for my latest step with any friend, even the most well-meaning. I left Montmorency and Paris suddenly, without farewell to any of my friends. I went to Geneva where I heard from a Parisian friend, whose letters had followed me addressed on chance to half a dozen towns poste restante, that my poor wife had herself come to Paris to seek me out and offer explanations. I thought it probable that my wife had taken this step at the urgency of my Zurich friends and felt fairly sure, too, that she was entirely in error if she supposed that by attempting to explain the contents of her last letter she could heal dissensions infinitely older and more deeply rooted. Nevertheless the simple discovery that she had sought me out and wished to reconcile me necessarily made a very great and touching impression on me. Though, as I say, I recognised she was mistaken about us two, this very mistake moved me, for it was the unequivocal expression of a love stronger than her errors about a nature which she failed to understand. For my wife is no weakling and I should have supposed rather that she would turn her back on me proudly and coldly after receiving my parting letter. Indeed I was actually afraid that this pride of hers would make her refuse to receive support from me, a thing which, as I wrote to her, would have made me inexpressibly unhappy. In such circumstances the news affected me very powerfully, and little things that were told me of her filled me with the deepest, most painful sympathy for the woman, who was in any case unhappy. It was impossible for me just then to strike a worst and final blow at her tormented sensibilities.
I wrote, therefore, to my wife and told her of my decision, actually just formed at that time, to travel in Greece and the East. I knew what a good effect this news must have upon her. It set her right in a way, particularly in the eyes of my Zurich friends, who could now believe that I wanted to get free, not so much of my wife, as of present conditions as a whole. Whereas I insisted expressly on the contents of my former letter and once more set forth our separation as a necessity, I did not omit to show the most sympathetic care for her. "Who knows," I concluded, "if God gives us life, perhaps we may some day see each other again." Did I do wrong, as man and physician, to speak to the poor thing so?
I had but just previously written a solemn, earnest, most momentous letter to Jessie, explaining the whole situation to her without softening anything down and insisting most solemnly upon the difficulties attending the decision she had recently imparted to me and the consequent need of the deepest and strongest conviction. I was still not perfectly certain of her constancy, and moreover must have thought it a most ill-timed piece of cruelty to deal my wife a final, hope-destroying blow just then, just at a moment when I felt irresistibly urged to comfort her somehow or other. I for my part should have thought it unworthy, and indeed impossible, to propose a divorce from my wife beforehand, since hitherto I lacked any moral ground for one. But that I was resolved, even to the point of cruelty to my wife, will prove to you how overpoweringly strong was my love for Jessie; for if I weigh what Jessie's husband was to her against what my wife must be to me after the unheard-of sufferings of our life together, the sacrifice demanded of Jessie fades to absolute nothingness compared with mine. Moreover, she never betrayed to me the least trace of love for her husband.
If knowledge of the contents of this last letter to my wife has enraged Madame Tailor, I can well understand and explain her anger according to the idea I have formed of her character, for I know that she has never understood me at all. But if Jessie, too, has been brought to change her mind by the contents and the form of this letter, I can only explain it by believing that she wanted to be brought round, for she must have understood me here, she must have recognised in it the man she loved, or else she never loved me and never understood me. Well, this is only said in passing! Enough! My ideas of my relationship to my wife have entirely changed since I came to know the effect of my parting letter upon her, and, indeed, have never regarded a separation from her, even had it come about, as she so often threatened, through some decisive step on her side, as anything other than a counsel of despair which could only be carried out at the expense of great suffering to her. I am consequently beside myself with indignation now at the thought that her grief should have been cruelly intruded upon and exploited by a mother whose only care in this matter has been for a heartless conventionality, and I see that at the moment my sole duty is to find out if my fears are well grounded, and, if so, to give my wife a true account of the circumstances, less for the sake of justifying myself in her eyes than to comfort her and pacify her deeply injured sense of honour. I wish to clear this matter up, but I do not wish to approach my wife in person, so I have asked Karl to go to Zurich and have a talk with my friend Baumgartner and discover through him what has happened recently and whether I have been slandered to my wife.
Remain true to me, and if you cannot believe implicitly, then question me. I am ready to stand any inquisition, for I am not ashamed to answer even for my mistakes. If only I can work again soon! I shall love to do it, for I know my works give you joy. If only my imagination will come to my aid, for once more reality for me has faded to fantasy! I shall not do Wieland. The faults of this poem are too clear to be disguised from me now by my outworn personal emotions. Wieland is dead; he will never grow wings! I am thinking of settling down next to a paper on Genius, the communal and solitary. Then, when I am strong again, I shall begin on the Achilleus.
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 177