I have got into the middle of a slough of conventionalities and customs, in which I stick up to the ears, without being able to lead into it the least drop of pure water for my recreation.  “Sir, we are not accustomed to this”—­that is the eternal echo I hear.  Neither can the orchestra recompense me.  It consists almost exclusively of Englishmen, that is clever machines which cannot be got into the right swing; handicraft and business kill everything.  Then there is the public, which, I am assured, is very favourably inclined towards me, but can never be got out of itself, which accepts the most emotional and the most tedious things without ever showing that it has received a real impression.  And, in addition to this, the ridiculous Mendelssohn worship!

And even if all this were better than it is, what business have I with such concerts?  I am not fit for them.  It is quite a different thing if I conduct one of Beethoven’s symphonies before a few friends, but to be a regular concert conductor, before whom they place the scores of concert pieces, etc., so that he may beat the time to them—­that, I feel, is the deepest disgrace.  This thoroughly inappropriate character of my position led me to the resolution of sending in my resignation after the fourth concert.  But of course I was talked out of it, and especially my regard for my wife, who would have heard of this sudden resignation and of all that would have been written about it with great grief, determined me to hold out till the last concert.  The infernal torture this is to me I cannot express.  All my pleasure in my work is disappearing more and more.  I had made up my mind to finish the score of the “Valkyrie” during the four months here, but that is out of the question.  I shall not even finish the second act, in so terribly dispiriting a manner does this false position act upon me.  In July I wanted to begin “Young Siegfried” at Seelisberg, on the lake of Lucerne, but now I think of delaying that beginning till next spring.  This dislike of work is the worst feature of all.  I feel as if with it eternal night were closing around me, for what have I still to do in this world if I cannot do my work?

Through this hell my study of Dante, to which I could not settle down before, has accompanied me.  I have passed through his Inferno, and am now at the gate of Purgatory.  Really I am in need of this purgatory; for if I consider it rightly, I was brought to London by a really sinful degree of thoughtlessness, which now I have to repent with fervour.  I must, I must be resigned; my experience long ago convinced me of the necessity of resignation in the widest sense of the word, and I must now subdue altogether this terrible, wild desire of life, which again and again dims my vision and throws me into a chaos of contradictions.  I must hope that I may at some future time rise from purgatory to paradise; the fresh air of my Seelisberg will perhaps help me to this.  I do not deny that I should like to meet Beatrice there.