The Master’s life has been divided into two equal halves—the first lasting from his birth in 1813 to 1848, the year of those political troubles in which he became so unhappily involved; the second from 1848 to his death in 1883. His creative activity began when he was yet a child—we have seen how when he was but sixteen years old he had completed his “great tragedy,” which taught him that music was essential to drama, that the language of the senses must find its complement in the language of the soul, that music alone can appeal to the fancy and the imagination as poetry does to the reason. This of course at once throws down the gauntlet to argument: no poet that ever lived has been gifted with the musical faculty as was Richard Wagner, yet who can assert that Shakespeare, Dante, that great prose poet Cervantes, were not kings over the fancy and imagination of mankind? Can they be said to be incomplete because their works were not wedded to music? Still this was the principle which was the guiding beacon of the Wagnerian inspiration, and from that he never steered aside. The arguments of enthusiasm are sometimes hard to follow. We are warned that we must not look upon Wagner “as a poet and a musician as if he were in some monstrous way gifted with two extraordinary talents, but that the yearning for music in the deepest and most hidden depths underlies the poetical impulse, and that music which then pours forth from the poetry like perfume from the leaves and flowers of trees, is in very truth the informing though unseen sap of this tree.” Here, we are told, is the key to the understanding of this poet. And yet we have seen that the boy was first of all a poet, and that it was the poetic faculty which called forth the musical faculty! I find it difficult to reconcile the two ideas. Apart from the merits of his work, the great gulf which separates him from all other composers lies in the fact that whereas before him there have been great poets and great musicians—Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, and others—it was in Wagner that for the first time the genius of music and the genius of poetry were united. But it was not until he had discovered his power in poetry that his power in music was revealed to him. This seems to me unanswerable. But there is further evidence to be brought forward in the shape of his own _Frederick Barbarossa_. Here was a work which, when he had completed it, he found to be unsuited to music: it failed to inspire him and so it remained unwedded. That teaches us much in regard to the relationship between poetry and music in Wagner—not all poetry was to be expressed in music. We must return to this question later.