That is different from the "wilful misunderstanding" Wagner moaned about. These musicians could not help themselves; as Sancho Panza remarks, "Man is as God made him, and generally a good deal worse." The essay which provoked the widest and fiercest hostility, especially amongst the Jews, was the _Judaism in Music_. Wagner started from two premises, (i) That the Jews, being alien in thought and feeling, could not express themselves in _our (i.e._ German) art; and (2) that had they thought and felt like Germans, they would have succeeded no better; for music--that is, song--is idealized speech, and the gurglings and bubblings which do duty for speech with the Jews cannot be idealized into anything beautiful. The answer is that very great music has been written by Jews; that music was an English, a Flemish and an Italian art before the Germans knew anything about it; that if music must be idealized German speech, with its guttural chokings, the less we have of it the better. The Jews paid little attention to Wagner's arguments, but objected to his "personalities." Now, the reader must have observed that of all people practical jokers are those who can least tolerate a practical joke played at their own expense, and that those whose staple of conversation is banter or "chaff" become irascible the moment they are flicked with their own whip. For years Wagner had been the victim of unprovoked personal attacks in the Jew-controlled press, and some of the worst of these can be traced to Jew scribblers. Yet on the publication of _Judaism in Music_ in the _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_, a wail went up from these journalistic descendants of Elijah; and several prominent Jew musicians signed and presented to the authorities of the Leipzig conservatoire of music a petition praying that Brendel (the editor who published the essay) might be dismissed from his post in the conservatoire. These underhand tactics put the Jews out of court. Nevertheless, Wagner's essay was a bad mistake. It is bad science, bad history, bad argument; it did no person, no cause, any good, and it worked a very great deal of harm.