.

There remains one thing to mention of these first Zurich years: his
operas were gradually spreading through Germany, and, especially,
Liszt had produced _Lohengrin_ at Weimar in 1850. It quickly became so
popular that before long Wagner could complain, or boast, that he was
the only German who had not heard it. His movements during these years
can easily be traced. Zurich remained his headquarters, but he went
hither and thither, mainly in search of health. But the chief cause of
his ill-health he carried with him--his irrepressible activity of
mind. Could some intelligent doctor have given him a dose to stop him
thinking for not less than one month, he would, I verily believe, have
enjoyed ten years of unbroken freedom from sickness. These flittings
are of no great interest in themselves; he never got far until his
famous expedition to London in the summer of 1855. But now it is time
to take a glance at the writings of the period.

II

In the introduction I announced my intention of dealing with Wagner's
prose-writings only in so far as they reveal anything of value
concerning the artist. His theories have been explained and elucidated
to death; hundreds of books have been written about them; never was a
man so much explained; never did a man suffer more from the
explanations. The day when Wagner began, not to theorise, but to
publish his theorisings, was an unlucky one for him. He began with the
intention, and certainly in the hope, of making himself clear to
himself; as I have already remarked, he wanted to find what it was he
wanted to be at and how to get there; and if, having achieved his end,
he had put all his pages of reasoning in the fire, he would have done
himself no ill-service. But he needed money, and in the 'forties and
'fifties there were, strangely enough, numbers of people who would pay
money for such stuff. Anything dull, "philosophic" in tone, anything
full of long words, longer sentences, and meanings too profound to be
understood by mortal--anything of this sort was sure of a paying
audience, if small, in "philosophic" Germany, no matter how fallacious
were the premises, how wrong the history, how perverse the inferences.
Hundreds of people must have risen from reading Wagner's essays
feeling themselves very deeply intellectual. In his first Paris days
Wagner had at once flown to his prose-scribbling pen as an instrument
to procure him bread; now, in Zurich, while writing and arguing mainl