Though we could find nothing of interest to say about Rothenburg, we did not wish to leave the town in a slighting silence, so I asked Edward if he thought that living among medieval aspects influenced the children playing, and if it were possible to feel sure that the Rothenburg mind could be as effective in modern life as the Berlin, or the Carlsbad, or the Dresden? Edward replied that he did not know or care whether it would be as effective, but was quite sure that life in a medieval town could not fail to produce a beautiful mind, and a long discussion sprang up between us, I maintaining that it were better to live in a modern town like Düsseldorf, in which there is only one picture—Holbein's Holy Family—then to live in a medieval town like Rothenburg, where there are only roofs and lanterns; Edward declaring that art is traditional, and where there is no tradition there can be no art, and, though it was not likely that Rothenburg would produce an impressionist painter—

There is no saying that Rothenburg might not produce another Cranach, or, better still, another Luther. And you would not mind sacrificing some red roofs to save Europe from another heresy.

Edward did not like my remark. It proved my soul, he said, a shallow one, for whenever I was being cornered in an argument I tried to banter my way out.

Continue, my dear friend; but I don't see your point.

Nor do I see yours, he answered—I thought somewhat testily. Rothenburg is a Gothic town, and you don't approve of the Gothic. Is your proposal to turn the people out of Rothenburg and keep the place as a museum? You wouldn't destroy it, I suppose?

Destroy it! No, I answered. But if it can be shown that medieval surroundings are not altogether a healthy influence upon children, do you not think that some opportunity should be given to them for contrasting the old with the new, and that some part of the town, for instance, should be modernised?

It is possible that the reader will think that I was rather tiresome that day, but so was the train, and to while away the time there was no resource but to raise the question whether Rothenburg would have produced the same Edward as Galway. But the question did not succeed in provoking any of those psychological admissions that make him so agreeable a travelling companion. He was not in a communicative mood that afternoon, and to draw him out I was obliged to remind him that Bavaria is Protestant and Catholic, and strangely intermixed, for the two sects use the same church—service at eleven and Mass at twelve.

And you might have been brought up a Protestant, Edward, or half and half.

A grave look came into his face, and he answered that if he hadn't been brought up a Catholic, and severely, he might have gone to pieces altogether; and I sat pondering the very interesting question whether Edward would have done better as a Protestant than as a Catholic. Every man knows himself better than any one else can know him, and Edward seemed to think that he needed a stay. Perhaps so, but there is a vein of thought—perhaps I should say of feeling—in him which Catholicism seems to me to have restrained, and which Protestantism, I like to think, would have encouraged. The effect of religion upon character was worth considering, and as there was nothing else to do in the train I set myself to think the matter out.

But it is hard to set bounds on one's thoughts, and mine suddenly turned from Edward, and I found myself wondering if the great genius towards whom we were faring could have written The Ring in Rothenburg. Now this was a question which had to be put to Edward, and at once, and he applied himself to it, pointing out that Bayreuth was nearly as quaint and slumberous as Rothenburg, yet Wagner had written part of The Ring in Bayreuth. True that he had written parts of it all over Europe; some of it was written in Switzerland, some in Italy, some even in Dorset Square.

But if he had been born in Rothenburg and had never left it—

The noise of the train prevented me from catching his answer, and leaning back in my seat, I fell to thinking of the extraordinary joy and interest that Bayreuth had been in my life ever since Edward and I went there for the first time at the beginning of the 'nineties, after hearing a performance of The Ring in London.

It had been the horns announcing the Rhine that re-awakened my musical conscience. The melodies of my own country I had never heard. Offenbach and Hervé stirred me to music when we went to live in London, and I carried to Paris all their little tunes in my head. Painters are often more or less musicians: one such drifted into our studio, and he introduced me to the Circle des Merlitons, where I heard Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart. Classical music ousted operette without difficulty; and as long as there were musical friends about, music was followed with as much interest as could be spared from the art of painting. But when the maladministration of my affairs called me from Paris to Ireland musical interests disappeared with my French friends; they were driven underground when agrarian outrages compelled me to consider the possibility of earning my living. The only way open to me was literature, so I went to London to learn to write, as has been told in a chapter in an earlier book.

