Besides the Quaker strain, with its tendency toward dignity, simplicity and openness to the leadings of spirit, he owes to his Celtic lineage the mystic, poetic, dashing, unsophisticated vein that might be easily mistaken for caprice, and to his American birth is due, no doubt, many of the more solid, practical characteristics that combined to produce the proper balance. Naturally, he was deeply influenced by his foreign teachers and also by his favorites among the great masters whose works he studied. He is said to have adored Wagner, with Tschaikowsky and Grieg for lesser musical loves. To what extent he drew upon Wagner no one can say, but that he did so, either unconsciously or with that imitation that is sincerest flattery is very evident. Many passages suggest Wagner, and one can easily imagine the ardent young American worshiping the great German master, as he in turn had adored Beethoven. Liszt used to say: "I only value people by what they are to Wagner." There is no estimating the value of Wagner to those who came after him. He was not satisfied, we are told, with either the melody of the Italians or the rhetorical excesses of the French. The music of Beethoven was his ideal, and the dramas of Shakespeare, whose work, to his mind, compared with the early Greek plays, was like a scene in nature in comparison with a piece of architecture. Mme. de Staël called beautiful architecture "frozen music." It was just this architectural, frozen, congealed condition that Wagner wished to overcome, without running into any frivolities. He was in every sense a living, breathing _man_, and his work is pervaded by this virile, life-like quality. In his first youthful attempt at drama, forty-two persons perished in the development of the plot and most of them had to be brought back as ghosts to enable him to complete the piece. Now, however, one is haunted by the faithfulness to life of his creations, not by the ghosts of his slaughtered victims, and an aspiring young composer who adored him could not help imbibing some of his power. Wagner thought that the musician should write his own lines in opera or song, and conceived and mastered a new form, taking poetry into music just as Sidney Lanier took music into poetry in his "Science of English Verse." Wagner also thought that because of the exactness of musical science, a composer became practically the actor of each of his parts, while the dramatic author could never be sure what meaning would be read into his lines.