pleased himself he knew it would please Franz Liszt, and having pleased Franz Liszt he knew it would please all those as great, noble, excellent and pure in heart as Franz Liszt. To speak to an audience made up of such as Liszt, and have them approve, was the sublime dream and hope of Richard Wagner.

Some of the enemies of Wagner, having placed themselves on record against the man, have sought to make out that Wagner and Liszt often quarreled, but this canard has now all been exploded. Such another friendship between two strong men I can not recall. That of Goethe and Schiller seems a mere acquaintanceship, and the friendship of Carlyle and Emerson a literary correspondence with an eye on posterity, as compared with this bond of brotherhood that existed between Wagner and Liszt.

During the ten years of Wagner's exile in Switzerland he received barely enough from his work in music to support him, and several times he would have been in sore need were it not for the "loans" made him by Liszt. He did not even own a piano, and never heard his scores played, except when Liszt made a semi-yearly visit. At such times a piano would be borrowed, and the friends would revel in the new scores, and occasionally talk the entire night away.

When Liszt would go home after such visits, Wagner would go off on long tramps, climbing the mountains, lonely and bereft, sure that the mood for high and splendid work would never come again. Then some morning the mist would roll away, the old spirit would come back, and he would apply himself with all the intense fire and burning imagination of which his spirit was capable.

When the score was done it was sent straight to Liszt, before the ink was dry.

The "Lohengrin" manuscript was sent along in parts, and Liszt was the first man to interpret it. On one such occasion we find Liszt writing: "Your 'Walkure' has arrived—and gladly would I sing to you with a thousand voices your 'Lohengrin Chorus'—a wonder, a wonder! Dearest Richard, you are surely a divine man, and my highest joy is to follow you in your flight and be one with you in spirit!"

On this occasion, when the "Lohengrin Chorus" first found voice, the only auditor was the Princess von Wittgenstein, who added a postscript to Liszt's letter, thus: "I wept bitter tears over the scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde! This is beautiful—like heaven, like earth—like eternity!" Was ever a woman so blest in privilege—to be the near, dear friend of Franz Liszt and hear him play the music of Richard Wagner from the manuscript, and then add her precious word of appreciation for the work of the weary exile! The quotation given is only a sample of the messages that Liszt was constantly sending to his exiled friend. And we must understand that at this time Liszt had a world-wide reputation as a composer himself, and was the foremost pianist of his time. And Wagner—Wagner was only an obscure dreamer, with a penchant for erratic music!

The "Lohengrin" was produced at Weimar under the leadership of Liszt, but even his magic name could not make the people believe—the critics had their way and wrote it down.

Yet Liszt lived to see the name of Wagner proclaimed as the greatest contemporary name in music; and he was too great and good to allow jealousy to enter his great soul. Yet he knew that as a composer his own work was quite lost in the shadow of the reputation of his friend. At a banquet given in Munich in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-one in honor of Wagner, Liszt said, "I ask no remembrance for myself or my work beyond this: Franz Liszt was the loved and loving friend of Wagner, and played his scores with tear-filled eyes; and knew the Heaven-born quality of the man when all the world seemed filled with doubt."

mong men of worth, no man of his time was more thoroughly hated, detested and denounced than Richard Wagner. Before he became an anarch of art, he was singled out for distinction by royalty and a price was placed upon his head. He escaped, and for ten years lived in exile, his sole offense being that he lifted up his voice for liberty.

That is the only thing worth lifting up your voice, or pen, or sword for. The men who live in history are the men who have made freedom's fight—there is no other. These men fought for us, and some of them died for us—Socrates, Jesus, Savonarola, John Brown, Lincoln—saviors all—they died that we might live.

Instead of dying for us, Wagner lived for us, but he had to run away in order to do it. There, in exile—in Switzerland—he wrote many of his most sublime scores, and these he did not hear played till long years after, for although the man could compose, he could not execute. The music was in his brain and he could not get it out at his finger-tips—for him the piano was mute. So now and again Franz Liszt would come and play for him the scores he had never heard, and tears of joy would flow down his fine face; then he would stand on his head, walk on his hands and shout for pure gladness.

All this, I will admit, was not very dignified.

Ostracism, exile, hatred, and stupid misunderstanding did not suppress Wagner. In his work he is often severe, stern, tragic, but the man himself bubbled with good-cheer. He made foolish puns, and routed the serious ones of earth by turning their arguments into airy jests. If in those early days he had been caught and carried in the death-tumbrel to the Place of the Skull, he would have remarked with Mercutio, "This is a grave subject."

Finally, public opinion relaxed, and Wagner found his way back to Germany. He settled at the town of Bayreuth, and very slowly it dawned upon the thinking few that at Bayreuth there lived a Man.

Among the very first who made this discovery was one Friedrich Nietzsche, an idealist, a dreamer, a thinker, and a revolutionary. Nietzsche was an honest man of marked intellect, whose nerves were worn to the quick by the pretense of the times—the mad race for place and power—the hypocrisy and phariseeism that he saw sitting in high places. He longed to live a life of genuineness—to be, not to seem. And so he had wandered here and there, footsore, weary, searching for peace, scourged forever by the world's displeasure.

The trouble was, of course, that Nietzsche didn't have anything the world wanted. In the time of the Crusaders, the tired children would ask at night-time, when the tents were pitched, "Is this Jerusalem?"

And the only answer was: "Jerusalem is not yet! Jerusalem is not yet!"

In Wagner, Nietzsche felt that at last he had found the Moses who would lead the people out of captivity, into the Promised Land of Celestial Art.

Nietzsche came and heard the Wagnerian music and was caught as flotsam in its whirling eddies. He read everything that Wagner had written, and having come within the gracious sunshine of the great man's presence, he rushed to his garret and in white heat wrote the most appreciative criticism of Wagner and his work that has ever, even yet, been penned. This booklet, "Wagner at Bayreuth," is a masterpiece of insight and erudition, written by a man of imagination, who saw and felt, and knew how to mold his feelings into words—words that burn. It is a rhapsody of appreciation.

Art is more a matter of heart than of head.

The book had a wide circulation, helped on, they do say, by the Master himself, who confessed that in the main the work rang true.

The publication of the book sort of linked these two men, Wagner and Nietzsche. The