In London literature and poverty absorbed me for several years, and I had forgotten music altogether when Edward asked me if I would go to hear The Rhinegold. I had consented, regretting my promise almost as soon as it was given, for Wagner was reputed unmelodious and difficult to all except the most erudite, and fearing that I should be bored for several hours by sounds which would mean nothing to me, I began to seek for excuses, and to ask Edward if he could not dispose of the ticket he had taken for me. He could not do this, and as my plaints did not cease, he said to me, as we walked up King's Bench Walk:



The dark theatre reminded me of the rooms at exhibitions in which bad pictures are exhibited, no light showing anywhere except on the picture itself; but the moment the horns gave out the theme of the Rhine my attention was arrested, and a few minutes after it was clear that new birth awaited me. A day or two later I heard Tristan, and it so happened that there were performances at Bayreuth that year, so Edward and I went there together, and we have gone there many times since, each visit awakening every little musical faculty in me, and developing it; and though nothing can be created, a seed can be developed prodigiously, and a taste likewise, if the soil be fertile and circumstances fortunate. They were certainly favourable to my picking up this lost interest. Edward is a true melamonaic, loving all good music, and ready to travel anywhere to hear music; then there is Dujardin, who is always talking to me about music; his friends are musicians and whenever I go to Paris I am with musicians, talking about music when not listening to it, and once again my life began to unfold in a musical atmosphere. To feel one's life unfolding is joy. Life should never cease to unfold, and it will be time enough for Death to lower the banner when the last stitch of canvas is reached.

Now I was going to Bayreuth again, determined to understand The Ring a little better than heretofore. But was this possible? I can learn until somebody tries to teach me; all the same every man is at tether, and lying back in my seat in the train from Rothenburg, a little weary of conversation with Edward, I relinquished myself to regrets that my ear only allows me to hear the surface of the music, the motives which float up to the top, the transforming effect of a chord upon a melodic phrase. I can hear that Wagner's melodies arise naturally one out of the other. If I could not hear that every melody in Tristan rises out of the one that preceded it, Wagner would have written in vain, so far as I was concerned. My ear is but rudimentary, an ear that will seem like no ear to those who can hear the whole orchestra together and in detail, seeing in their mind's eye the notes that every instrument is playing. It is well to have their ears, but mere ear will not carry anybody very far; to appreciate music an intelligence is necessary; and those who are not gifted with too much ear can hear the music oftener than those who can read it. Last year in Paris Dukas told me he would not go to hear some music with me because he had read it, and having once read a piece of music there was nothing left in it for him.

So essentially human is Wagner that there is something in his art for everybody, something in his music for me, and a great deal for musicians; and besides the music, some part of which everybody except the tone-deaf can hear, there are the dramas, wonderful in conception and literary art; for him gifted with imagination there are scenes in The Ring as beautiful as any in Shakespeare; and were Dujardin pressed to state his real feeling on the subject he would affirm that nothing has been written in words as moving as the scene in which Brünnhilde tells Siegmund that Wotan is calling him to Valhalla. Not the music, Dujardin cries—it is not the music that counts, but the words. The music is beautiful, of course it is—it couldn't be else; but so intensely aware was Wagner of the poetry that he allowed it to transpire.

One can think about Dujardin and Wagner without the time appearing long; and I had forgotten a very important matter about which there had been a great deal of correspondence, till I was suddenly reminded of it by a slackening in the speed of the train.

