euth? In the midst of years of privation
Richard Wagner planned and partly executed the _Ring_; he completed
_Tristan_ and the _Mastersingers_; as quite a young man he had dreamed
of a Bayreuth; as an old man he turned his dream into a reality. He
had his lieutenants--big men always have their lieutenants--but the
idea, the purpose, and the force behind were his and nobody else's
than his. Bayreuth does not stand for very much to-day; in the
'seventies it stood for a fierce attack on the general sloppiness of
opera performances all the world over, for the setting up of an ideal
to which there is no parallel in the history of the art of music.
Nothing but the personal force of this one man accomplished this
thing--personal force accompanied by a wholehearted devotion to his
art. I suppose the inventors of steam-engines and the builders of
giant dams have an ideal, too, in their crazy craniums, but they
invent and work with a very definite idea of personal gain. Wagner
hoped for no gain, and he gained little, though, as I have said, as
much as he wanted. He was helped by the only noble-hearted king born
into the nineteenth century; but he found that king and inspired him.
He risked everything for his idea; if his works have grown to be
valuable assets since his death, they were not during his lifetime. By
unheard-of energy while suffering privation--even of the ordinary
necessities of life--he went on and created masterpieces, and then by
creating Bayreuth set up a standard of musical execution that no one
before him had thought possible. All the great conductors of the last
fifty years are, musically, his offspring. Without him we should have
been without a Richter, or Richter's introducer to the English, an
Alfred Schulz-Curtius; without these two men we should have no Robert
Newman or Henry J. Wood. Wagner's influence has been further-reaching
than many of us think; and that influence was due not more to the
consummate skill of the musician than to the character of the man.

Outside his musicianship the man had interests in everything human--in
painting, sculpture, drama, poetry and prose. He made what we consider
mistakes, as what man does not who is a product of a period of
passionate revivals of human and humanising ideals?--but how few they
are! They hardly count. He absorbed all the culture of all the
centuries. The Greek and Latin poets were as familiar to him as were
the English. Hardly a great book had been wri