That Minna was as much sinned against as sinning will hardly be disputed by any unprejudiced reader of _Mein Leben_ and Wagner's correspondence. Let us throw as rapid a glance as possible over the various stages of their union.
Wagner himself sings the praises of the earlier Minna frequently enough. The picture we first get of her is that of a pretty bourgeoise, of no great intellectual capacity, but modest, sensible and sympathetic. On the other hand, several of Wagner's self-revelations show him in his youth as the harum-scarum one might expect a genius of his dynamic temperament to be--not vicious, perhaps, in the style of more stupid men, but keen for pleasure, and anxious to taste every vintage that life could offer him. His early life probably differed from that of tens of thousands of highly-strung young artists only in the degree of ardour with which he pursued his will-o'-the-wisps, and his quite abnormal imprudence in the affairs of daily life--financial affairs in particular. Throughout his career the protection, the solace, the domestic care of a woman were necessities to him. We may believe him when he says that he was the most home-loving of men; home and a devoted woman were haven and anchorage for him.[107] His longing for this haven would always be increased by the despair into which his vivacious nature, so keen for pleasure, was for ever bringing him. His early twenties were undoubtedly a very critical time for him mentally and morally. The debt-acquiring habit was already firmly rooted in him, and we get hints here and there of a certain hectic quality in his views of sex. In the _Autobiographical Sketch_ (1842) he tells us how, under the impulse of these ideas, he dealt with Shakespeare's _Measure for Measure_ in the act of metamorphosing it into his own _Das Liebesverbot_:
"Everything around me seemed to be in a state of ferment, and it seemed to me the most natural thing to give myself up to this fermentation. During a lovely summer's journey amongst the Bohemian watering places I drafted the plan of a new opera, _Das Liebesverbot_; I took the matter for it from Shakespeare's _Measure for Measure_, only with this difference, that I deprived it of its prevailing seriousness and cast it in the mould of _Das junge Europa_: free and uncloaked [_offene_] sensualism [_Sinnlichkeit_] won the victory, purely by its own strength, over Puritanical hypocrisy."[108]