At the time I am writing of, Bayreuth was an uncomfortable town to live in; it has changed a good deal within the last ten years, and in the twentieth century we get better food in the restaurants than we did in the nineteenth; bathrooms have begun to appear, the fly-haunted privy is nearly extinct, and this was the important matter that the slackening of the train's speed had reminded me of. We had written many letters, and had many interviews with the agent who apportions out the lodgings, and my last words had been to him, A clean privy! He had promised that he would see to it, but from the direction in which the coachman was driving us, it would seem that the desirable accommodation was not procurable in the town. It was Edward who noticed that our coachman was heading straight for the country, and standing up in the carriage, he began to expostulate—ineffectually, however, for Edward's German is limited and the driver only laughed, pointing with a whip towards a hillside facing the theatre, and there we saw a villa embowered and overlooking a corn-field, a lodging so delightful that I could not but feel interested in Edward's objection to it.

We shall be out of the way of everything, was all he shrieked.

But not out of the way of the theatre! I interjected. We shall walk through the corn-fields to it.

The theatre isn't everything.

Everything in Bayreuth ... surely.

He spoke of his breakfast. He wouldn't be able to get it. He must be near a restaurant, and the corn-field did not appeal to his sense of the picturesque as Rothenburg did. Despite my entreaty, he stood up again in the carriage, and began to expostulate with the driver again, who, however, only laughed and pointed with his whip, pouring forth all the while a torrent of Bavarian German which Edward could not understand.

How shall I stop him? he cried, turning to me, who can speak no single word of German. After mentioning this fact, I reminded him that the people in the villa were waiting for us, and for us to go away to the town without advising them might prevent them from letting their lodgings. I said this, knowing Edward's weak spot—his moral conscience. He fell to my arrow, answering quietly that he would willingly pay for the lodging on the hillside if I would only go with him to the town in search of another. To this I consented, unwillingly I admit, but I consented. My unwillingness, however, to live in the town, where all the decent lodgings had long ago been taken, became more marked when we were shown into a large drawing-room and two bedrooms, the cleanest we had ever seen in Bayreuth.

We shall want a room in which to write The Tale of a Town.

The mention of his play did not seem to soften Edward, and the landlord, an elderly man, who had relinquished me because I knew no German at all, attached himself to Edward—literally attached himself, taking him by the lappet of his coat; and I remember how the old man drew him along with him to the end of a passage, I following them, compelled by curiosity. We came to a door, which the old man threw open with a flourish, exhibiting to our enchanted gaze a brand-new water-closet, all varnish and cleanliness, and the pride of the old man, who entered into a long explanation, the general drift only of which pierced Edward's understanding. He says he has redecorated the privy for us at the special request of Mr Schulz Curtis. But if we pay him for his lodging!

No mere payment will recompense him. Remember he asked you if you liked the wallpaper. He may have spent hours choosing it.

But, blind to all the allurements of the checkered paper, Edward insisted on telling the landlord that he wished to live near a restaurant where he could get his breakfast. The German again caught him by the lappet of his coat, and there was a pretty German girl who knew a little English, the old man's daughter, smiling in the doorway, about whom I had already begun to think. But it was impossible to dissuade Edward, and we drove with our luggage here and there and everywhere, seeking a couple of rooms. It would be inopportune to describe every filthy suite of apartments that we visited; but it is not well, in a book of this kind, to omit any vivid memory, and among my memories none is more vivid than that of an iron railing dividing a sort of shallow area from the street in which some workmen were drinking beer, and of the kitchen beyond it. Uncouth women, round in the back as washtubs, walked about with frying-pans in their hands, great udders floating under blue blouses; and we followed a trail of inferior German cookery up a black slimy staircase to the first landing, where a bald-headed waiter, with large drops of sweat upon his brow, opened a door, exhibiting for our inspection two low-ceilinged rooms with high beds in the corners.

Ask him if we can have clean sheets. We have no others, the waiter answered.

