Afterwards he removed to Paris, where in 1860 he gave some concerts; in the same year the score of Tristan was issued; next year came the Tannhaeuser fiasco at the opera, and later he heard Lohengrin, in Vienna, for the first time; next he stayed for a while at Biebrich, and finally settled in Vienna.

This is all the biography of ten of the fullest years of his life that we need trouble about at present.  His everyday existence is only diversified and variegated by little anecdotes not worth repetition.  He was everywhere, of course, the musical lion.  And, speaking of animals, he always had a few:  it had been a real grief to him some years before when his parrot died when it had just mastered a passage of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

When he finished Tristan in August of 1859, his prospects were, so to speak, as bright as before.  It may here be mentioned, by way of showing how bright that was, that when, four years later, an attempt was made to give Tristan at Vienna, the work was abandoned after at least fifty rehearsals.

His letters, first to his faithful servitor Uhlig, who died in 1853 at the age of thirty-one, and then to Fischer, are full of requests to get scores copied, to send them here, there and everywhere, and to collect honorariums.  But, as I have said, for years he had hungry creditors snapping at his heels, and they devoured most of the fruits of his early genius.  It is a fact to be faced that Wagner never in all his life earned his livelihood.  He earned more than average men require to live comfortably upon; but he was unceasingly extravagant, and denied himself nothing.  He had been hungry in his early Paris days; for the remainder of his life he bent himself to the task of making up for that spell of famine.  The precariousness of his income, the insecurity of his position, fostered the habit of self-indulgence; by nature the reverse of miserly, if he had money to-day he spent it, reflecting that he might have none to-morrow.  His debts, moreover, were not entirely for what we may call personal extravagances.  So confident and sanguine was he that he had the full scores of his operas published at his own expense; and the charges had to be met out of what the operas brought him.  And so when he had finished Tristan in 1859 the outlook was of the blackest.

It was not less than a disaster that, during this period, 1849-59, Wagner got to know the writings of Schopenhauer.  In my first chapter I pointed out how from his youth Wagner was fond of dabbling in pseudo-philosophy, and this had strengthened rather than weakened its hold on him as he grew older.  For some time Feuerbach was his mentor.  It is idle to ask what he saw in Feuerbach.  It has long been a commonplace that rightly to understand an author you must meet him half-way.  Wagner did more than that:  he went the whole way, and often a long way beyond.  What he read was not Feuerbach, but