My very dear Sir,
I have just got round to finishing your article on the “Ring of the Nibelung”. Please believe me when I tell you that I was uncommonly touched and delighted by it. At a time when I can think of those days in Bayreuth last year with little but sadness, it fills me with great warmth to know that someone like you was present here then! -
God knows how long I may yet retain my vital strengths; but however long they may last, I can certainly reckon on never finding myself in agreement with my contemporaries; there must always remain something left over which I shall have to leave to a new and younger generation to claim for themselves. Herein lies my consolation and my hope; for what persuades me to enjoy both while I may are occasional signs of life on the part of my fellow men, of the kind which you yourself so splendidly showed me!
Do not expect me to offer any further - or more detailed - criticism of your essay. There is nothing about it to which I would object, and nothing of which I might wish to remind you. I felt only pleasure and deep emotion at all that you said, at your reasons for saying it - and the manner in which you said it. As a curiosity I would remind you only that it was barely a year after completing the poem that I first became acquainted with Schopenhauer’s philosophy (and, indeed, with philosophy in general), that it initially repelled me, and that only through a deeply tragic perception of the world - a view which I and Schopenhauer have in common - did I feel powerfully drawn to an understanding of it. -
Not another word about our friend: I know that, thanks to your love, he is in the best possible care. I cannot help him now. If he were really to fall on hard times, I could help him then: for there is nothing I would not share with him.
Fare you well, and think kindly of
Your obedient servant
Richard Wagner
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 457