As I moved towards the doorway, I heard Edward saying that the rooms would do us very well, and when I explained to him their disadvantages, he answered that he would be able to get his breakfast. To get his breakfast! The phrase seemed so Irish, so Catholic, that for a moment it was impossible to suppress my anger at Edward's unseemly indifference to my sense of cleanliness and comfort, and the women in the kitchen, the waiter, and the sheets horrified me, even to the extent of compelling me to tell him that I would sooner go back to England, giving up The Ring, Parsifal—

I would sooner sleep anywhere, Edward; in the streets! Let us get away. Perhaps we shall find—

No, you'll object to all.

But why, Edward, should you stay here? You can have breakfast at our lodging.

I shan't be able to get an omelette. Can't you understand that people have habits?

Habits! I said.

And then he admitted—it seemed to me somewhat unwillingly, no doubt because he was talking to a heretic—that the villa under the lindens was two miles from the chapel, and that he liked to go to Mass in the morning.

I see; it is the magician and his house that tempts you.

If you talk like that you'll make me regret I came abroad with you.

But, unable to restrain myself, I added:

The desire to have a magician always at one's elbow is extraordinary.

I know the value of such talk as that, he growled, as we drove back to the villa, and he seemed so much put about that he gained my sympathy, almost to the extent of persuading me that I, and not he, was the inconsiderate one; and I began to defend myself.

It would have been impossible to eat anything that came out of that kitchen. The magician must have a very strong hold upon you to—

Edward is so good-humoured that one cannot resist the temptation to tease and to twit him, though one knows that one will regret doing so afterwards; and, sorry already, seeing how seriously he felt this unexpected dislocation in his habits, I began to think how I might be kind, and, rightly or wrongly, mentioned his play, asking him when he would like to consider it with me. Without answering my question, he went into his room and began to rummage in his trunk, coming back, however, with the manuscript, which he handed to me.



You don't want to alter that, do you? I thought it the best act—

He did not seem to appreciate my criticism or to pick up my suggestions. He was not very forthcoming, and we went to bed early that evening. He'll be in a more literary humour tomorrow morning, I said, before going to sleep, and looked forward to a long séance de collaboration after breakfast. But Edward would accept no breakfast in the house, only a cup of tea and a thin slice of bread and butter. He refused to ask the landlord's daughter, who attended upon us, if she could make an omelette, for some reason which it is impossible for me even to guess at. It would not be like him to go without breakfast, so that he might make me feel I had seriously inconvenienced him, and it seemed difficult to understand why he should refuse to breakfast in the house. The people were willing to cook him anything he wanted. Was he such a slave to habits that he had to breakfast in a restaurant? No, for when he was at home he had to breakfast in his own house. He would say that was different. So I was forced to fall back on the theory that he was annoyed because he would have to walk two miles to chapel to hear Mass. But when he was in Galway he did not go to Mass every morning. So why did he wish to go to Mass every day in Bayreuth? Why would he refuse to discuss the question any further, saying that it didn't matter, that it was all right, and, after sipping his tea, steal away for the greater part of the day, leaving me alone with The Tale of a Town? A séance de collaboration would have passed the morning nicely for me, and I muttered: He has taken his soul out, or his soul has taken him out. Would that his soul would betake itself to literature! He has gone away without saying a word about The Tale of a Town.

It did not strike me until late in the afternoon that he had gone away to avoid criticism of his play; but on reflection it hardly seemed necessary that I should accept literary sensitiveness as a reason for absence. Yeats had told him, and I had told him, and Lady Gregory had told him, that the play could not be acted by the Irish Literary Theatre in its present form. It would have to be altered, and at Aix-la-Chapelle, at Boppart, and at Mainz, and in the long train journey from Mainz to Nuremberg, he had seemed willing to accept some of my criticism as just. Et alors? Had he begun to examine my criticism, picking it to pieces, arriving gradually at the conclusion that it was all wrong, and that his play was all right? Or was it that he had persuaded himself that it were better to retain his own mistakes than to accept my suggestions, even if they were improvements? A view of art for which a great deal may be said when the artist has arrived at maturity of thought and expression, but a very dangerous one when the artist is but a beginner.



