a formal way. Neither liked the other; neither liked the
other's music; their rivalry in London mattered not two sous to the
one or one pfennig to the other, but they were both disappointed men
seeking appreciation and approbation on the continent. Wagner had
tried in Paris and Berlioz had tried in Germany. Wagner worked
stubbornly the whole time, and was mightily glad to get back to Zurich
in July. The episode is of small importance in Wagner's life; but the
attitude of the Press naturally filled him with disgust. He said if he
had paid the critics he would have received "favourable notices," and
when I reflect on the smallness of the critics' official salaries and
the splendour in which some of them lived I cannot but think he was
right: the money necessary to keep up big establishments had to be
found somewhere--where?

During the next few years Wagner went many journeys, again mainly in
search of "cures," but never got far. He worked unceasingly at the
_Ring_, with the wildest plans in his head regarding performances. How
wild some of these must have seemed at the time may be judged from the
following paragraphs taken from a letter to Uhlig (Dec. 12, 1851).
This is, of course, earlier than the period we are now dealing with;
but he never departed from the idea, and it eventually took shape at
Bayreuth, a quarter of a century later. Here is the letter--

"For the moment, I can only tell you a little about the
intended completion of the great dramatic poem which I have now
in hand. Just reflect that before I wrote the poem, _Siegfried's
Death_, I sketched out the whole myth in all its gigantic
sequence, and that poem was the attempt--which, with regard to
our theatre, appeared possible to me--to give one chief
catastrophe of the myth, together with an indication of that
sequence.

"Now, when I set to work to write out the music in full, still
keeping our modern theatre firmly in mind, I felt how incomplete
the proposed undertaking would be; the vast train of events,
which first gives to the characters their immense and striking
significance, would be presented to the mind merely by means of
epic narrative.

"So to make _Siegfried's Death_ possible, I wrote _Young
Siegfried_; but the more the whole took shape, the more did I
perceive, while developing the scenes and music of _Young
Siegfried_, that I had only increased the necessity for a