distinguishing marks of national character more in these
nonsensical minutiae than in the most important matters of
state."

That the task of reproducing these minutiae without doing too
much violence to the English idiom was an extremely difficult
one, the experienced reader need not be told. Liszt, it is true,
writes generally in a simple and straightforward manner, and his
letters, especially those written in French, present no very
great obstacles; but with Wagner the case is different. He also
is plain and lucid enough where the ordinary affairs of life are
concerned, but as soon as he comes upon a topic that really
interests him, be it music or Buddhism, metaphysics or the
iniquities of the Jews, his brain gets on fire, and his pen
courses over the paper with the swiftness and recklessness of a
race-horse, regardless of the obstacles of style and
construction, and sometimes of grammar. His meaning is always
deep, but to arrive at that meaning in such terrible letters, for
example, as those numbered 27, 35, 107, 255, and many others,
sometimes seems to set human ingenuity at defiance. It would of
course have been possible, by disentangling dove-tailed sentences
and by giving the approximate meaning where the literal was
impossible, to turn all this into fairly smooth English. But in
such a process all the strength and individual character of the
original would inevitably have been lost. What I have endeavoured
to do is to indicate the diction which a man of Wagner's peculiar
turn of mind would have used, if he had written in English
instead of in German.

To sum up, this translation of the correspondence is intended to