And while walking through the corn-field I remembered a letter to Bülow in which the Master says: One thing is certain—I am not a musician, meaning thereby that music was only part of his message. He tells in these words that his art enjoined separation from the drone of daily life, and that is why he chose Bayreuth, a small Bavarian town difficult to get at, but not impossible to reach. It had a train service even in Wagner's time, and there was a sufficient number of dirty inns and lodgings in the town to house the pilgrims. Humanity was an open book to the Master, and the hardships he was inflicting on his pilgrims he knew to be for their good, for it would induce in them the disposition of mind suitable for the reception of the sacramental Ring. And while building his theatre on the brow of the hill in the shade of the pines, there can be no doubt that he foresaw the added charm it would be to the pilgrim to leave the town and plod through the glare up the long street past the railway-station into the avenue of chestnut trees. He foresaw them, pausing in their ascent, leaning upon their staves; and the restaurant which he allowed to be built next his theatre is a tribute to his perfect understanding of men, for however beautiful his music might be he knew that none could listen to it for five hours upon an empty belly. He liked, I am sure, the little green-painted restaurant higher up the hill in the orchard close, and must have gone there himself and sat under the trees, drinking Rhenish wine mixed with cool water from stone jars. The Master, who thought of everything, must have foreseen the great charm it would be to walk through the pine-wood, seeing beyond the red bark of the trees the purple ranges of hills that enclose the great plain, slope after slope rising at evening, and no one too far distant for the eye to follow the noble shapes and all the delicate sinuosities travelling down the skyline. Every shape and every outline is visible between the acts of The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and the Götterdämmerung. The village standing in the middle of the plain is often lighted by a last ray. Between the acts an extraordinary harmony gathers; art and Nature abandon their accustomed strife, and with ears filled with calm, exalted melodies, our eyes follow the beautiful landscape in which Bayreuth stands.

There are off-days at Bayreuth when there are no performances, and these are pleasant days of rest, that give us time to think of what we have heard, and what we are going to hear, and time to stroll about the town admiring its German life. The town is more interesting than Rothenburg—to me at least—for it is less archaic. One cannot imagine oneself living in the fifteenth century, whereas one can imagine oneself living at the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth. Bayreuth is very yesteryear, suranné as the French say. A foreign word is a veiled face. The veil is often slight, but there is a veil always, wherefore we like foreign words—a weakness. The great gables which show themselves against the blue skies at Bayreuth mean more to me than the red-tiled roofs with the dormer windows in Rothenburg, for I can imagine myself born in Bayreuth, or growing up in it, and living there, seeing the Margrave and his court. It would be pleasant to live under the protection of a Margrave. One asks the name of the last, and wonders what he was like in his Schloss, a melancholy building full of tall official portraits and heavy German furniture, surrounded by gardens full of trees in which there is artificial water and swans. The year I am writing of the swans were followed by a brood of cygnets, and we used to watch these, not Edward and I, but myself and the daughter of a great painter, one who has inherited some of the intensity of her father's early pictures—a woman loving music dearly, and travelling with her husband in search of it.

It was pleasant to leave The Tale of a Town and visit her, and to walk about under the sunlit trees, or through the town, or to visit with her the old Court Theatre, perhaps picking up Edward on the way there and taking him along with us.

He will always go to see a building, and though we had both visited the Court Theatre many times before, it was pleasant to see it again, and she and he and I together admired its pillared front and its quaint interior, German rococo, clumsy, quaint, heavy, but representative of the German mind. And together we admired the gilded cupids, the garlands of flowers and the little boxes on either side of the stage, in which the Margrave's trumpeters used to appear to announce his arrival—a theatre not intended for the populace, but for the Court, containing only fifty or sixty stalls, beautifully designed and comfortable withal. The gilded balconies reminded us of drawing-rooms; we spoke of the courtly air of the theatre, now forbidden to the mime for many a day. A beautiful little theatre, we said—a theatre designed for the performance of Mozart or Gluck's operas, and I think Edward would have given up some performances of Parsifal to hear Gluck or Mozart in this out-of-date theatre.

