Now to me Schopenhauer was not the original great thinker that Wagner considered him. Some of his most prominent points I had found enunciated already by Burke, that eloquent and vigorous writer, in his “Enquiring into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful.” The personally well attested statement that “the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure,” was so well reasoned by Burke, that Wagner induced me to read the whole of that author’s work to him.
Wagner a pessimist! So he would have had every one believe then, and for some time later too. But my impression then and now is that, as with a good many people, pessimism is only pre-eminent when fortune fails to favour. This feeling is confirmed by an extract recently published from certain manuscripts found after Wagner’s death: “He who does not strive to find joy in life is unworthy to live.” Certainly this was not the utterance of Wagner in the dark days of his work. While on this subject I may recall one incident which has remained prominently with me because of the locality where it occurred. We were on the top of one of the heights overlooking the Zurich Lake, discussing the much debated Schopenhauer, when I observed that pessimism, in a well-balanced mind, could only lead to optimism, on the ground that, “what cannot be cured must be endured,” and jocularly cited from Brant’s “Narrenschiff,” written in the quaint language of the fifteenth century:--
Wer sorget ob die genss gaut blos, Und fegen will all goss und stross, Und eben machen berg und tal Der hat keyn freyd, raw überal.
He who shall fret that the geese have no dress, The sweeper will be of street, road and mess. He who would level both valley and hill Shall have of life’s gifts no joy, but the ill.
Wagner stopped, shouted with exultation, and then commenced probing my knowledge of one of our earliest German poets. He assumed the part, as it were, of a schoolmaster, and so when we arrived home, in a boyish manner, he, delighted, called aloud to Minna before the garden gate was opened, “Ach, Ferdinand knows all about my pet poets.”
Every morning after breakfast he would read to Minna her favourite newspaper, “Das Leipziger Tageblatt,” a paper renowned for its prosy character. Imagination and improvisation played her some woeful tricks. With a countenance blameless of any indication of the improviser, he would recite a story, embellishing the incidents until their colouring became so overcharged with the ludicrous, that Minna would exclaim, “Ah, Richard, you have again been inventing.”
