XVIII. CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE 230
5. THE LATER CONDENSATION OF THE LEIT-MOTIVE 277
6. SINGULARITIES IN HIS USE OF THE LEIT-MOTIVE 282
10. HIS POWER OF DRAMATIC CHARACTERISATION 302
11. THE PICTORIAL ELEMENT IN HIS MUSIC 307
12. SOME GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS STYLE 312
APPENDIX A. THE RACIAL ORIGIN OF WAGNER 326
SYNTHETIC TABLE OF WAGNER'S LIFE AND WORKS AND SYNCHRONOUS EVENTS 359
RICHARD AND COSIMA WAGNER _Frontispiece_ (_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner," published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)
WAGNER'S MOTHER _face page_ 26 (_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner," published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)
MINNA WAGNER " " 56 (_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner" published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)
WAGNER. From a photograph taken in Paris in 1861, with facsimile of signature " " 106 (_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner," published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)
WAGNER IN THE _TRISTAN_ PERIOD " " 144 (_By permission, F. Bruckmann, Munich._)
RICHARD WAGNER, 1877 " " 236 (_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner," published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)
RICHARD WAGNER " " 278 (_From the painting by H. Herkomer at Bayreuth._)
WAGNER: THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH " " 320 (_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner," published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)
LUDWIG GEYER " " 326 (_From Chamberlain, "Richard Wagner," published by F. Bruckmann, Munich._)
While there is at present no adequate Life of Wagner, there is probably more biographical material available in connection with him than with any other artist who has ever lived; and on the basis of this material it seems justifiable now to attempt--what was impossible until the publication of _Mein Leben_ in 1911--a complete and impartial psychological estimate of him. There has probably never been a more complex artist, and certainly never anything like so complex a musician. A soul and a character so multiform as this are an unending joy to the student of human nature. It has been Wagner's peculiar misfortune to have been taken, willy-nilly, under the protection of a number of worthy people who combine the maximum of good intentions with the minimum of critical insight. They have painted for us a Wagner so impeccable in all his dealings with men and women--especially women--a Wagner so invariably wise of speech, a Wagner so brutally sinned against and so pathetically incapable of sinning, that one needs not to have read a line of his at first hand to know that the portrait is a parody--that no such figure could ever have existed outside a stained-glass window, or, if it had, could ever have had the energy to impress itself upon the imagination of mankind even for a day. The real Wagner may be hard enough to disentangle from the complications and contradictions presented by his life, his letters, his prose works, his music, his autobiography, and the testimonies of his friends and enemies; but in the case of no man is the attempt better worth making. For the enduring interest of his character, with its perpetual challenge to constructive psychology, is in the manysidedness of it. The well-meaning thurifers who try to impose him upon us in a single formula as one of the greatest and best of mankind,[1] do but raise him to their own moral and reduce him to their own intellectual level, making their god in their own image, as is the way of primitive religious folk. The more interesting Wagner is the one who stands naked and unashamed before us in the documents of himself and others--equally capable of great virtues and of great vices, of heroic self-sacrifice and the meanest egoism, packed with a vitality too superabundant for the moral sense always to control it; now concentrating magnificently, now wasting himself tragically, but always believing in himself with the faith that moves mountains, and finally achieving a roundness and completeness of life and a mastery of mankind that make his record read more like romance than reality.