But he felt his vocation. Listen to what he says of those early days. “Whilst I was finishing my great Tragedy I for the first time became acquainted with Beethoven’s music at the concerts of the Gewandhaus at Leipzig; its impression upon me was all-powerful; with Mozart, too, I made friends, especially through his _Requiem_. Beethoven’s incidental music for _Egmont_ inspired me so that for nothing in the world would I let my finished Tragedy leave the stocks until it should be furnished with similar music. Without a moment’s hesitation I felt confident that I could myself write this all-important music, but still thought well first to furnish myself with a few chief rules of thorough-bass. In order to achieve this as far as possible, I obtained a week’s loan of Logier’s ‘Methode des General-basses,’ and worked at it zealously. But the study did not bear fruit so quickly as I had thought. Its difficulties charmed and riveted me; I determined to become a musician.” And this, remember, was a boy of sixteen. Icarus himself, harnessing the horses of the Sun, was not more audacious. But Wagner was not to share the fate of Icarus. I remember how once when a lady consulted Lord Leighton about her boy, who showed a great talent for painting, his answer was: “Let him have the education of a gentleman in the first place, then, if he should still have an inclination for art, let him specialize.” The story of Wagner shows the wisdom of those words. His biographer tells us how greatly Wagner profited by his classical education, and he points out what an untold advantage this gave him over the other great musical writers, such as Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck. Had Mozart, for instance, as he suggests, been kept at school instead of being trotted out as an infant phenomenon at Courts and in the palaces of great nobles, would he have allied the genius of his music to such piteous libretti as those with which he had to be satisfied? Is it not possible that in him, as in Wagner, the poet might have been united with the composer? In Wagner, as we have seen, the poet came first, then the musician: the education of the gentleman was the dominant influence. During his school and college life he showed such a predilection for language that his masters thought that he would become a great philological professor. They missed the point that it was language in the singular, not in the plural, that fascinated him: he had not the gift of tongues, nor did he take any special interest in comparative philology, but the power of expression, the poet’s power, inspired his music, in the same way that his music gave birth to his poetry. The two wedded made him unique. Without his classical education, which opened out to him Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, and drove him to learn English in order that he might enjoy Shakespeare untranslated, the two could never have grown to the noble stature which they assumed; possibly they might never have been born.