was full of the bitterest suffering, and with a resolution so set and irresistible as to deserve a place among heroes for this, if for nothing else. Had he been the victim of an over-mastering delusion, his strength, displayed in obedience to it, should have made him famous. The comprehensive glance which revealed to him all phases of life, as it is now lived in Europe, was more turbid than Goethe's, and shot through with visionary colours; but only a poet could have borne such eyes in his head. As a poet we must think of him, and let him tell his own story, tell it as he would his great mythical dramas, in words, and tones, and action, ourselves not interposing with criticism or denying him our sympathy, while he relates, as Schopenhauer would say, his figured representation of the world, and accompanies it with music which is alone capable of disclosing the secret hidden beneath all he says and does.

Wagner did not need any biographer but himself. We learn that he has left behind him an Autobiography,' which will be printed when those whom it describes have passed away. But as early as 1842 he published a short and characteristic sketch of his life; and through the eleven volumes of his writings many pages are scattered which, though not always accurate in detail, show us the man as well as the artist, picture his moods, enlarge upon his distresses, and are sometimes touchingly natural. The Communication to My Friends,' sent out in 1851, may be fairly entitled an 'Apologia pro Vita sua'; it is by far the most momentous account of his development into that novel kind of dramatic author, who was then looking forward confidently to the production of the 'Nibelungen Ring.' His letters, again, to Liszt, Uhlig, Berlioz, Villot, and his theoretical pamphlets, of which he put forth a long series, throw the most direct light upon a mind always agitated, abounding in projects, and curiously selfregarding. His whole life was a play of emotions, a succession of raptures and ecstasies, but never did he lose sight of the end which, from a boy, he had framed to himself. It took many shapes; and the tragic element in all he attempted was due, partly to his own anguish in mastering a dimly perceived and elusive ideal, and still more to the indifference or hostility of men, whether musicians, actors, or critics, who saw him struggling but could not imagine that his antagonist was a godlike figure. All they beheld was the cloud which distorted him to something grotesque.

Hence, as Nietzsche justly observes, when we look at the life of the master without affection, there is even a touch of the comic in it; and Wagner, who had an inexhaustible vein of laughter from

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from the gods, confesses as much. When we see how few things hold their ground,' he wrote to Liszt,' when we meet again and again with the same passion of superficiality, the same incredible frivolity and morbid love of pleasure, our own earnestness often appears in a very ludicrous point of view.' It was said of him in 1848 that he wanted a European revolution in order to regenerate the Opera. Germans, he was always complaining, would not be serious out of business-hours; the shop closed, the lecture ended, they dined and went to the play for amusement. But the last thing Wagner dreamt of, once he had come to his true self, was to amuse them. And the prophet of a religion of art discovered that he had taken on his shoulders a burden the like of which was not in history. Other men had aimed at changing the laws of society; reformers, from Savonarola to Jean Jacques, had preached to the nations in sackcloth and ashes; but who had been wild enough to suppose that a revolution on the stage would bring to pass a revolution in the street? that a fresh interpretation of the Opera would work that miracle which neither philosophy nor religion, neither learning nor liberalism, had hitherto coaxed out of the Pandora's box at the bottom of which it lay hidden? Wagner felt that there was a comic and exasperating truth in the objections made to him by Puritans on one side and by Philistines on the other. His idea of Art was a revelation ; but the many deemed it a craze. Both worlds were against him, the serious-minded and the frivolous. What was he striving to set up in the nineteenth century? A Greek altar in a modern theatre; that, and nothing more. He would have men return to Eschylus and Athens; he was bent upon uniting what had long been put asunder in countries north of the Alps, music with tragedy, art with life. His undertaking might be expressed by a reversal of Schiller's celebrated dictum, and by saying now, Ernst ist die Kunst, heiter ist das Leben.' As he saw the world around him, it was gloomy because art had become trivial; he could not find religious or human earnestness in its occupations, or anything more than the excitement of fatigue and the debauch of the senses in its moments of leisure. He had gone through all this, with the spirit and the soul of an artist, compelled to earn his bread by amusing a weary audience, while his own great powers lay unused, or vexed him by their demand for realization. The hour struck when he leaped down, indignant, almost beside himself, from off the stage, broke his director's baton, fled into solitude, gave up his days and nights to the dreams that had long been slumbering beneath those ashes, and evoked a universe of myth and music, although

although no theatre could yet exhibit his creations. He would be the first, if he were also doomed to be the last, in that better order of things where harmony, and not confusion, must reign.

His philosophy, much as in detail it varied, was all of a piece; the form was Hellenic, if the substance proved to be German; and the end was ideal unity, a society of brethren who had passed beyond mercantile greed, who flung away pedantry as a worn-out garment, who scorned dilettantism as the ghost of a great idea, and who would enter deep into the eternal nature of the universe by emotion, by the exquisite play of symbols and artistic devices, by the mystery of tones, by the beauty of self-sacrifice, shown before their eyes in living gesture. It is manifestly the Greek tragedians who have spoken through their choral odes and long resounding lines to this kinsman of theirs; but he is endowed with a science of harmonies which they never knew. His musical expression will reach up to heights and descend into abysses unexplored by the dance or the song of twenty-three centuries ago. His idea cannot be false, for it was once a reality; the most highly gifted of the children of men lived upon it; what they have left us under its inspiration is, even in death, sublime and persuasive, a thing of supreme loveliness. No age will wither Sophocles, no highest Shakespeare darken the mighty light of Eschylus. But our concern is with Leipzig, Paris, and London. How will this new-old dream of a beautiful civilization fare in these latter-day cities?

