e, we surmised. Yet we found ourselves convinced that it would
prove minor and unsatisfactory. For Wagner's music had for us an
incandescence which no other possessed. It was the magnetic spot of
music. Its colors blazed and glowed with a depth and ardor that seemed
to set it apart from other music as in an enchanted circle. It unlocked
us as did no other. We demanded just such orchestral movement, just such
superb gestures, just such warm, immersing floods, and were fulfilled by
them. That there would come a day when the magnetism which it exerted on
us would pass from it, and be seen to have passed, seemed the remotest
of possibilities.

For we accepted him with the world of our minority. For each individual
there is a period, varying largely in extent, during which his existence
is chiefly a process of imitation. In the sphere of expression, that
submission to authority extends well over the entire period of
gestation, well into the time of physical maturity. There are few men,
few great artists, even, who do not, before attaining their proper idiom
and gesture, adopt those of their teachers and predecessors. Shakespeare
writes first in the style of Kyd and Marlowe, Beethoven in that of Haydn
and Mozart; Leonardo at first imitates Verrocchio. And what the
utilization of the manner of their predecessors is to the artist, that
the single devotion to Wagner was to us. For he was not only in the
atmosphere, not only immanent in the lives led about us. His figure was
vivid before us. Scarcely another artistic personality was as largely
upon us. There were pictures, on the walls of music-rooms, of
gray-bearded, helmeted warriors holding mailed blonde women in their
arms, of queens with golden ornaments on their arms leaning over
parapets and agitating their scarves, of women throwing themselves into
the sea upon which ghastly barks were dwindling, of oldish men and young
girls conversing teasingly through a window by a lilac-bush, that were
Wagner. There were books with stories of magical swans and hordes of
gold and baleful curses, of phantasmal storm ships and hollow hills and
swords lodged in tree-trunks awaiting their wielders, of races of gods
and giants and grimy dwarfs, of guardian fires and potions of
forgetfulness and prophetic dreams and voices, that were Wagner. There
were adults who went to assist at these things of which one read, who
departed in state and excitement of an evening to attend performances of
"Di