During the three years that Wagner was in Paris, he was brought into communication with several prominent men in the world of art, men eminent in literature, in music, both as composers and as executants, in painting, and other phases of art. Of the dozen or so of men with whom he thus became more intimately acquainted, the greater portion were his own countrymen and about half were Jews. This constant close intimacy of Wagner with the descendants of Judah is a curious feature in his life, and shows that when he wrote as strongly as he did of Jews and their art work, his judgments were based upon close personal knowledge of the question. As may be supposed, the acquaintance of a young man between twenty-six and thirty years of age with these several thinkers and writers, could not fail to influence, more or less, an impressionable and receptive nature.
It was an odd freak of fortune that almost immediately after Wagner had settled in Paris, he should, by accident, meet in the streets an old friend from Leipzic, Heinrich Laube. It was in a paper edited by Laube that Richard Wagner’s first printed article on the non-existence of German opera had appeared. That was when Wagner was about one and twenty. Laube was a political revolutionist who underwent several terms of imprisonment for daring to utter his thoughts about Germany and its government through his paper. But prison confinement never controlled the dauntless courage of the patriot. He was a man of considerable and varied gifts. It is not only as a political demagogue that he will be known in future times, but as a philosopher, novelist, and playwright. In Leipzic he had shown himself very friendly to Wagner, whose sound, vigorous judgment attracted him, and now after hearing of Wagner’s precarious situation, offered to introduce him to Heine. Such an opportunity could not be lost, and so the cultured Hebrew poet and Richard Wagner met.
A curious trio this: Laube, hard-featured and unpleasant to look upon, with a weirdness begotten possibly of frequent incarcerations,--a strange contrast to the handsome, regular-featured, soft-spoken Heine; and then the pale, slim, young Wagner, short in stature, but with piercing eyes and voluble speech which surprised and amazed the cynical Heine. When Heinrich Heine heard that Meyerbeer had given Wagner introductions, he doubted the abilities of the newcomer. Heine was strongly biassed against Meyerbeer and distrusted his sincerity. Although the meeting with Laube was a delight to Wagner, as it brought back to him all his youthful enthusiasm and hope, yet his appreciation of the accomplished writer, which in Leipzic amounted almost to reverence, had been by time and events considerably lessened. Wagner’s greatest majesty, earnestness, was wanting in Laube. The litterateur in Wagner’s estimation had no fixed purpose, no ideal. He frittered away considerable gifts in innumerable directions. Incongruities the most glaring not unfrequently appeared in his writings. A paragraph of sound philosophical reasoning would be followed by a page of the merest bombastic phraseology. In his dramatic efforts tragedy and farce were placed in amazing juxtaposition. He wrote a large number of novels, but not one proved entirely satisfactory. “Reisenovellen” was an imitation of Heine, but it fell immeasurably below the standard attained by his model. His best literary production was, without doubt, the history of his life in prison, which interests and touches us by its simplicity. However, Wagner could not resist the attraction which Laube’s peculiarities possessed for him. The litterateur’s unprepossessing pedantic exterior contrasted strangely with his voluptuous and imaginative mind. Possessed of a brain specially fitted for the conception of the noblest schemes for the freedom of human thought, he often childishly indulged in a roguish _plaisanterie_. From a thoughtful disquisition on the philosophy of Hegel he glides into the description of such unworthy topics as a ball-room, love behind the scenes, coffee-room conversation, etc. But, curiously, his revolutionary tendencies in all other matters were in strange contrast to his tenacious clinging to the then existing opera form, and Wagner’s outspoken notions about the regeneration of the opera into that of the musical drama were vehemently opposed by him.