As regards his literary productions, that which provoked most discussion and engendered a good deal of acrimonious hostility towards him was “Judaism in Music.” No one knowing Wagner, and writing any reminiscences of him, no matter how slight, could omit reference to this subject. Any such treatment would be incomplete, though it would be easy to understand such omission, for no friend of Richard Wagner would elect to put him in the wrong, nor care to admit that his attitude towards the descendants of Abraham, in certain phases, was as unreasoned, and perhaps as ungenerous, as that of earlier anti-Semitic agitators of the fatherland. However, an impartial critic must confess that in Wagner’s attacks on the Jews and their treatment of art, he has, in much that he says, force and truth on his side. Unfortunately, much of the cogency of his reasoning is weakened in the eyes of many by the introduction of the names of two of his prominent contemporaries, Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, both of Hebraic descent. His attack is put down to personal spite, jealousy born of anger at the success of his rivals. Never was charge more groundless. Richard Wagner was high above such small-minded enmity. His was a nature incapable of mean, paltry envy. Rancour was not in him. Yet how could an attack upon “Judaism in music” be maintained without indicating Semitic composers, in whose works supposed shortcomings and spurious art were to be found? That he was not animated by any personal motive I am convinced, and that the things he wrote of lay deep, deep in his heart, I am equally persuaded. Finding in me a partial antagonist, he debated the question freely. Perhaps, too, it was a subject impossible of exclusion from our discussion, since, when he came here (London) in 1855, or three years after his Jew pamphlet had been published, the press spared not its sneers and satire for a man who only saw in the grand composer of “Elijah” “a Jew,”[7] the man Wagner, whom “it would be a scandal to compare with the men of reputation this country (England) possesses, and whom the most ordinary ballad writer would shame in the creation of melody, and of whose harmony no English harmonist of more than one year’s growth could be found sufficiently without ears or education to pen such vile things.”