My life and loves Vol. 2

by Frank Harris

  "His whole future depends on his work," he shouted. "He ought to be in Secunda next year and he hasn't a chance, not a chance!"

  "Oh, come," I said, "you know you told me once that when Heinrich learned anything, he never forgot it, whereas I forget as easily as I learn; you can't have it both ways."

  "That's what I tell my father," said Mary, and the storm gradually blew over.

  But as the time of the examination approached, similar scenes were of almost nightly occurrence; I've seen the professor working passionately with Heinrich at one and two o'clock in the morning, the whole family on pins and needles because of one boy's slowness of apprehension.

  The ordinary German is not by any means a genius, but as a rule he has had to learn a good deal and knows how to learn whatever he wishes; whereas the ordinary Englishman or American is almost inconceivably ignorant, and if he happens to have succeeded in life in spite of his limitations, he is all too apt to take pride in his ignorances. I know Englishmen and women who have spent twenty years in France and know nothing of French beyond a few ordinary phrases. It must be admitted that the Englishman is far worse than the American in this respect; the American is ashamed of ignorance.

  In mental things the German is, so to speak, a trained athlete in comparison with an Englishman, and as soon as he comes into competition with him, he is conscious of his superiority and naturally loves to prove and display it. Time and again towards the end of the nineteenth century, English manufacturers grieving over the loss of the South American markets have shown me letters in Spanish and Portuguese written by German "drummers" that they could not get equalled by any English agents: "We are beaten by their knowledge," was the true summing up and plaint. And in the first ten years of the twentieth century the German's pride in his unhoped-for quick success in commerce and industry intensified his efforts, and at the same time his contempt of his easily beaten rivals.

  In the spacious days of Elizabeth, Englishmen and Englishwomen too of the best class were eager to learn and prized learning perhaps above its value; the Queen herself knew four or five languages fairly well, better than any English sovereign since. One other fact that an Englishman should always keep before him: the population of Great Britain at the end of the sixteenth century was roughly five millions; at the end of the nineteenth it was some forty-five millions, or nine times as many; yet three-fourths of all the schools today in England for higher education were there in the days of Elizabeth.

  That fact and all it involves explains to me the efflorescence of genius in the earlier, greater age: the population has grown nine-fold, the educated class had not doubled its numbers, and certainly has not grown in appreciation or understanding of genius.

  I am the more inclined to preach from this text because it suggests the true meaning of the World War, which England has steadily refused to learn.

  When from 1900 to 1910 she saw herself overtaken by Germany, not only in the production of steel, but also of iron and coal, England ought to have learned what her contempt of learning and love of sport were costing her, and have put her house in order in the high sense of the word. For a hundred years now she has been sending some of her ablest sons to govern India. She ought to have learned from Machiavelli that every possession of the Romans not colonized by Latins was a source of weakness in time of war. England ought to withdraw from India and Egypt as soon as possible and concentrate all her forces on developing her own colonies, who will always trade with her for sentimental reasons and by compulsion of habit. The Canadian buys six times as much of English goods as the American, and the Australian spends twenty times more on English products than on German, in spite of the superior qualities of the German output. The worst of it is that the English guides and leaders do not even yet grasp the truth.

  But at the time the growth of Germany and its eager intellectual life only confirmed me in the belief that by nationalizing the land and socializing the chief industries such as railways, gas and water companies, which are too big for the individual to manage, one could not only lift the mass of the English people to a far higher level, but at the same time intensify their working power. It would surely be wise to double the wages of the workman when you could thereby increase the productivity of his labour. Moreover the nationalization of the railways, gas, water and mining companies would give five millions of men and women steady and secure employment and sufficient wages to ensure decent conditions of life; five millions of workmen more could be employed on the land in life-leases, and in this way Great Britain might be made self-supporting and her power and wealth enormously increased.

  I tell all this because I resolved to make myself a social reformer and began to practice extempore speaking for at least half an hour daily.

