My Life — Volume 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 486 pages of information about My Life — Volume 2.

My Life — Volume 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 486 pages of information about My Life — Volume 2.
to Anacreon, agreed very well with the ecstasy of love.  As my friends studied me and my condition more closely, they felt they had reason to be very anxious about my foolish and obstinate extravagances.  I looked terribly pale and thin; I hardly slept at all, and in everything I did I betrayed a strange excitement.  Although eventually sleep almost entirely forsook me, I still pretended that I had never been so well or so cheerful in my life, and I continued on the coldest winter mornings to take my cold baths, and plagued my wife to death by making her show me my way out with a lantern for the prescribed early morning walk.

I was in this state when the printed copies of Oper und Drama reached me, and I devoured rather than read them with an eccentric joy.  I think that the delightful consciousness of now being able to say to myself, and prove to the satisfaction of everybody, and even of Minna, that I had at last completely freed myself from my hateful career as conductor and opera composer, brought about this immoderate excitement.  Nobody had a right to make the demands upon me which two years ago had made me so miserable.  The income which the Ritters had assured me for life, and the object of which was to give me an absolutely free hand, also contributed to my present state of mind, and made me feel confidence in everything I undertook.  Although my plans for the present seemed to exclude all possibility of being realised, thanks to the indifference of an inartistic public, still I could not help inwardly cherishing the idea that I should not be for ever addressing only the paper on which I wrote.  I anticipated that before long a great reaction would set in with regard to the public and everything connected with our social life, and I believed that in my boldly planned work there lay just the right material to supply the changed conditions and real needs of the new public whose relation to art would be completely altered with what was required.  As these bold expectations had arisen in my mind in consequence of my observations of the state of society in general, I naturally could not say much about them to my friends.  I had not mistaken the significance of the general collapse of the political movements, but felt that their real weakness lay in the inadequate though sincere expression of their cause, and that the social movement, so far from losing ground by its political defeat, had, on the contrary, gained in energy and expansion.  I based my opinion upon the experience I had had during my last visit to Paris, when I had attended, among other things, a political meeting of the so-called social democratic party.  Their general behaviour made a great impression upon me; the meeting took place in a temporary hall called Salle de la Fraternite in the Faubourg St. Denis; six thousand men were present, and their conduct, far from being noisy and tumultuous, filled me with a sense of the concentrated energy and hope of this new party.  The speeches of the

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
My Life — Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.