but may here anticipate by saying that the nature of music is to
assimilate the elements with which it is joined; the hearer may,
within certain broad restrictions, put into it whatever he likes, and
will therefore hear in it the reflection of himself. This is why
different people hear such different things in the same music. If a
man hears sensuality in the _music_ of, let us say, the second
act of _Tristan und Isolde_, it is his own interpretation.
Another hears something very different, an anticipation of eternity,
of that world beyond which the lovers are about to enter to be united
with each other and with all nature in a higher love of which all
earthly love, with its degrading garment of sensuality, is but the
debased image. The music by itself will bear either interpretation;
each hearer will find in it just that which he looks for and can
understand. But when the words are added the meaning is clear. People
are not "sensual" when death is right before them, as it is here. I do
not wish to be understood as meaning that Wagner excluded sensuality
from his works, or that he did not treat the most universal and most
ungovernable of human impulses in accordance with its character. The
drama must include everything human, and when passionate sexuality is
a necessary part of the dramatic development, Wagner no more shirks it
than did Shakespeare or any other great dramatist. But Wagner always
treats it with such consummate grace and refinement that it ceases to
be repulsive and appears in its own uncorrupted beauty, as in the
_Venus_ music and in the flower-maiden scene in _Parsifal_. Only to
the impure are the senses impure.

An unbiassed consideration of all that is known about Wagner's life
will acquit him of all the graver vices, unless a propensity for
living beyond his income be reckoned as such. Whatever his faults
there was nothing dishonourable or mean about them, and he is entitled