gnacity
landed him in bankruptcy, and enabled him finally to win a fortune by
oratorio when no one would listen any longer to his operas. Gluck was
from the first a popular composer: there were rows, it is true, but
they did not concern him; he had always an assured public. Beethoven
had throughout his working life an ample pension and the friendship of
princes. Wagner had no such friends until he was sixty years old; he
had no pension; he offended every opera director in Germany by telling
those gentry that they knew nothing of their business; he got mixed up
with revolutionists, and, mainly because he was a man of unusual
ability, was regarded as dangerous by every bureaucrat. He was fast
becoming a popular composer; and he left his successes behind him and
went on to change opera in a fashion never attempted by Gluck or any
other composer. He was the most consummate contrapuntist of his age:
therefore the critics and professors declared he knew nothing about
counterpoint. He wrote the loveliest melodies of the nineteenth
century: therefore it was generally agreed that the gift of melodic
invention had been denied him by a merciful Providence, who reserved
that gift for the Jews and their friends. He could hold neither his
tongue nor his pen; if a bull may be excused, he replied before he was
attacked, he hit back before he was struck. Proud as Satan, and
through his pride a beggar; giving the world unheard-of delights, and
yet dependent on the world for his bread; quarrelling with his
friends, picking quarrels with his supposed enemies, quarrelling with
his wife, running away with the wife of his best friend, theorising
about his art and promptly throwing his theories overboard, declaring
he would never allow excerpts from his operas to be given, nor even
one single opera of the _Ring_ to be given, and then allowing single
operas to be given and conducting excerpts himself--there never was in
the world such a mass of contradictions as this musical apostle of
universal peace born during the Napoleonic wars of 1813.

All this we may joyfully concede, knowing how much may be said on the
other side. Wagner not only was the most stupendous personage born
into the nineteenth century: he was also one of the noblest, most
generous men that have lived. There is not a mean trait in his
character. He endured privation, actual starvation; he was shamefully
treated; his wife did not believe in his genius; his simplest actions
we