y
to free his own soul, he had an eye on the publisher and the public,
for he needed bread as much as ever he had needed it; and he needed
other things besides: all the luxuries he had grown accustomed to and
could have done without ten years earlier. He persuaded himself of the
validity of another reason why he should unload his prose-wares on the
world. He had written much at times in various papers with a
wholehearted wish to purify and advance art. Now he determined to be
himself John the Baptist walking, in defiance of the laws of nature,
miles in front of himself in the wilderness, crying out that he who
was to redeem German music and the German folk was coming. He actually
persuaded himself, I say, that by reading these lucubrations German
audiences would prepare themselves to understand his works--as yet in
process of incubation--at a first hearing! Fools we are, and slight;
but surely no man was ever a bigger fool than our poor Richard when he
thought that a great work of art could possibly or should be
understood at the first glance, and that the feat would be easy if
only one had read some theories of art beforehand. The contrary holds
true: if you have seen and felt Wagner's operas, you may understand
what he is talking about in his articles and pamphlets; but to read
these first is merely to bewilder yourself utterly when you go to see
the operas. I will dismiss, therefore, much of the prose with very
brief notice, and some of it without any notice at all. It may be
remarked that of all the commentaries I have waded through (and been
well-nigh choked with), on the prose, there is, to my mind, only one
worth reading, Mr. Ernest Newman's valuable _Study of Wagner_.

The French stories and articles are as good as anything Wagner wrote.
He had not yet fallen into the villainous German philosophic style, or
was restrained by the consciousness that he must write in a lingo that
could be translated into French. These pieces were written for bread
and bread alone in the terrible years of starvation, 1840-41. _An
End_ [of a German Musician] _in Paris_ is full of autobiography, and
intensely interesting on that account; it is interesting, too, because
of its display of the naive arrogance which leads Germans to believe
the whole world was made for Germans. This German musician, for
instance, arrives in Paris, where scores of French musicians--Berlioz
amongst them--are roughing it, if not actually starving in the
str