upon me for the crime I committed against my being and my inmost
conscience when, two years ago, I became unfaithful to my
rightful determination and consented to the performance of my
operas. Alas! how pure and consistent with myself was I when I
thought only of you and Weimar, ignored all other theatres, and
entirely relinquished the hope of any further success.

Well, that is over now. I have abandoned my purpose, my pride has
vanished, and I am reduced to humbly bending my neck under the
yoke of Jews and Philistines.

But the infamous part is that by betraying the noblest thing in
my possession I have not even secured the prize which was to be
the equivalent. I remain, after all, the beggar I was before.

Dearest Franz, none of my latter years has passed without
bringing me at least once to the verge of the resolution to put
an end to my life. Everything seems so waste, so lost! Dearest
friend, art with me, after all, is a pure stop-gap, nothing else,
a stop-gap in the literal sense of the word. I have to stop the
gap by its means in order to live at all. It is therefore with
genuine despair that I always resume art; if I am to do this, if
I am to dive into the waves of artistic fancy in order to find
contentment in a world of imagination, my fancy should at least
be buoyed up, my imagination supported. I cannot live like a dog;
I cannot sleep on straw and drink bad whisky. I must be coaxed in
one way or another if my mind is to accomplish the terribly
difficult task of creating a non-existing world. Well, when I
resumed the plan of the "Nibelungen" and its actual execution,
many things had to co-operate in order to produce in me the