  From Goettingen after three semesters I went to Berlin; it was tune; I needed the stimulus of the theatre and galleries of art and the pulsing life of a great city. But there was something provincial in Berlin; I called it a Welt-dorf, a world-village; yet I learned a good deal there: I heard Bismarck speak several times and carried away deathless memories of him as an authentic great man. In fact, I came to see that if he had not been born a Junker in a privileged position and had not become a corps-student to boot, he might have been as great a social reformer as Carlyle himself. As it was, he made Germany almost a model state. He was accused in the Reichstag one day by a socialist of having learned a good deal from Lassalle; he stalked forth at once and annihilated his critic by declaring that he would think very little of anyone who had had the privilege of knowing that extraordinary man and had not learned from him. It was Bismarck, I believe, who was responsible for the first steps towards socializing German industries; Bismarck who established the land-banks to lend money on reasonable terms to the farmers; Bismarck too who dared first to nationalize some German railways and municipalize gas and water companies; and provide for the extension by the state of the canal system.

  Under his beneficent despotism, too, the municipalities of Germany became instruments of progress; slums disappeared from Berlin and the housing of the poor excited the admiration of even casual foreign visitors; his bureausbureaus, providing suitable employment, were copied timidly forty years later in London. It is not too much to say that he practically eradicated poverty in Germany.

  The great minister himself anticipated that his attempts to lift the lowest class to a decent level would hem industrial progress and make it more difficult for the captains of industry to amass riches, but in this he was completely mistaken. He had given help and hope to the very poor, and this stimulus to the most numerous class vivified the industry of the whole nation; the productivity of bureaus increased enormously: German workmen became the most efficient in the world, and in the decade before the great war, the chief industries of steel and iron, which twenty years before were not half so productive as those of Great Britain, became three and four fold more productive, and showing larger profits, made competition practically impossible. The vivifying impulse reached even to the shipping, and while it became necessary for the British government to help finance the Cunard line, the Hamburg-America became the chief steamship line of the world and made profits that turned English shippers green with envy: immigration into Germany reached a million a year, exceeding even that into the United States. And this astounding development of industry and wealth was not due to natural advantages, as in the United States, but simply to wise, humane government and to better schooling. Every officer on a German liner spoke at least French and English as well as German, whereas not one English or French officer in a hundred understood any language save his own.

  Looking over the unparalleled growth of the country and its prodigious productivity and wealth, it is hardly to be wondered at that the ruler ascribed the astonishing prosperity to his own wisdom and foresight. It really appeared that Germany in a single generation had sprung from the position of a second rate power to the headship of the modern world. And already in the early eighties, the future development
could be foreseen. I spent one month of my holidays in Dusseldorf and Essen and was struck on all hands by the trained and cultured intelligence of the directors and foremen of the chief industries. The bureaus saving appliances alone reminded me of the best industries in the United States; but here there was a far wider and yet a specialized intelligence. Someday soon the whole story will be told properly, but even now in 1924 it's clear that the rival nations, instead of following Germany and bettering Bismarck's example, are resolved on degrading, dismembering and punishing her. It makes one almost despair of humanity.

  After Goettingen and Berlin, I went to Munich, drawn by the theatre and Opera-House, by Ernst Possart, the greatest Shylock I ever saw and assuredly the best-graced, all-round actor, except the elder Coquelin, who ruled the stage and was perfection perfected. And the music at Munich was as good as the acting: Heinrich Vogl and his wife were both excellent interpreters and through them, as I have told, I came to know Richard Wagner. In my fourth volume of Contemporary Portraits I've done my best to picture him in his habit as he lived; but I left out half-consciously two or three features which it seemed to me hardly right to publish just when I had learned in 1922 that Cosima Wagner was still alive. Here I may be franker. In my "portrait" I left it half in doubt as to the person who was the Isolde, or inspiring soul, of that wonderful duo of love which is the second act of Tristan. Of course there is no doubt whatever that Mathilde von Wesendonck was Wagner's Isolde; he wrote it to her in so many words: "Throughout eternity I shall owe it to you that I was able to create Tristan."

