At every point Wagner’s reasoning goes to the ground.  His basic facts are no facts, and his reasoning is absurd.  All the essays on music and on drama and on the music-drama are as much an expression of himself as his music-dramas.  I have in earlier chapters gone so far as even to labour the point that he could not get on in music without the aid of drama; and as he could never look beyond himself nor imagine that what he could not do—­i.e. compose pure music—­some one else—­e.g. Schumann or Brahms—­could do, he went out with absolute confidence to persuade the world that he was right and all others were wrong.  To those who may be interested in the study of Wagner, the mighty creative artist, as a cerebral curiosity, I commend Mr. Newman’s book aforementioned.  Mr. Newman points out that Wagner was so magnificently self-centred that he attributed all opposition to “misunderstanding.”  To him it was incomprehensible that any one should say, “Yes, I perfectly understand your argument; but I beg leave not to agree with you.”  Any one who said that at once aroused his suspicions; such an one, thought Wagner, cannot possibly be sincere.  Hence the hot denunciations of all and sundry who differed from him; hence the nightmare phantom of an organized body of “persecutors.”  Had he not been blinded by his wrath, and looked a little closer, he might have seen that the persecutors, far from being an organized body or confederacy, were fighting angrily, bitterly, amongst themselves.  Many of them had this in common:  they could not understand and did not like Wagner’s music.  That is different from the “wilful misunderstanding” Wagner moaned about.  These musicians could not help themselves; as Sancho Panza remarks, “Man is as God made him, and generally a good deal worse.”

The essay which provoked the widest and fiercest hostility, especially amongst the Jews, was the Judaism in Music.  Wagner started from two premises, (i) That the Jews, being alien in thought and feeling, could not express themselves in our (i.e. German) art; and (2) that had they thought and felt like Germans, they would have succeeded no better; for music—­that is, song—­is idealized speech, and the gurglings and bubblings which do duty for speech with the Jews cannot be idealized into anything beautiful.  The answer is that very great music has been written by Jews; that music was an English, a Flemish and an Italian art before the Germans knew anything about it; that if music must be idealized German speech, with its guttural chokings, the less we have of it the better.  The Jews paid little attention to Wagner’s arguments, but objected to his “personalities.”  Now, the reader must have observed that of all people practical jokers are those who can least tolerate a practical joke played at their own expense, and that those whose staple of conversation is banter or “chaff” become irascible the moment they are flicked with their own whip.  For years Wagner