In the afternoon my friends suggested to us that we should accompany them to a village some six or seven miles distant, and we went there in a carriage drawn by two long-tailed Bavarian horses, that drew us slowly but surely out of Bayreuth along smooth white roads, every one lined with apple trees and loaded with fruit. It was a wonder to us how these trees were not despoiled by thieves, so easy would it be to carry away the fruit by night. In England, in Ireland, or in Scotland a great deal of fruit would certainly have been robbed, and we asked ourselves if the Bavarian peasants are more naturally honest than the English, or if it were mere custom that prevented the waggonner from gathering as many apples as he pleased. The lady's husband, who is a politician, suggested that these wayside trees belonged to the community, and he is no doubt right; and we accepted his explanation that the honesty of the Bavarian is to be found in the fact that everybody shared in the fruit and, this being so, it was nobody's interest to strip the trees.

Behold the trees, and the long undivided plain stretching away to the foot of the hills, without wall or hedge, and we asking ourselves how do the peasants distinguish between the different farms, somebody telling how one of his farmers had called another to admire a fence he had put up between their lands. I'd like the fence, aye, twice as well, if thee 'ad not taken in some six or seven inches of my land. In our appreciation of the German landscape there is to be reckoned our disappointment at seeing nowhere beautiful English trees—ash, elm, beech, and oak—only the pine, and we, being tree-lovers, think the pine a tedious tree, if it can be called a tree; it isn't in our apprehension of one, only being intended by Nature for what the French call bois charpentier. No man would care to sit under a pine (and a woman still less), needles underfoot and needles overhead. To us English folk the beauty of a wood is as much in the underwoods as in the tall trees, and the pine allows no underwood. In a pine wood one meets few birds. A goshawk, startled from the branches, flees quickly down the long aisles. The pine is cultivated in Germany; the unfortunate pine, ugly by nature, is made still more ugly by cultivation. Pines cover the lower hills, forming black stains in the landscape and disfiguring their purple.

The long-tailed Bavarian horses walked up some steep ascent, trotted down a hill, at the bottom of which a pretty brook purls through an orchard, and the village was reached at last, built under the foot of a steep black hill, on which stand the ruins of a castle. There are paths through the woods, and one becomes conscious of the ceaseless change in human life as one follows the paths to the gateway of the robber-baron who lived there three centuries ago, defying Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, until his castle was battered with cannon. It was fortunate for Adolphus that he had cannon to batter it with, for without cannon he would not have captured it.

We came upon a ravine, and on each hillside a wooden platform had been built; the orchestra playing in the pit between, no doubt, as in the theatre at Bayreuth. We strolled up and down the steep paths, wondering if players were heard from hillside to hillside, inclining to the belief that human voices would not carry so far, and to put the natural acoustics of the wood to the test, some went to the other hillside and spoke to us. But what play had been acted in this wood? Somebody suggested a miracle play, and leaping at the suggestion, I spoke of the miracle plays in Oberammergau.

Some pious people of your sect, Edward, I said, taking his arm, who would set Asiatic Gods against native divinities.

My aphorism was not at first understood, and I explained it—how Bavaria comprises two spectacles: the Asiatic Gods in the South on the Tyrolean frontier, while the original Rhine Gods display themselves in the North at Bayreuth—Wotan, Loki, Donner, Froh, and the Goddesses Frika, Erda, and Freia. My remark had some success, and we walked on, wondering how it was that this division of the deities had not been remarked before. All were interested except Edward, who said he did not care to listen to blasphemy.

But, my dear Edward, it cannot be blasphemy to tell the truth, and surely the Gods that Oberammergau exhibits are Asiatic. And there can be no doubt that the Gods that Bayreuth exhibits are German and Scandinavian; and I pressed Edward to explain to me how a mere statement of fact, the truth of which could not be contested, could be called blasphemous, falsehood being implicit in every blasphemy. To escape from this quandary Edward began to argue that the Rhenish Gods had come from Asia, too, by way of Scandinavia, finding solace, apparently, in the belief in the Asiatic origin of all Gods. We laughed at this novel defence of divinity.

