Sick in heart, he soon became sick in body; seriously ill indeed. On his recovery, feeling naught congenial to him in Paris, he left again for Zurich, via Bordeaux and Geneva. At Bordeaux an episode occurred similar to one which happened later at Zurich, about which the press of the day made a good deal of unnecessary commotion and ungenerous comment. I mention the incident to show the man as he was. The Opposition have not spared his failings, and over the Zurich incident were hypercritically censorious. The Bordeaux story I am alluding to, is, that the wife of a friend, Mrs. H----, having followed Wagner to the south, called on him at his hotel, and throwing herself at his feet, passionately told of her affection. Wagner’s action in the matter was to telegraph to the husband to come and take his wife home. On telling me the story, Wagner jocosely remarked that poor Beethoven, so full of love, never had his affection returned, and lived and died, so it is said, a hermit.
Another adventure of this description took place at Berlin, which to my mind is a verification of the homeopathic doctrine, _similia similibus curantur_, for I often taunted him with possessing, though in homeopathic doses, just those very failings he denounced in others, viz. amorousness, Hebraic shrewdness, and the Gallic love of enjoyment. When he was in a jocular mood he would laugh heartily at my endeavour to prove the truth of my opinions by the citation of instances, and occasionally he would admit the impeachment, whereas, at other times, he would become irritated, and put an end to any such conversation by charging me with having lost all my German feeling under the pernicious influence of a London fog.
Back in Zurich, he could not force himself to compose. He could not, and never did, take kindly to his compulsory exile, even appealing himself to the authorities more than ten years later for permission to re-enter his fatherland. And yet I have no hesitation in asserting that the world should regard it as a boon for art that he was thus driven into exile. Away from the theatre and the busy activity connected with his office of conductor, he had time to reflect over the many schemes for the elevation of art that constantly held communion with his inner self. Freed from the contact of that vortex of petty agitation which constitutes the active life of the stage, and of which every individual, no matter how inferior his grade, thinks himself the chief attraction, he gained that repose which enabled him to see art matters in their just proportion. His state, he described to me, as that spoken of by both Aristotle and Plato: “One of the highest happinesses attained through the pleasures of the intellect by the contemplative life.” Indeed, it can be maintained, that all the great works of his after-life were either completed or sketched during those years of exile.