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.