nd the
gurglings and bubblings which do duty for speech with the Jews cannot
be idealized into anything beautiful. The answer is that very great
music has been written by Jews; that music was an English, a Flemish
and an Italian art before the Germans knew anything about it; that if
music must be idealized German speech, with its guttural chokings, the
less we have of it the better. The Jews paid little attention to
Wagner's arguments, but objected to his "personalities." Now, the
reader must have observed that of all people practical jokers are
those who can least tolerate a practical joke played at their own
expense, and that those whose staple of conversation is banter or
"chaff" become irascible the moment they are flicked with their own
whip. For years Wagner had been the victim of unprovoked personal
attacks in the Jew-controlled press, and some of the worst of these
can be traced to Jew scribblers. Yet on the publication of _Judaism in
Music_ in the _Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik_, a wail went up from these
journalistic descendants of Elijah; and several prominent Jew
musicians signed and presented to the authorities of the Leipzig
conservatoire of music a petition praying that Brendel (the editor who
published the essay) might be dismissed from his post in the
conservatoire. These underhand tactics put the Jews out of court.
Nevertheless, Wagner's essay was a bad mistake. It is bad science, bad
history, bad argument; it did no person, no cause, any good, and it
worked a very great deal of harm.

Wagner was at his best when writing about music or about musicians he
had known. A paper on Spontini, belonging to this period (Spontini
died in 1851), has a pleasant, generous note; and the account of the
pompous old gentleman's visit to Dresden a few years previous is
amusingly lifelike. The _Communication to my Friends_, a trifle
egotistical, is still full of interest. The article on musical
criticism is not so good as it might have been. Wagner had the utmost
contempt for the ordinary press criticism of the day: with that sort
of thing, he wrote Uhlig, one could not tempt the cat from behind the
stove. He knew what criticism should not be, but when he came to what
it should be his view was warped by the obsession that pure music had
reached its boundaries, and the future of music was involved with the
future of the music-drama. When his prejudices were not aroused, he
himself was the greatest critic who has lived: his