point of view, one idea seized hold on him—–­ the idea that those who did not like his music were in a pitiable condition, and compassion exhorted him to rescue them, to redeem them.  He meant to heap coals of fire upon a generation that refused to recognise him as a prophet.  He did it—­with a double vengeance:  he made the detractors come to his knees and he made a fortune out of them—­them alone.  For Bayreuth never became a profitable investment for Jewish money until the one great Christian drama of modern times was produced there.

Parsifal, in one form or another, had long fermented in Wagner’s brain.  At first it was—­incongruous though the thing may seem—­either Jesus of Nazareth or Wieland the Smith; then Parzival grew out of the Siegfried idea; and at length, stimulated by the attentions and help of poor Ludwig, he settled on Parsifal.  These are matters not of opinion, but of historical fact.  Ludwig, when not masquerading in woman’s clothing, or ordering it from Paris, or appearing at private performances in one opera or another, suffered from great attacks of religion; and, unhappily for the art of music, what appealed to his diseased brain from one side appealed to Wagner’s tired brain from the other side.  Ludwig asked him to complete Parsifal and he did so.  I doubt whether without the royal request he ever would have done so.  But in doing so he, as Americans say, “struck lucky.”  Throughout Western Europe you have only to bawl the word “religion” and your fortune is made; in America it is the same; on the two continents innumerable fortunes have been made by bawling the word “religion.”  So Wagner’s conviction, Ludwig’s desire, and advertisement possibilities, all coincided; and thenceforth Bayreuth flourished—­financially, if not artistically or morally.

I shall devote little attention to Parsifal.  The plot would disgrace Wagner’s memory if we did not know it to be the work of his tired-out old age.  The central idea is that of Renunciation; and I will give the reader a skeleton, but a fair skeleton, of the plot, and ask him, Who renounces anything? who gains anything by renouncing? or loses anything by not renouncing? and, above all, what is any one called on to renounce?

At the Montsalvat of Lohengrin—­ah! what a different Montsalvat—­Amfortas, lord of the tribe of monks, has flirted with a lady, and a magician, Klingsor, has seized the sacred spear with which Christ’s side was pierced and inflicted on Amfortas an incurable wound.  That is the state of affairs when the curtain rises.  Gurnemanz, a faithful warder, talks with sundry squires, not yet fully degraded to the order of knighthood, and tells them how through a certain wondrous woman Amfortas fell from his high estate.  The wondrous woman, Kundry, disguised as a sort of Indian squaw, enters, coming, she says, from far lands; exhausted, she flings herself in a thicket to sleep—­sleep—­she