es not worth repetition.
He was everywhere, of course, the musical lion. And, speaking of
animals, he always had a few: it had been a real grief to him some
years before when his parrot died when it had just mastered a passage
of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

When he finished _Tristan_ in August of 1859, his prospects were, so
to speak, as bright as before. It may here be mentioned, by way of
showing how bright that was, that when, four years later, an attempt
was made to give _Tristan_ at Vienna, the work was abandoned after at
least fifty rehearsals.

His letters, first to his faithful servitor Uhlig, who died in 1853 at
the age of thirty-one, and then to Fischer, are full of requests to
get scores copied, to send them here, there and everywhere, and to
collect honorariums. But, as I have said, for years he had hungry
creditors snapping at his heels, and they devoured most of the fruits
of his early genius. It is a fact to be faced that Wagner never in all
his life earned his livelihood. He earned more than average men
require to live comfortably upon; but he was unceasingly extravagant,
and denied himself nothing. He had been hungry in his early Paris
days; for the remainder of his life he bent himself to the task of
making up for that spell of famine. The precariousness of his income,
the insecurity of his position, fostered the habit of self-indulgence;
by nature the reverse of miserly, if he had money to-day he spent it,
reflecting that he might have none to-morrow. His debts, moreover,
were not entirely for what we may call personal extravagances. So
confident and sanguine was he that he had the full scores of his
operas published at his own expense; and the charges had to be met out
of what the operas brought him. And so when he had finished _Tristan_
in 1859 the outlook was of the blackest.

It was not less than a disaster that, during this period, 1849-59,
Wagner got to know the writings of Schopenhauer. In my first chapter I
pointed out how from his youth Wagner was fond of dabbling in
pseudo-philosophy, and this had strengthened rather than weakened its
hold on him as he grew older. For some time Feuerbach was his mentor.
It is idle to ask what he saw in Feuerbach. It has long been a
commonplace that rightly to understand an author you must meet him
half-way. Wagner did more than that: he went the whole way, and often
a long way beyond. What he read was not Feuerbach, but the thousand
ideas that the meres