It is like China tea, I answered, only grown in Asia. Somebody else spoke of Havana cigars, and very soon all the life died out of the argument. We were but vaguely interested in it, for none amongst us, perhaps not even the youngest, was entirely free from the thought inspired by the empty platforms. We were all thinking how every generation is but a pageant, that all is but pageant here below. Part of our excursion was already behind us, and in later years how little of it would be remembered! Such philosophies are soon exhausted, and we sympathised with a lady who was anxious about her daughter and husband. They were walking in the woods, and she feared they might be overtaken by the coming darkness. But we assured her there would be light for many hours still, and whistled the motives of The Ring....

We returned through the hilly country, with the wide, sloping evening above us, and apple-trees lining the roads, all the apples now reddened and ready for gathering. We admired the purple crests illuminated by the sunset, as millions of men and women had done before us, and as millions of men and women shall do after us. Voices dropped and faces grew pensive. We asked if we should ever meet at Bayreuth again, and our thoughts turned towards the great Master lying in his grave, whose dreams had given us such sweet realities.

Too soon over, somebody said. In a few days Bayreuth would be deserted like the platforms we found in the wood. The long distance we had come was mentioned, and somebody asked if the pleasure we had received were worth the journey. The answer made to this—and it was a woman who made it—was that the journey would be more real in six months' time than it was today, and picking up the thought, I answered quickly:

So you think that we must live not so much for the moment as for the sake of the memory of it?

Somebody answered that memory was, perhaps, half of life and this was denied.

He who cannot enjoy things as they go by is but a poor companion.

A poor lover, I interjected. And soon after found myself arguing that the great gift Nature has bestowed upon woman is the power of enjoying things as they go by—a great gift truly it is, and sufficient compensation for lack of interest in religion and morals. It may be that that is why women have not written a great book, or painted a great picture. Or invented a religion, some one added.

Women are not idealists, Edward said, speaking out of his remembrance of his play The Heather Field.

In the evening we were all going to the house that Wagner had lived in, and in which he had written the last act of Siegfried, the Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal. Every one who goes to Bayreuth is asked there if he leaves a card upon Madame Wagner. Such, at least, used to be the custom. One presented an invitation card at the door and walked about the music-room and into Wagner's library. Edward was much moved to see the Master's books and his writing-table. Things interest him more than human beings, whereas Wagner's books and writing-table merely depressed me, and refusing to follow Edward to the grave, I sought for a friend who might introduce me to Madame Wagner.

A tall, thin woman, nearer sixty than seventy, very vital, with a high nose like her father's, came forward to meet me, full of cordiality, full of conversation and pleasant greeting. Liszt lives again in her, I said, the same inveigling manner; she casts her spells like her father, and—Well, there is no way of telling my impression except to tell the thought that passed through my mind: it was, But how is all this to end? Am I going to run away with her? And when we arrive somewhere, what am I to do with her? A woman nearly seventy years! And I thought what an extraordinary fascination she must have been when she heard Tristan for the first time, and felt she could no longer live with Bülow.

It is always pleasant, she said, to welcome to Bayreuth strangers who come to hear our art.

The arrogance of the expression amused me; but after all, music is the art of Germany just as poetry is the art of England; and feeling in the next five minutes that I must either take her hand or interrupt the conversation, I chose the latter course, and asked her to introduce me to her son. She hastened to comply with my wish, and put herself to some trouble to find him. He was found at last, and I was introduced to him.

My impression of Madame Wagner is compressed in the Am I going to run away with her? And the same words, with a change of preposition and pronoun, will describe the impression that Siegfried Wagner produced upon me. The son is the father in everything except his genius—the same large head, the same brow, the same chin and jaw. A sort of deserted shrine! I cried to myself and gasped for words.

