“6. This is defined only according to the inner meaning of that which is to be expressed, so far as this grows from a matter of understanding to a matter of feeling—an inner meaning which can only be grasped by the understanding remains only expressible by the language of words, but the more it extends to a movement of feeling the more explicitly it needs a means of expression with which the language of music alone can furnish it. (Conclusion from these premises.) Here then is clearly defined that which the word-and-tone poet has to express: it is the purely human set free from all conventionality (from all that which is formal and historical).” Such are the principles upon which the second half of Wagner’s work, that which was carried out after 1848, is based; at least such is Wagner’s own setting forth of those principles. How far these views, so confidently laid down as artistic canon law, are justified by his own creations and by those of others is a question capable of being debated. Wagner’s own work is not uniformly in consonance with them. If the historical and the formal are to be shut out from the realm of music as unfitting, how can we account for so grand a conception as _Rienzi_, a work at least as historical and formal as the discarded _Barbarossa_? If nothing conventional is to be portrayed, what is to be said of the _Meistersinger_, one of the greatest of all Tone-Dramas, though it is throughout a picture of medieval middle-class life in Germany? Divest it of the poet’s inspiration and of the magic charm of music and it sinks at once into the commonplace from which genius has lifted it. As a matter of fact there is no phase of man’s life and man’s activity so prosaic that “das rein-menschliche,” the purely human or ideal, is not in some shape or other contained in it. To amplify Schopenhauer’s dictum, music cannot describe a cathedral with its apse, its nave, its clerestory, its towers; but it can and does describe the spirit of piety which raised that monument of faith; and it is conceivable that a great tone-poet, such as Beethoven, should even describe in music the act of building it. Wagner himself described the forging of the sword by the Dwarf. He could not in the language of music have portrayed the sword when forged. The question is to find the ideal wherever it may be hidden. Wagner found it in _Rienzi_ and in the _Meistersinger_: he failed to find it in _Barbarossa_. Here surely is one of those arbitrary contradictions with which we occasionally meet in men of transcendent genius. It is only the smooth man of average brains that is uniformly consistent. The triumph of the ideal is revealed in the _Ring des Nibelungen_, which is wholly Fairy Tale, and in _Parsifal_, which is wholly Worship. In these as poet and as musician Wagner reaches his highest achievement—poetry and music are united in an indissoluble wedlock; the senses are enthralled, and the world bows before the great wizard.