o the
senses; it must be born in the imagination of the beholder,
although begotten by the work of art.--SCHOPENHAUER.

Wagner's achievement can be attributed, in part, to a certain quality of
intellectual receptivity, by virtue of which he was enabled to
appropriate to himself the genius of two of his predecessors for whom he
had a special affinity. His epoch-making work was rendered possible
through Shakespeare and Beethoven, who served him as models all his
life.

Every great achievement is referable to some preceding one often quite
as great but more obscure. No man stands alone in his deed. The doer of
every great work has been helped thereto by his predecessors working the
same soil. The greater the performance, the more prominently this comes
out sometimes, as in the case of Shakespeare whose indebtedness to
Christopher Marlowe and others will at once come to mind.

To Beethoven and to Shakespeare, Wagner paid tribute on all occasions.
Especially is this true in his relation to Beethoven, to whom he readily
yields the palm in the realm of music. In the eight volumes of his
_Gesammelte Schriften_, no single fact stands out more clearly than his
recognition of Beethoven as his chief, his master, from whom proceeds
all wisdom and knowledge and truth. One can hardly read any of Wagner's
prose writings without seeing how readily he falls into the place of
disciple of Beethoven. "I knew no other pleasure," he says in A
Pilgrimage to Beethoven, "than to plunge so deeply into his genius that
at last I fancied myself become a portion thereof." The Pilgrimage,
though an imaginative work, is the medium he employed to give utterance
to his regard for Beethoven. His letters to musical friends, to Liszt,
to Fischer, especially those to Ulig, are filled with praise of the
older master. In a letter to Meyerbeer, in 1887, he states how he came
to be a musician. "A passionate admiration of Beethoven impelled me to
this step." The only one who was good enough in Wagner's eyes to be
compared with Beethoven, was Shakespeare. These two names are frequently
brought into juxtaposition in his works. No musician is worthy of
comparison with his demigod. "Mozart died when he was just piercing into
the mystery. Beethoven was the first to enter in," he says in his
Sketches. As if even this praise were too great, he severely criticises
Mozart's operas and symphonies elsewhere.

The deferential attitude which Wagner assumes towar