He was rather an undersized man with an uncontrollable temper.  As he let himself go in his music, so did he let himself go in his daily life.  To any but the most patient he must have proved an impossible personage; Madame Cosima Wagner must have possessed the temper of an angel and the understanding of an archangel to put up with him.  We see that every one did put up with him; every one who knew him had the same faith in his genius as he himself had; every one who knew him—­really knew him—­loved him.  Those who did not know him belaboured him in the press or by word of mouth, and much honour and profit did they get by it.  He stands unsmirched by the mud thrown by his detractors; he stands undamaged even by the adulation of his admirers.

Let us consider for a moment what the man’s personal character and momentum enabled him to achieve.  Finely endowed personalities like Mozart and Chopin did much:  did they write a Ring or a Tristan?  The question needs no answer.  Did they or the still mightier Beethoven dream of creating a Bayreuth?  In the midst of years of privation Richard Wagner planned and partly executed the Ring; he completed Tristan and the Mastersingers; as quite a young man he had dreamed of a Bayreuth; as an old man he turned his dream into a reality.  He had his lieutenants—­big men always have their lieutenants—­but the idea, the purpose, and the force behind were his and nobody else’s than his.  Bayreuth does not stand for very much to-day; in the ’seventies it stood for a fierce attack on the general sloppiness of opera performances all the world over, for the setting up of an ideal to which there is no parallel in the history of the art of music.  Nothing but the personal force of this one man accomplished this thing—­personal force accompanied by a wholehearted devotion to his art.  I suppose the inventors of steam-engines and the builders of giant dams have an ideal, too, in their crazy craniums, but they invent and work with a very definite idea of personal gain.  Wagner hoped for no gain, and he gained little, though, as I have said, as much as he wanted.  He was helped by the only noble-hearted king born into the nineteenth century; but he found that king and inspired him.  He risked everything for his idea; if his works have grown to be valuable assets since his death, they were not during his lifetime.  By unheard-of energy while suffering privation—­even of the ordinary necessities of life—­he went on and created masterpieces, and then by creating Bayreuth set up a standard of musical execution that no one before him had thought possible.  All the great conductors of the last fifty years are, musically, his offspring.  Without him we should have been without a Richter, or Richter’s introducer to the English, an Alfred Schulz-Curtius; without these two men we should have no Robert Newman or Henry J. Wood.  Wagner’s influence has been further-reaching than many of us think; and that influence was due not more to the consummate skill of the musician than to the character of the man.