Another thing which contributed to his unpopularity was his relations with his own and another man’s wife.  Hans von Buelow, his pupil, had married Liszt’s daughter Cosima:  that lady became infatuated with Wagner, and Wagner with her, and they virtually eloped together.  Minna’s cause was eagerly taken up by musicians, operatic people generally, and journalists, though none of them cared a rap about Minna.  The most scandalous stories were circulated, and Wagner came to be thought not only a charlatan cadger living on the State funds, but one who used those funds to satisfy his carnal and other appetites.  His silk dressing-gowns, his gorgeous apartments, his sybarite feastings, were the common talk of the newspapers:  while he was slaving, as the saying goes, twenty-six hours out of twenty-four, the common fancy was taught to picture him as taking his ease in unheard-of luxury.

These matters have nearly all been indirectly dealt with already, and as we come to review the situation, this is what we find.  Minna was an impossible wife for such a man:  she never could understand why he could not have remained quietly at his post in Dresden, indifferent to good or bad opera representations, and unambitious concerning the proper artistic production of his own works.  When calamity followed calamity, to her all the trouble seemed due to Richard’s pig-headedness; and she would at once have grown cheerful and good-natured had he burned his finished and unfinished scores and written “something popular.”  She was, I say, impossible.  Cosima, for her part, found Buelow impossible.  A splendid character in many ways, he was as wayward and quarrelsome a man as has lived.  So Richard and Minna drifted apart, and Buelow and Cosima drifted apart, and in the end Richard and Cosima drifted together.  The censures that still are passed at times on their conduct are hypocritical and grotesque.  The people who pass them are usually people who think that the Ten Commandments were made only to be observed by the poorer classes, or by other people, not themselves, and are willing enough to excuse offences against the marriage laws when they are committed by folks of exalted social position.  The whole truth about the Richard-Cosima affair will evidently never be known; no one has told; three of the four concerned have passed away; and those writers to-day who pretend to know most are precisely those whom I suspect of knowing least.

The charge of living in luxurious surroundings is well enough founded—­Wagner undoubtedly did love them:  he said so himself.  What did the luxury amount to?  A few carpets, chairs, a silk dressing-gown, and sufficient to eat and drink!  He certainly worked hard enough for them and had a right to them.  It is odd to think that most of those who brought these charges against him themselves grasped at as much luxury as they could get:  had King Ludwig spent his money on them there would have been no objections raised, and doubtless they would have given us Rings and Mastersingers.  This must be the judgment of every sane person.