to the treatment that is always accorded by one gentleman to another,
whether friend or enemy, so long as he does not disgrace himself.
Surely it ought not to be necessary to insist upon this before an
English public, but it has not always been observed.

Similar is the charge of "ego-mania," that is, of overrating his own
importance, so often heard. There cannot be any notion of his
_over_rating his importance, for all are now agreed that his
influence, whether for good or for bad, can scarcely be overrated.
Only society requires, very rightly, that a man shall speak of himself
and his achievements with a certain reticence, leaving it to others to
judge of them. Nowhere that I know of has Wagner offended against this
very proper rule. It has so long been the practice to represent Wagner
as a man of overweening vanity, a man who tried to exalt himself at
the expense of other artists, that some in England will not believe me
when I say that there is no foundation whatever for such assertions. I
only ask of those who think there is to read Wagner's own published
writings, and to judge from them, not from what is said about him. I
do not mean to say that he did not believe with the most intense
conviction in his own idea of a new German dramatic art, uniting the
separate arts in itself, and did not proclaim it as a thing of the
first national importance; every serious reformer believes in himself
in that sense. But that is not the same thing as asserting his own
powers to realize it. With regard to these he speaks very modestly of
himself as a beginner, a pioneer only. In fact the question of his own
particular genius is, he says, irrelevant, and has nothing to do with
the other one, adding rather cynically that genius is often given to
the wrong people.

It is in this sense that I understand the famous words of his speech