  In her widowhood Mathilde retired to Traunblick near Traunsee in the Bavarian Alps, and I might have seen her there in the wonderful summer of 1880 which I spent in Salzburg; but hardly anyone knew her importance in Wagner's life till after her death in 1902, when she left instructions to publish the 150 letters he had written her and the famous journal in the form of letters to her, which he wrote in Venice immediately after then-separation.

  He found a great word for her. "Your caresses crown my life," he wrote. "They are the joy-roses of love that flower my crown of thorns;" and Mathilde deserved even this praise: she was, as he said, always kind and wise, and above even her lover in living always on the heights. He complained one day to her that Liszt, his best friend, did not fully understand him. "There could be no ideal friendship," he added, "between men." At once she recalled him to his better self: "After all, Liszt is the one man most nearly on your level. Don't allow yourself to underrate him. I know a great phrase he once used about you: 'I esteem men according to their treatment of Wagner.' What more could you want?" And her charming poetic word for their days of loving intimacy:

  "The heart-Sundays of my life." If ever a man was blest in his passions, it was Richard Wagner.

  And yet here, too, when at his best he shows the yellow streak. In 1865, six years after the parting with Mathilde, he allowed Madame von Bulow to write-it is true: "In the name of his Majesty, the King of Bavaria," to Mathilde, to ask her for a portfolio of articles and sketches which Wagner in the days of their intimacy had confided to her keeping. Naturally Mathilde wrote in reply directly to Wagner, giving him a list of everything in the portfolio, and adding finely: "I pray you to tell me what manuscripts you want and whether you wish me to send them?" In the cult of love women are nearly always nobler and finer than the best of men: Wagner's answer that the King wanted to publish the things did not excuse him for having allowed Cosima to crow over her great rival. But in publishing Wagner's letters to her and his Venice journal, Mathilde got even with Cosima; yet again Cosima was not to be outdone. She had left Von Bulow for Wagner, preferring, as someone said, "God to his Prophet"; but she, too, could reach the heights.

  Meeting Von Bulow years later, who said to her by way of reconciliation,

  "After all I forgive you," she replied finely; "it isn't a question of forgiveness, but one of understanding." And now, in face of the revelation of 1902 of Wagner's letters to Mathilde, she first wrote saying that "the Master desired these sheets to be destroyed" (der Meister wunschte beiliegende Blatter vernichtet); but when she found that they were sure to be published in spite of her opposition, she not only consented graciously to their publication in German, but added fourteen letters from Mathilde von Wesendonck, which she had found among Wagner's papers. The whole story, I think, is of curious human interest.

  Cosima was Wagner's equal and deserved all his praise of her as "intellectually superior even to Liszt"; but whoever studies Wagner's life will, I think, admit that it was Mathilde who wove the first joy-roses in his crown of thorns, and she it was who helped him to his supreme achievement. The Ring and Parsifal, he used to contend later, constituted his greatest message; and Cosima was the true partner of his soul who gave him happiness and golden days; but there can be no doubt that Mathilde was the Rachel of his prime and the inspiration of all his noblest, artistic masterpieces.

  Years later, he wrote the whole truth. "It is quite clear to me that I shall never again invent anything new. With Mathilde my life came to flower and left in me such a wealth of ideas that I have since had merely to return to the treasure-house and pick whatever I wish to develop… She is and remains my first and only love; with her I reached the zenith: those divine years hold all the sweetness of my life." She was the inspiring genius, not only of Tristan but of the Meistersinger, and it would not be difficult to prove that the finest moment in Parsifal was due to Wagner's intercourse with her. She came at the right time in his life. After all, he was well over fifty before Cosima joined him.

