realised he realised it at the first opportunity; if he saw it could not be realised he explained it in an article and left others to make the first effort at realisation. The man who created Bayreuth was not the man to imagine altogether vainly that he could, per favour of a king, whom he must have known to be utterly weak, turn some millions of citizens and villagers into an Utopian nation of art-lovers and so on. But hatred surrounded him everywhere; the machinery of the state came early to a standstill, and, finally, the king had to ask him to withdraw for a longer or shorter while. This is the plain truth of an affair concerning which there has been an immense amount of lying on both sides. The scandals about the personal relations of the king and Wagner I leave to the vampires; as for the gentry who will have it that Wagner was "persecuted" out of Munich by Jews, Christians, journalists and bank-managers, I leave them to anybody who likes to take them up. That Wagner had to quit Munich was a sad thing in his life--a very sorrow's crown of sorrow; and it was a bad thing for German music. It put back the clock many years. But, sad though it was for Wagner, in the long run it proved good for him. He would have composed little more in such a city--a city so misgoverned and misguided as Munich: his days would have been filled with bitterness, his nerves would have been quickly shattered by intrigues. He was now amply provided for; a villa--the celebrated "Triebschen"--was taken for him on the shores of Lucerne, and here he settled and remained for some years. Here he finished the _Ring_ and planned Bayreuth. Another thing which contributed to his unpopularity was his relations with his own and another man's wife. Hans von Bülow, his pupil, had married Liszt's daughter Cosima: that lady became infatuated with Wagner, and Wagner with her, and they virtually eloped together. Minna's cause was eagerly taken up by musicians, operatic people generally, and journalists, though none of them cared a rap about Minna. The most scandalous stories were circulated, and Wagner came to be thought not only a charlatan cadger living on the State funds, but one who used those funds to satisfy his carnal and other appetites. His silk dressing-gowns, his gorgeous apartments, his sybarite feastings, were the common talk of the newspapers: while he was slaving, as the saying goes, twenty-six hours out of twenty-four, the common fancy was taught to picture him as taking his ease in unheard-of luxury.