At Leipzig, therefore, on the morning of May 22nd, 1813,that memorable year for the old Saxon battlefields,-Wagner was born. He died in Venice, seventy years after, on February 13th, 1883. Pious research has traced his ancestors back as far as 1643; and in the catalogue we find many schoolmasters, besides precentors and organists. But, as he wrote gaily, 'while fine feathers make fine birds, and our new Hebrew fellow-citizens dazzle and delight us with their exquisite names, we poor old sons of townsfolk and farming folk must be satisfied for ever with our wretched Smith, Miller, Weaver, and Waggoner.' He did not need to complain; Wagner belonged to a sound German stock, on both sides; his inheritance was learning, music, and acquaintance from childhood with the stage; and though he lost his father young, he had a remarkable and highly-distinguished uncle in Adolf Wagner, as well as a friend in his stepfather, the artist, Ludwig Geyer. Uncle Adolf was a man of extraordinary gifts. He published the complete edition of Giordano Bruno in Latin and Italian; was the first

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to bring out all the poems of Robert Burns; printed the 'Parnasso Italiano' at Leipzig; and wrote essays on the Greek tragedians. Geyer was an actor as well as a painter. And Karl M. von Weber, whose influence on Richard proved to be lasting, found that his stepfather had an admirable voice, and invited him to sing in his operas.

The whole family may be said to have grown up on the stage. Richard saw with his bright piercing eyes what most children do not know even by hearsay, the life of the greenroom and the look of a theatre behind the scenes. He attended rehearsals; went every evening to the play; and must have cherished as a lad of nine or ten the ambition to act and recite as these glorious creatures were doing. His brother Albert had thrown aside his medical studies and mounted the boards; his three sisters followed the same profession. But hitherto this genius of the family did not, like Mozart or Beethoven, practise music as if intended for that career. He went to the old Kreutzschule in Dresden; by and by, returning to Leipzig on the death of Geyer, he was a student at the Nicolai; and his matriculation in music and philosophy' has a Grecian sound that would have delighted Plato. His love of the German language grew into a passion for philosophy and antiquities. He read Shakespeare with enthusiasm; and at thirteen had begun to conceive of the Attic stage as a vision of beauty, the background to lofty recitation and noble symphonies. If he had possessed the voice or the resources of an actor, says Nietzsche, an actor he would have been. From his own lips we gather how strong an impression was made upon him by the spectacle, and it is always a wonderful thing, of a large audience subdued or excited as it answers to the magic of gesture and emotion. But he could not be a personage before the footlights; and he soon turned his daring thoughts to musical composition. Daring enough, since he had first to learn counterpoint, of which he knew not even the rudiments!

A most inspiring note in Wagner is the forlorn hope, or desperate courage, that neither difficulty nor disappointment can beat down. He is like a man without knowledge of mechanics who, finding himself in want of a steam-engine, sets about making one, and amid the derision and incredulity of his friends, does, at length, produce a unique motor-car and drive it triumphantly forward. Weber had awakened in him the desire to be a musician; but when he first listened to the enchanting and sublime creations of Beethoven, a world opened its gates in which he had never travelled; it was, to the letter, such a revelation as couching the eyes of the blind might have

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been; realities grew upon him in the mysterious light so beautiful and strange, that he seemed to be caught up into Paradise. When he was sixteen he had composed a 'Pastoral Play,' writing words and music together. Then he attempted symphonies and overtures for full orchestra; and it is noticeable that from the beginning he had in view a grouping or division of instruments such as, at Bayreuth, is confessedly one of the most marked improvements on the old confused system. He wrote a 'Scena and Aria' which was performed in 1832 at the Leipzig Court Theatre, and the same year sketched an opera 'Die Hochzeit.' His brother now called him to direct the chorus at Würzburg, where Albert was stage-manager. Richard went thither in 1833; and while abounding, as always henceforth, in the most versatile activity, composed his first real work, Die Feen,' which bears a singular likeness in its motive to Lohengrin' and 'Parsifal,' and is said to contain much poetical beauty and inspiration.

With this earnest of a new style he came back to Leipzig; and there his trials began. He had drawn the eyes of some distinguished persons towards him; but when the opera was submitted to Franz Hauser,-a friend of Mendelssohn's, who managed the Leipzig theatre,-his verdict was that Richard 'displayed complete ignorance of his resources; that he had not composed from his heart; and that the tendency of the piece did not in any way please him.' Wagner swallowed down his vexation and went to Magdeburg, where he remained as conductor till the spring of 1836. This theatre, like others with which he was connected, became bankrupt; and his second work, Das Liebesverbot,' performed by a company in the agonies of dissolution, turned out an utter failure. He wandered to Königsberg; gave orchestral concerts; fell into debt, and could not keep from falling in love; for he was always passionate and impulsive, and we fear it must be added that he was often selfish ;-so now he married in haste a wellmeaning but quite unsuitable helpmeet, the actress Minna Planer, and lived to repent when it was too late. Bankruptcy again deprived him of his situation. Further afield he moved on to Riga. There he became Kapellmeister; and, sick as he was of conducting wretched pieces with such companies as were at his disposal, in those melancholy days he wrote Rienzi,' the last of his 'operas,' and the prelude to that musical drama,' thoughts of which were already fermenting within his eager mind. He offered it, when he had written the words and some of the music, to Eugène Scribe. Scribe did not welcome 'Rienzi,' and in a sudden access of desperation Wagner packed

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