  Wagner's life rests on three persons: on Mathilde von Wesendonck, King Ludwig and on Cosima Liszt. In my "portrait" I said little of Cosima, but she was undoubtedly the chief person in his later life. His life with her in Tribschen from 1866 to 1872 was not only the happiest period of his existence but highly productive. The birth of the son, whom he boldly christened "Siegfried" (den ich kuhn 'Siegfried' nennen konnte) was to him a consecration. Instead of living with a woman like his wife, who continually urged him to compromise with all conventions because she didn't believe in him and was incapable of appraising his genius at its true worth, he had now a better head and completer understanding than even Liszt's- "Eine unerhort seltsam begabte Frau! Liszts wunderbares Ebenbild nur intellektuel uber ihm stehend" (a singularly gifted woman; Liszt over again though intellectually his superior)-to encourage and sustain him.

  In his delight, Wagner worked his hardest. For years he wrote from eight in the morning till five in the afternoon. In these happy fruitful years in Tribschen he completed the Meistersinger, perhaps his most characteristic work! He finished Siegfried also and composed nearly all the Gotterdammerung.

  Then, too, he wrote his best work, his Beethoven. In Tribschen he even began to publish the final edition of his works, and at length came the victory of 1870 to add a sort of consecration to his happiness. At long last the Germany he loved had come to honour and glory among men; now he too would live long and make the German stage worthy of the German people.

  He was really as affectionate as he was passionate, and his whole nature expanded in this atmosphere of well-being, encouragement and reverence.

  He took on the tone and manner of a great personage; he could not brook contradiction or criticism, not even from a Nietzsche, and this attitude brought with it blunders. If we mortals don't keep our eyes on the earth, we are apt to stumble.

  Talking one day about der Fliegende Hollander, he said he had heard the story from a sailor on his memorable voyage from Riga to London thirty-five years before. I could not help interrupting: "I thought you took the splendid redemption of the hero by love from Heine, Master?"

  "It was all told me by a sailor," he repeated. "Heine took the salvation of the hero by love from a Dutch theatre piece."

  But there is no such Dutch theatre piece. It was excusable in Wagner, you may say, to have been misled in this instance; he took the story from Heine, but he believed that Heine himself had borrowed it. But there is
no such explanation possible in regard to the legend of Tannhauser. Wagner maintained always that he had taken the story from a simple Volkslegent (aus dem Volksbuch und dem schlichten Tannhauserlied); but there is no such Volksbuch, no such legend. It's all from Heine. And when one day I talked with passionate admiration of Heine and placed him with Goethe far above Schiller, Wagner wouldn't have it. "Sie schwarmen-You are misled by admiration," he said. "Heine was only a simple lyric poet (ein Lyriker), but Schiller was a great dramatic genius."

  He owed to Heine's genius the finest things in all the German legends which he set to music, and I think in the future his denial of Heine, though little known now, will be about the greatest blot on Wagner's character, which in many respects was noble. It shows him so much smaller, less sincere even than Beethoven, and with none of that magic of loving-comprehension which our Shakespeare lavished even on his rival Chapman. That Wagner could pretend elaborately in such a case always seems to me to relegate him to a place below the very highest. Why will the men of genius who illumine our life keep such spots to mar their radiance?

  CHAPTER V

  Athens and the English language

  I SHALL NEVER be able to describe natural beauty, though I know scenes so lovely that the mere memory of them brings tears to my eyes; and in the same way there are two cities, Athens and Rome, which I can never attempt to describe: they must be seen and studied to be realized. The impression of Athens is as simple as that of Rome is complex. The beauty of the human body is the first impression: the majesty of the man's figure and the sensuous appeal of the woman's are what Athens gives immediately; while Rome is the epitome of a dozen different civilizations and makes a dozen dissimilar appeals.

  The second night I was in Athens there was nearly a full moon; all over the sky were small white cloudlets on the intense blue, like silver shields reflecting the radiance. I had nothing to do so I walked across the square where the barracks of a palace stands and went up the Acropolis through the Proplyaea. As I stood before the Parthenon its sheer beauty sang itself to me like exquisite verse; I spent the night there going to and fro from the Caryatides of the Erechtheum to the frieze of the Temple, to the Wingless Victory, and back again. As dawn came and the first shafts of light struck the Parthenon I stood with clasped hands, my soul one quiver of admiration and reverence for the spirit of beauty I saw incorporated there.