it may be remarked, was a preciously comfortable one, and he made no pretence about it being anything else. He was a successful man of business; in spirit he was broken, exhausted, defeated. That is the first point to be considered; the next is a corollary. This man of dashed, broken hopes still needed the driving force of either human passions, griefs or sorrows, or of great human ideals, before he could compose ten notes. It is no desire of mine to scoff at the Schopenhauerian, Feuerbachian notions working in Wagner's brain when he planned the _Ring_, and wrote its finest music; in art--as in business, if it comes to that--one judges by results and results only. But we can see that it was these ridiculous ideas, as perhaps I have already pointed out, that were the postilion's whip to Wagner's Pegasus. Of some men it can be said that no one knows anything of the postilion's whip: of every artist concerning whom a fair tail of facts is available and consultable we find a very distinct whip. We may laugh at the idea of the "stories" to which Beethoven worked: who would laugh at the Fifth Symphony would not even be laughed at. And I have not the slightest hesitation in affirming that when Wagner set to work on _Parsifal_ his most eager and greedy desire was to show the world that he desired nothing. Knowing Bayreuth a failure, fancying his whole life a failure, from a particular point of view, one idea seized hold on him--- the idea that those who did not like his music were in a pitiable condition, and compassion exhorted him to rescue them, to redeem them. He meant to heap coals of fire upon a generation that refused to recognise him as a prophet. He did it--with a double vengeance: he made the detractors come to his knees and he made a fortune out of them--them alone. For Bayreuth never became a profitable investment for Jewish money until the one great Christian drama of modern times was produced there.