ABSTRACT
The third volume of Mr. Ernest Newman’s monumental Life of Wagner has now been published, and there is one more volume to come. As Wagner, on whom he began to write towards the close of the nineteenth century, has taken so much of Mr. Newman’s thought and energy, it is natural that he should regard him as his own property, much as Dr. Johnson regarded Garrick, and resent hostile criticism of him by anyone except himself. Wagner the artist and Wagner the political phantast were not separate persons. A man’s artistic faculty is merely the means by which he communicates his vision of life, and, however brilliant, however complex cannot purify a corrupted vision or deepen a shallow one; for how a man sees life is determined by how he lives it. The main episode in these years was Wagner’s looting of the young King Ludwig.
