which he has been accused are just those from which he was singularly
free. No charge has been more audaciously or persistently brought by
ignorant writers or believed by an ill-informed public in England and
America than that of morbid sensuality. Just as Wagner's dramas have
been called licentious, so his character has been described as
sensual, in defiance of easily ascertainable facts. Not long ago the
discovery was made that his health had been undermined by loose living
when he was young. It is easy to invent such charges, for which there
is not a particle of evidence, and unfortunately the reader is not
always in a position to verify the authorities, and naturally thinks
that the writer must have some ground for what he says. As a rule
these statements have originated with Ferdinand Praeger's book
_Wagner as I knew him_, a book which I am astonished to see still
quoted in England, as if it were an authority. I have not seen it, and
do not know what it contains. Its character was exposed by two
Englishmen, Mr. H. S. Chamberlain and Mr. Ashton Ellis, soon after its
publication in 1892, and it was consequently withdrawn from
circulation in Germany by its publishers, Messrs. Breitkopf und
Haertel. In England and America it still seems to be widely read, and
is, more than any other single work, responsible for the false notions
that are abroad about Wagner. Sensuality, that is in the morbidly
sexual sense of the term, was no part of Wagner's character, nor could
it be of the man who justly claimed that no poet had ever glorified
women as he had done. His Sentas, Elsas, Bruennhildes, and I must add
his Isoldes, rightly understood, afford the best answer to such
accusations.

"But," it is said, "his music is unmistakably sensual." I must defer
it to a future chapter to consider how far pure music, that is, music
apart from words, is capable of expressing a specific human quality,