[...] I assume that Frau Ritter has informed you as to the latest developments in my domestic circumstances: allow me to draw a veil of silence over the most recent past and report in brief only that I have returned home to find a new wife: although she has remained the same in everything else, I now know that - whatever might befall me or come to pass - she will remain beside me until her dying day. For my own part, I certainly did not think simply of testing her: but as events have turned out, she has survived an ordeal by fire such as all women must submit to nowadays if they desire consciously to support those of us who acknowledge the future and who strive to meet it. My friends here have proved their worth. - I have grown much older: I now know for certain that I have entered the second half of my life and that all idle hopes are now behind me. -
[...]
You see what a great change has taken place within me as a result of this configuration of external events. The moment one knows oneself dependent upon others, one becomes more certain, calmer and freer than if one is left entirely to oneself and has the power to choose - a power which is inhibiting rather than liberating. I, too, was tormented by the choice of what I wished to do next: should I draft a new opera libretto, or write a book or some essays? It all seemed so arbitrary, and all my actions seemed so useless and unnecessary. Once this indecision had enabled me to sort out these ideas in my mind, - the very clarity of that realization was bound to make me appear quite pitiful in my own eyes, and this view of myself was confirmed when I perceived what effect my writings have had. That they would in general receive no further attention was something I had assumed in advance: but that they were for the most part not even understood by the few members of our own party who took the trouble to read them was something I was finally compelled to acknowledge with a deep sigh of regret. Prejudice is so deeply rooted that only life itself can break it down: only a true artist and, indeed, an artistic human being can grasp what is at stake here - no other person can do so with the best will in the world. And who, for ex., shall grasp the natural relationship between plastic art and a direct and purely human art, given the artistic egotism of today’s manufacturers of reproductive art? I shall pass over in silence what a sculptor or an historical painter would have to say to all this, but the fact that an otherwise well-disposed writer on aesthetics such as the contributor to the deutsche monatsschrift (for whom it is certainly not simply a question of money) should have sunk to such depths of the most utter mindlessness and been reduced to such artificial and loquacious drivel as he has there succumbed to, well, that is sad. But I also read a review of my latest piece in the Berlin abendpost by the young Bülow: at least he still has the fresh sensitivity of youth, and I believed he would have been able to follow my line of thought with relatively few qualifications: well: at least he was not openly critical - but when the discussion turns to sculpture, lo and behold - he suddenly observes that the author has lost his otherwise so laudable clarity and “appears to proclaim the decline of sculpture”. - At that point I returned home with Karl, read aloud the section on sculpture and painting for his benefit and for mine and — we both found that, however hard we tried to discern some ambiguity in the said passage, the turning point in the whole history of humankind and of art was clearly and explicitly stated to lie with sculpture, a point I intentionally laboured in great detail and underlined with especial emphasis, so that those critics who did not even notice this importance but who seemed only to assume that I had stumbled unawares into an area of vagueness and uncertainty out of ignorance and because I insisted upon having my say concerning these other types of art as well could on no account claim to have understood anything at all about the book as a whole, since they interpreted as a marginal aberration on my part the central point of the argument, which I had strenuously emphasized, namely the decline of the egotistically monumental aspect of art in contrast to the communally present element, which is full of movement. -[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 114