l language and men greet each other in the fields in such
accents as a Beethoven now utters at rare intervals at a distance."

The episode made a turning-point in his life. Hitherto his whole mind
and thought had been placed on literature, the drama in particular, as a
career. Through Beethoven he first learned what a power music possesses
in the portrayal of the emotions and passions. He had, as he says, an
intimate love and knowledge of Mozart without apparently being much
influenced thereby. Up to this time Shakespeare had been his archetype.
Now, with a fine discriminating intelligence, marvellous in a youth of
sixteen, Beethoven is to be included in this hero-worship, and is
eventually to supplant his former ideal. "It was Beethoven who opened up
the boundless faculty of instrumental music for expressing elemental
storm and stress," he says in the "Art-Work of the Future," and
elsewhere in the same article, "the deed of the one and only
Shakespeare, which made of him a universal man, a very god, is yet but
the kindred deed of the solitary Beethoven, who found the language of
the artist-manhood of the future."

Wagner's criticisms on music are admirable. Here he expresses his
thoughts as plainly as in his compositions. His disquisitions on music
as an art and on Beethoven in particular, are always lucid and forcible.
He may be misty in his philosophical speculations, but when he speaks
on music it is in the authoritative tone of the master, familiar with
every phase of his subject. He always contributes something of value,
and his thoughts are an illumination.

Had Wagner never written a line of music, had he elected to be a
literary man, a poet, a dramatist, philosopher, his fame to-day would
still be world-wide. Had he confined his genius into this one channel of
literary expression, as was his original intention, with his mental
equipment, and a Napoleonic ambition that balked at nothing, the product
would have been as original and extraordinary, we may be sure, as is his
art-product in music. Wagner, the musician, is so commanding a figure
that the literary man is obscured; but when we consider the magnitude of
his literary achievement, the dramas Tannhaeuser, Lohengrin, Flying
Dutchman, Tristan, Parsifal, the stupendous Ring of the Nibelung, the
essays on music, philosophy, criticism and sociology, and reflect that
it is, so to speak, a by-product, it becomes apparent that, had he made
literature his chief ai