Those, perhaps, of the period 1867-77 were justified in pressing their
master's claims on the public at large, for the support of the public
at large had to be won, and the best way of winning it seemed to lie
in advocating those claims, in season and out of season, through the
agency of the newspaper-press; but the rest of the herd have proved
themselves an unqualified nuisance and a hindrance to a right
understanding of Wagner.

This herd I would not willingly join. In the following pages no
general theory concerning Wagner will be found. I shall indulge in no
theorisings whatever, but stick to the facts, facts which can now be
ascertained with certainty. My endeavour will be to tell a plain,
unvarnished tale of what Wagner did and of what he suffered, of the
environment amidst which he grew up and laboured and struggled: with
all that he said and wrote I shall deal as briefly as may be,
regarding his endless loquacity of mouth and pen as of interest only
when it throws real light on the artist. Least of all shall I waste
the reader's patience on the morals that may be drawn from his musical
works. The moral to be drawn from his prose works is simply that a
man, even a stupendously great man, may write far too much; the moral
to be drawn from his musical works every man may find out for himself:
for myself, I have found none, any more than I could ever find a moral
in a play of Æschylus or Sophocles or Shakespeare.

There are plenty of authorities for the statements now to be made. We
have the exhaustive _Life_ by Glasenapp and W. Ashton Ellis; then
there is Wagner's own work, _My Life_, lately translated into
English; finally there are the _Letters_. Many of these are of no
interest or value whatever, dealing only with details concerning
scores and proof-sheets and petty money matters. Many, on the other