to anybody who likes to take them up. That Wagner had to quit
Munich was a sad thing in his life--a very sorrow's crown of sorrow;
and it was a bad thing for German music. It put back the clock many
years. But, sad though it was for Wagner, in the long run it proved
good for him. He would have composed little more in such a city--a
city so misgoverned and misguided as Munich: his days would have been
filled with bitterness, his nerves would have been quickly shattered
by intrigues. He was now amply provided for; a villa--the celebrated
"Triebschen"--was taken for him on the shores of Lucerne, and here he
settled and remained for some years. Here he finished the _Ring_ and
planned Bayreuth.

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