To share each other's joys and sorrows, is still a blessing left us!
Otto has been laid up for three weeks with rheumatic fever and inflammation of the muscles, and I am nursing him day and night, without, however, having gained much ground as yet. His condition is most painful, and complicated by many ups and downs — also, I am afraid, very lingering. Griesinger will be called in consultation to-morrow, and I am hoping great things from his skill. Under these circumstances you will understand, Friend, why I was silent. The misery of your state of mind chilled my blood itself; I felt that I was helpless there. I was to tell myself forsooth, that all the gifts of Nature, even the most glorious, are squandered if uncrowned by empty external success; that they are nugatory in and for themselves, and he who owns them above others, possesses but the right to greater wretchedness! It made me almost bitter, to think you would have me believe that; my religion and my belief (which really are one and the same) are vowed to nothing save the Thing in itself. I cannot understand at all, how anybody can at once scorn and seek what people call success, i.e. applause. Only the sage, methinks, who asks nothing from the world, should venture to despise it; the man who uses it, becomes its accomplice by mere contact with it, and can no longer be its judge. You are at once a knower and accomplice in the last degree: you rush at every new illusion, apparently to sweep from your breast the disappointment of its predecessors; and yet no one knows better than yourself, that it never can or will be. Friend, how is this to end? Are not fifty years' experience enough, and should the moment not arrive at last, when you will come to full agreement with yourself? —
To-day I have received your welcome message, which has done me infinite good, and I now can pluck up heart again to believe in your coming. What sincere joy it will give me, to prepare you a nice quiet rest! In Switzerland the autumn days are often very beautiful, and even in winter it is most pleasant in this home of ours. Should Otto's illness drag on longer than expected — which Heaven forbid! — would it perhaps be possible for you to keep the Christmas holidays with us? Meanwhile I hope with all my heart, both for your sake and our own, that it may be earlier.
Greeting and love from Your
Mathilde Wesendonck.
Source: Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905), No. 162