ted, I think,
the atmosphere and colour of the _Ring_ and its backgrounds. Wagner
was as great a master as has lived of pictorial music, and the hills
and ravines, the storms amongst the pines, were things he must have
craved to translate into terms of his own art. After all, he found
time also for a good deal of social intercourse, though the enormous
quantity of work he turned out makes this difficult to believe. But
Liszt visited him; Praeger undoubtedly did; Buelow, as said, was with
him for some time; the Wesendoncks, his greatest pecuniary benefactors
after a while, were there; Wille and his wife were there; Alexander
Ritter, son of Frau Ritter, who made Wagner a regular allowance from
1851 to 1856, became his firm friend, and afterwards married one of
his nieces; there were Baumgaertner and Sulzer--in fact, a bare list of
names would fill a few pages. We must not take Wagner's plaints in his
letters too seriously; he was an overworked, nervous man of moods;
like Mr. Micawber, he seems to have come home of an evening weeping
and declaring himself a ruined man, and in a few hours gone to bed
calculating the cost of throwing out bow windows to his house.
Throughout his life his resilience of spirit was one of his most
amazing characteristics: I have no doubt that in the depth of despair
he would write to Liszt swearing that he only wanted solitude; and in
an hour's time he would think it might be pleasant to spend an hour
with the Wesendoncks--and go. In the same way he longed earnestly for
death while spending all his friends' money on baths and cures and
doctors, and seeing to it that Minna provided the best of everything
for his table. The pile of work remains to show his life was one of
incredible industry. Between the end of 1848 and the end of 1854 he
wrote at least a dozen long pamphlets, and as many more that are not
so long; he wrote the words of the _Ring_ and composed and scored the
_Rhinegold_, and began the music of the _Valkyrie_. Further, he
revised the overture to Gluck's _Iphigenia in Aulis_, and
reconstructed his own _Faust_ overture. How on earth he managed his
interminable correspondence is more than I can guess. When we bear in
mind the calls upon his time by his superintendence of opera and
concerts, we cannot wonder that a man who did so much, and was born a
weakling, was rarely quite well, and incessantly complains of his
nerves. Yet these nerves, he wrote, gave him wonderful hours of
insight