Most worthy Herr Brockhaus,
I am very much obliged to you for communicating to me your views on my position & upon my plan in life; rest assured that I am fully capable of appreciating the level-headedness & calmness of the same, & that I, too, should have adopted some similar plan in life, right from the very outset, had I succeeded even once in being able to gain a foothold in the right place & in finding some support on which to hold. If, for example, I were to have been granted the good fortune of obtaining the position of musical director in a town such as Leipzig, I can assure you that I should never have dreamt up such a wild scheme as that of trying my luck in Paris. Even now, the certainty of a similar position could persuade me to return at once to Germany, & thus would enable me to satisfy the wish which you yourself have expressed; but for that to happen I should need to be offered a helping hand, & since I do not know of whom I might reasonably expect such help, plans of this kind must necessarily remain within the realm of fantasy.
At all events, I know that the communication of your view was well meant, & that is why I take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to you.
The negative response to my offer to provide reports for the Leipz: All: Zeitung is an aspect of your rejoinder which I find so fully & so appositely motivated that I cannot of course but agree with you; I only wish that you had understood me better & not considered it necessary to go to special lengths to justify your refusal to pay me an advance, since such a refusal is inevitably bound up with turning down my offer. In particular, the section of your esteemed letter in which you declare that you are unable to agree to paying me an advance until such time as the direction of my life has taken a turn more in accord with your own ideas on the subject leaves me in no doubt whatsoever that you have totally misunderstood me, inasmuch as you presumably believed that I had used my offer simply as a pretext to ask for financial help. Permit me, therefore, to enlighten you as follows as to myself & my present way of thinking: - had any such thought crossed my mind, then I should certainly have had more pressing cause to ask you for help when I really was on the brink of utter ruin, when I & my wife were literally without bread, & when, in order to obtain some few days’ supply, we were reduced to measures of which you can really have no conception, & when, in dread of heart, I saw myself driven to take a step which you at any rate have found out about & which, the very next day when I was somewhat calmer, I myself could not conceive how I could ever have been driven into taking. The fact that, at a time when I was motivated by necessity’s law of invention, it did not occur to me to appeal to you for support, may be a guarantee, my most worthy Herr Brockhaus, that I should not have seen myself driven to making a similar appeal now, at a time when you appear sufficiently well apprised of my situation to express your pleasure at the greater satisfaction to which my present situation appears to entitle me. - I believe that in my last letter I gave you even less cause to hold such a mistaken opinion, since I recall intentionally having couched it in terms which were far from calculated to arouse sympathy but rather to depict my offer simply as a business transaction. This, too, was something I was persuaded to do by a somewhat hastily offered piece of advice on the part of Dr Laube, & I confess that, left to myself, I should probably never have thought of such an idea, since I know well enough how contrary to your nature it is to have dealings with anyone whose direction in life, whether it find its true outlet in France or in Germany, in a fixed or independent post, fails to conform to your own views on the subject, especially when you believe that, directly or indirectly, you are being importuned for financial support.
Your counter-offer to accept occasional reports on various matters of outstanding interest is one which I take up all the more gladly in that I see in it a suitable means of setting about a gradual repayment of my debt to you, - which, if I am not mistaken, must amount to something in excess of 170 thalers, & whose cash repayment is something which I certainly could not contemplate at the moment.
May I finally ask you to pass on my kindest regards to Luise to whom I owe my sincere thanks for the interest which she recently showed in me in her letter to Cäcilie, & who, if I were to make some urgent appeal to her, would treat the affair - which is now at an end - simply as a business transaction, of which you no doubt have many similar ones to attend to every day.
Kindly accept my thanks for communicating your views to me & rest assured of the especial devotion of your most respectful brother-in-law
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 33