It is certain--and no one knew it better than himself--that Wagner
might easily have been successful from the first if he had liked. He
might have been wealthy, popular, petted by the great, have lived in
the luxury that he loved, at peace with all the world, if he had only
consented to traffic with his art and to produce what the public
wanted. For assuredly his talent for writing operas on the old lines
was not inferior to that of Meyerbeer or Rossini. His _Rienzi_
was the greatest immediate success of his whole life when grand
operas, of which it is the type, were fashionable, and a few more
works of the kind would have raised him above all anxiety for his
livelihood. This can scarcely be questioned now; it has been asserted
again and again by those who most hated him, and who were in the habit
of denouncing him as "past help" because he refused to listen to them.
To do so he would have had to sacrifice all that he held sacred. He
had "hitched his waggon to a star," and deliberately chose poverty,
exile, public calumny and ridicule, domestic unrest, rather than allow
the purity of his art to be sullied by departing for an instant from
the ideals after which he strove. Witness the events of the fateful
seventies, when his financial straits were perhaps at their worst,
when all the powers of Germany, statesmen, theatrical Intendants,
press, singers, seemed in league together to thwart the project of
Bayreuth upon which his all depended; when even King Louis of Bavaria
cooled for a time; when Buelow and Liszt had withdrawn their help, and
Nietzsche had seceded in horror and despair; when the first effort of
Bayreuth had left a ruinous debt, and the failure of the
_Patronat-Vereine_ shut off the last faint ray of hope. Well
might the _Meister_, now advancing in age, have thought of
accepting one of the dazzling offers which repeatedly reached him from
Russia, from America, from Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, and other places.
But he only saw in them lures to tempt him into degrading his art by