Van Roy was singing at the time, and I succeeded at last in asking Siegfried Wagner who had composed the song.

I do not know, but it should be by Grandpapa Liszt.

I bowed, thanked him, and moved away, glad to escape from his repelling blankness. Shyness it may have been, or perhaps boredom. If we had met at Venice or in London—anywhere except in that crowd, we might have become friends. So I was glad to meet him on the bench in front of the theatre, and to find him slightly more forthcoming than he had shown himself to me in his mother's house. We spoke about his opera, and about Ellis, who had translated his libretto, and for a moment it looked as if we were going to know each other, to become acquainted, for in answer to my question whether he thought it was of advantage that the musician should write his own libretto, he answered that he thought it was, for while writing the libretto the musician sang his first ideas of the music.

Meeting me again on the same seat at the same hour, he asked me why I was not in the theatre, and it only occurred to me to tell the mere truth, that I came to Bayreuth to hear The Ring and not Parsifal. Perhaps if you knew the score of Parsifal.

I can never know a score, for I'm not a musician, but I've heard it many times, and it makes no personal appeal as do the other works.

The explanation was received in silence, and I thought how I might have better explained my position if I had said that, though I recognised Milton to be a great poet, he wrote in vain so far as I was concerned. But Siegfried's manner checks the words upon one's lips, and the people began to come out of the theatre soon after.

We parted, and all the way to the café where Edward and I went to have supper I turned Siegfried over in my mind and understood him to be a man of talent, for he is the son of a man of genius. One must be a man of talent to conduct The Ring as I had heard him conduct it, bearing the last scene of The Valkyrie along with him like a banner. A man of talent, the son of a man of genius, without sufficient vitality to be very much interested in anything; his life a sort of diffused sadness like a blank summer day when the clouds are low; and he must be conscious, too, that there is no place on earth where he can lay his head and call it his own.

If the physical resemblance were not so marked, I said to myself as we entered the café.

That little café! What enchanting hours Edward and I have spent in it between half past ten and in the morning, amid beer and cigars and endless discussions as to the values of certain scenes and acts, of singers and conductors! The year that I am now referring to, Parsifal was conducted in turn by Fischer, Mottl, and Seidl, Wagner's favourite pupil and disciple. He sat in the far end of the café by himself, and I often wondered why his society was not more sought after. Although he was an old man, and in declining health, it was a pleasure for me to sit with him and engage him in conversation, telling him that under his direction the first act of Parsifal played ten minutes quicker than it did under Mottl, and that Mottl was five minutes quicker than Fischer.

So much as that?

Yes, I took the time. And how much better I like your conducting of The Flower Maidens! Mottl gets a crescendo in the middle.

Whereas there is no necessity. It goes as well without, doesn't it?

A thin, spare man, quiet, speaking but little—a kindly man, as the reader has already guessed from the few phrases exchanged between him and me, and an unassuming man, apparently taking a pleasure even in such appreciations as Edward's and mine; a man between sixty and seventy, at the time I am speaking of, and as I write this line I can see his small, refined features and his iron-grey hair, which once must have been black. My thoughts pause, and I like to indulge myself in the regret that I did not walk home with him in the evenings to his lodgings. He might have asked me to come to see him in the morning, and over the piano, perhaps, would have told me many things regarding his relations with Wagner and his understanding of the music, and things about himself, for Seidl lived among great men, and was easily inveigled in the confessional.

He died a year or two later, and the café is no longer as attractive as it was when all the actors came down from the theatre to eat their supper there. Klafsky was my first Brünnhilde; when she died Gulbranson took her place, and the moment she came into the cafe all eyes went towards her, and I may say all hearts, for very soon a beautiful smile would light up a round, rosy, very ordinary face, suffusing it, transforming a plain woman into one to whom one's heart goes instinctively, convinced that all that is necessary to be happy is to be with her.