_Parsifal_ looking like a cheap bed-hanging.

Then take, again, the set forms. Wagner eliminated the double bars and
full stops, even as Beethoven had done, to an extent, in the "Heroic"
Symphony, where theme leads into theme without a break; but his music is
full of form, and also of forms, and the more he wrote the more careless
he became about keeping up an appearance of continuity when vital
continuity there was none. Wagner's forms were vaster than those of his
predecessors; but for all that they are there.

Wagner's essays are worth reading by those who have the time and the
physical and mental strength, if only because they reveal a man thinking
on wrong lines while he is doing on right ones; but they are terribly
long-winded, and many weary pages are devoted to demonstrations of the
obvious or the actually fallacious. Mr. W. Ashton Ellis has given many
years of a valuable life to translating them into something which is not
English and not German. For the ordinary music-lover I believe the above
summary will be sufficient to enable him to understand Wagner's aims at
this period, and we shall presently see how far he was able to attain
them, and to what extent they refused to be, and could not be, attained.
The most valuable of his writings are those on conducting and on
Beethoven. The latter has some bumptious and comical allusions to "world
conquerors," the Germans suffering badly at the time from an attack of
swelled head, subsequent to their defeat of the unhappy, unprepared
French.

At Zurich Wagner was occupied with a multiplicity of other pamphlets,
with conducting concerts, with his librettos, and so on. Hans von Bülow
came to him as a pupil, and proved a devoted friend, afterwards letting
him take his wife, Cosima, of whom he, Bülow, it is true, stood in no