Much has in this same analytical way been read into Wagner’s work by his admirers and disciples. Yet there was no need for it, for the Tone-Poet has himself told us of the motives and ideas which were at work in his brain when he gradually gave birth to his great inventive conception, the Tone-Drama.[49] But even when Wagner himself becomes his own interpreter we prefer the work to the interpretation; for that is apt to be as cryptic to the average reader as St. Peter found the epistles of “our beloved brother Paul”—“in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.” A great work of art, as it seems to me, needs no interpreter. If a poem, a picture, or a musical composition fails to touch me, then I think that there must be something lacking, either in my power of apprehension, or in the work of art itself. In neither case will the interpreter be able to fill the gap. If my senses or my understanding are hard, he cannot soften them. If the work is faulty, all the preaching in the world will not make it right. The true test of a work of art is its power of appeal. The master is the man who can make his fellow-men thrill with pleasure or shiver with horror; if he needs a third person to explain his meaning, then he is no true artist, and his work is for the scrap-heap. Wagner was essentially above all men of his time the one master who could stir the feelings of those whom he addressed, the one man who could make his own art an article of faith in others. To split hairs as to the why and the wherefore of his power, to read into his work metaphysical intentions, appears to me to be unnecessary and trivial, and therefore almost a sacrilege. If by all the analyses and verbiage with which he has been plastered you could educate other Wagners there would be some justification for them; but you cannot make Wagners, and his imitators have been without exception wretched failures. On the other hand, the relation of the mental processes by which he arrived at his great invention of the Tone-Drama is a psychological study of absorbing interest, and a story of profound significance in the history of art. Most of the commentators are long and wearisome beyond words—especially is this the case with some of the lesser Germans. Would they but lay to heart old Hesiod’s warning, νήπιοι οὔδ’ ἴσασιν πλέον ἥμισυ πάντος. Children! and they know now how much better the half than the whole.