Dearest Herr Friedrich,
Yesterday evening I read your treatise to our friend. It took me a long time to calm her down again afterwards: she found that you had treated the tremendous names of the great Athenians in a surprisingly modern manner; I myself thought it necessary to remind her that the nature of public lecturing and elegant book-writing nowadays has debased the traditional language used in discussing our great classical models and reduced it to the level of the methods employed in dismissing decidedly modern phenomena. (Mommsen’s Cicero as a feuilletonist inevitably came to mind.) This was soon understood as something deriving from a weakness of the age, and, as such, it was excused. For my own part, what I felt most of all was a sense of shock at the boldness with which you impart so new an idea, in such brief and categorical terms, to a public which is presumably not really disposed to be educated, so that, if you want your sins to be absolved, you must reckon upon being totally misunderstood in this quarter. Even those people who are initiated into my own ideas are bound to be shocked when they find how much your ideas conflict with their own belief in Sophocles and even Aeschylus. For myself, of course, I can but say to you: so it is! You have hit the mark, and described the real issue with such acuity that it is with a sense of wonderment that I await your future development, when you attempt to overcome common dogmatic prejudice. - But I am concerned about you, and pray from the bottom of my heart that you do not come to grief. That is why I should like to advise you not to discuss these incredible views of yours in short treatises designed to create an easy effect by raising awkward issues, but, since - as I recognize - you are deeply imbued with these ideas, to collect your thoughts together for a longer and more comprehensive work on the subject. I am sure that you will then find the right word to describe the divine errors of Socrates and Plato, men who were of such overwhelming creative power that, even when turning away from them, we are none the less bound to revere them. Oh my friend! Where shall we find words of praise when we gaze from our world upon those inconceivably harmonic beings! And what high hopes and aspirations may we then cherish for ourselves, when we feel deeply and clearly that we can, and must, achieve something that was denied to them! -
Above all things I hope most emphatically that I have left you in no doubt as to my opinion of your Socrates and the others, for I have just told you what I think of it. -
Yours,
R.W.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 392