No man that ever lived was so fitted both by nature and by experience to appreciate the true functions of the drama as Richard Wagner—he was born a poet, he was cradled in the theatre, his classical education, “the education of a gentleman,” as Leighton put it, opened out to him the masterpieces of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. When under the spell of a distinctly felt want he took to music, behold! that was his birthright also—he was the child of the Muses. His long apprenticeship as Kapellmeister—conductor of the orchestra—in the Opera House at Dresden made him familiar with the operatic works of the great masters. But it taught him a great lesson: it showed him what was the true value of music, what was its relation to the sister art of poetry, and he, poet and musician as he was, learnt how to give the highest dignity to both. Their union was his task, and in 1848 he had come to the realization of the significance of that task, for he felt in the fullest degree the fetters in which the masters who preceded him had worked. He perceived that their noblest inspirations were only to be found in the expression of feelings: where they failed was when they attempted to describe facts. “Music,” said Schopenhauer, “never expresses a manifestation, but only the inner essence of all manifestations.” The key to Wagner’s music is to be found in the following propositions which he himself lays down as fundamental: “1. Feelings and sensibilities alone are what is to be expressed in the language of music. It expresses in the fullness of perfection the inner feeling of the purely human language set free from that language of words which has become the special organ of the understanding. “2. That which is impossible of expression in the absolute language of music is the exact definition of the subject of feeling and sensibility in which these reach a true reality. “3. The widening and extension of the musical expression consists in the winning of the power to indicate that which is individual and special with clear distinctness, and “4. The language of music can only attain this in its marriage with the language of words. “5. This marriage can only be successful when the language of music is at once joined to so much of the language of words as is in harmonious relation to itself; the union must go forward exactly in the direction where the language of words has itself already manifested an imperious necessity for true sensuous expression of feeling.