Why may genius do this, which is so uniformly fatal to the less gifted? It is because of its comprehensive grasp of logical sequence and its intuitive choice of adaptable means.
Ripe genius is a definite talent which has been subjected to exhaustive discipline, which is familiar with traditions, and takes full cognizance of pedantic forms, but is guided by an art feeling engendered by this knowledge, and not by the knowledge itself.
It is a law unto itself. It conceives a picture, a poem, or a musical sentiment, and communicates it to us through means that are often as unfamiliar as is the effect of the whole original; for it usually avoids the ruts of travelled ways, its clear view of the objective goal enabling it to follow the less frequented stream-side or mountain-top paths.
Wagner was, in the last thirty years of his life, a ripe genius. He was the sixth of our musical high-priests, and he filled the art temple with a characteristic song incense which will pervade its atmosphere as long as human passions continue to furnish art impulse.
There is a class of pedants who still take satisfaction in calling Wagner's music artificial; but these short-sighted critics cannot or will not properly survey the field of his activity and its fruits. No human mind could, unless impelled by natural, sequential feeling and virile imagination, write even one of his later dramas without manifold exhibitions of weakness in redundancies and lapses in significance. The fact that Wagner's works, from the "Meistersinger" on, show few, if any, such barren moments, adequately evidences their natural growth from musical germs.
A great creator always incites a large number of lesser lights to imitate his methods, but few of them do so successfully. Wagner is not, however, answerable for the vague effects of his dramatic means, when they are transplanted into Wagnerish overtures and symphonic poems. He evolved situations that made these means legitimate and significant; isolated, they fall into bizarre artificiality. Although we cannot fail to be influenced by the elements which Wagner added to tonal resources, they, like all other elements, must be applied because most adaptable to the development of the musical scheme in hand, and not because of their newness.
"A prophet is not without honor save in his own country." This was strikingly exemplified by the attitude of professional Leipzig towards Wagner during the earlier stages of his career. Leipzig was at that time regarded by the outlying world as the musical centre of the universe, a Mecca with a magic balm, dispensed by a priesthood whose Mahomet was Mendelssohn.
The town had been a prominent seat of learning since the first part of the fifteenth century, had possessed Bach as cantor of its "St. Thomas' school," had for a long series of years maintained its "Gewandhaus" concerts, and was the greatest of all book- and music-selling marts.
These circumstances combined to make Leipzig stand out in bold relief on the world's map, but it required Mendelssohn's magnetism to make its attractions irresistible.