Wagner as I Knew Him

WAGNER AS I KNEW HIM
BY FERDINAND PRAEGER NEW YORK LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 15 EAST SIXTEENTH STREET 1892
Copyright, 1892, By CHARLES J. MILLS.
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL OF DYSART, President of the London Branch of the United Richard Wagner Society.
THE EARL OF DYSART.
My Lord:—
If an intimacy, an uninterrupted friendship, of close upon half a century during which early associations, ambitions, failures, successes, and their results were frankly discussed, entitles one to speak with authority on Richard Wagner, the man, the artist, his mental workings, and the doctrine he strove to preach, then am I fully entitled so to speak of my late friend.
To vindicate Wagner in all things is not my intention. He was but mortal, and no ordinary mortal, and had his failings, which will be fearlessly dealt with. My sole purpose is to set Richard Wagner before the world as I knew him; to help to an honest understanding of the man and his motives as he so often laid them bare to me; and I unhesitatingly affirm that, when seen in his true character, many a hostile, plausible, and unsparing criticism, begotten of inadequate knowledge or malice, will shrivel and crumble away when exposed to the sunlight of truth.
The daring originality of Wagner’s work could not help provoking violent opposition. Revolution in art as in aught else has ever been wedded to storm and tumult.
Of all things, Wagner was a thinker. The plot, construction, and logical development of his dramas, the employment of those wondrous character-descriptive tone-themes, their marvellous combination, his ten volumes of serious matter, especially “The Work and Mission of my Life,” emphatically testify to his deliberate studied thinking, and friend and foe alike readily acknowledge the originality of his thought.
Here then entered the art world, in the person of Richard Wagner, a quite natural subject for discussion. Here was a thinker, an original thinker, and Carlyle says that “the great event, parent of all others, in every epoch of the world, is the arrival of a thinker, an original thinker.” No matter for marvel, then, that the air thickened with criticism as soon as the Thinker proclaimed himself.