Wagner could not play any instrument, not even a piano, and so he tried for a position in the chorus of a cheap theatre; but his voice was not found good enough for even that.  His long sea voyage had given him an idea for an opera, “The Flying Dutchman.”  He was driven to sell his libretto for a hundred dollars to another composer.

It would not do to follow Wagner’s artistic progress in this place; that is an epic in itself.  Finally, however, he managed to get his “Rienzi” written and accepted in Dresden.  He scraped up money enough to go back to his Fatherland, and to take his wife to the baths at Teplitz, her health having broken under the strain of poverty.  It is at this period that he closed an autobiographic sketch, with these words:  “In Paris I had no prospects for years to come, so in the spring of 1842 I left there.  For the first time, with tears in my eyes, I saw the Rhine; poor artist that I was, I swore eternal allegiance to my German Fatherland.”

But his German Fatherland seems to have sworn everything except allegiance at him.  From this moment he emerged into fame, or rather into notoriety; he thrust his head through the curtain of obscurity, as if he were a negro at a country fair, and with remarkable enthusiasm the whole critical fraternity proceeded to hurl every conceivable missile at him.  It was well for him that his skull was hard.

“Rienzi” made an immediate success.  But he was in his thirtieth year before even this unwelcome success was achieved.  It is typical of the indomitable greatness of the man that even thus late in life, and after all his trials, he could put away from him success of such a sort, and turn back into the wilderness of exile and ignominy for years, until he could find the milk and honey land of art, which only his own magnificent fanaticism and the unsurpassed friendship of one man, Liszt, inspired him with the hope of reaching.

To the woman, Minna Planer, who had cooked his meals, washed his clothes, and darned his socks, this refusal of prosperity was a final blow of disenchantment.  She had understood him little enough before, but now she lost track of him altogether.  Her feelings were those of Psyche, when she found that her lover was a god with wings and a mania for flight.  So far as concerned the further marriage of their minds, he now disappeared for her into the blue empyrean; when she sought to embrace his soul, she clasped thin air.

As for Wagner’s heroism for his art, has there ever been anything like it?  Some of his operas he did not see performed for years and years.  He saw hardly the hope of winning his crusade this side the grave of martyrdom.  That he believed in presentiments will be understood in his powerful feeling throughout the composition of “Tannhauser,” that sudden death would prevent his finishing it.  The world knows the value of these presentiments.  Mendelssohn, too, in his letters tells of receiving on one occasion a letter which he feared to open, so