nto unseemliness of
speech. The scoffs of critics and the ready-made gibes and jeers of the
mob were to her gospel truth; her husband's genius was a vagary to be
stoutly endured. So for many years she was inclined to pose as one to be
pitied--and so she was. That she suffered at times can not be denied,
yet God is good, and so has put short limit on the sensibilities of the
vain.

But Wagner would never tolerate an unkind word spoken of Minna in his
presence, and once rebuked a friend who sought to console him by saying,
"Never mind, Minna lives her life the best she can, and expresses the
thoughts that come to her--what more do you and I do?"

And in his later years, when calm philosophy was his, he realized that
Minna Planer had supplied him a stinging discontent, a continued unrest
that formed the sounding-board on which his sorrow and his hope and his
faith in the Ideal were echoed forth.

Love is the recurring motif in all of Wagner's plays. A man and a woman,
joined by God, but separated by unkind condition, play their parts, and
our hearts are made by the Master to vibrate in sympathy with the
central idea. Only a broken-hearted man could have conjured forth from
his soul such couples as these: Senta and the Dutchman, Elizabeth and
Tannhauser, Elsa and Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, Siegmund and
Sieglinde, Walter and Eva, Siegfried and Brunhilde.

Wagner's unhappy marriage forms the keynote of his art. Every opera he
wrote depicts a soul in bonds. From "The Flying Dutchman" to "Parsifal"
we are shown the struggle of a strong man with cruel Fate; a reaching
out for liberty and light; the halting between duty and inclination; and
the endless search for a woman who shall give deliverance through her
abiding love and faith.

* * * * *

All art seems controlled by fad and fashion. No fashion endures, else
'twere not fashion, and in its character the fad is essentially
transient. Still we need not rail at fashion; it is a form of
periodicity, and periodicity exists through all Nature. There are day
and night, winter and summer, equinox and solstice, work and rest, years
of plenty and years of famine. Comets return, and all fashions come
back. Keep your old raiment long enough and it will be in style.

All things move in an orbit, even theories and religions. Certain forms
of fanaticism come with the centuries--every new heresy is old. All
extremes cure themselves, for when matters