ouncing his intention to write this very opera, Wagner said:

"As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a
monument to the most beautiful of my dreams, in which, from beginning
to end that love shall be thoroughly satiated. I have in my head
'Tristan and Isolde,' the simplest, but fullest, musical conception.
With 'the black flag,' which waves at the end, I shall then cover
myself--to die."

The truth was that Wagner, as so many another creative genius, spent
his love chiefly upon the beings that he begot within his own heart.
Every genius is more or less a Pygmalion, and his own imagination is
the Aphrodite that gives life to the Galateas that he carves. I have
shown by this time that certain musicians have been most excellent
lovers, and there would be documents enough to prove Wagner another,
but we know it for a fact that his one great passion was for his art.
There is not recorded anywhere, I think, another such idolater of
ideals as Richard Wagner. To his theory of the perfect marriage of
music and poetry, he sacrificed everything,--his heart's blood, his
sensitiveness to criticisms, his extraordinary fondness for luxuries,
his sense of pride, and to these he added human sacrifice,--his wife,
his friends, and any one who stood in his way. He made himself a
pauper, and begged and borrowed every penny he could scrape from every
friend who could be hypnotised into supporting his creeds. As a result,
after years of humiliation such as few men ever did, or ever cared to,
endure, after a battle against the highest and the lowest intellects,
he attained a point of glory which hardly another artist in the world's
history ever reached. He reached such a pinnacle that critics were not
lacking who said that he often threatened to give Art a more important
place in the State than Religion.

Nothing but the most complete success, and nothing but the most
beneficial revolution could justify such a creed or such a life as
Wagner's. Both were eminently justified. He reaped a superb reward, but
he earned every mite of it. When his days of power and of glory came,
however, he spent them with another woman than the one who had gone
through all his struggles with him; had suffered all that he suffered,
without any aid from hope, without any belief in his personality or his
creeds, supported only on the courage and the dog-like fidelity of a
German _Hausfrau_ to her _Mann_.

Wagner was as plainly destined f