At The Shrine Of St. Wagner

Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891

It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-
mad strangers that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It had been
long since we had seen such multitudes of excited and struggling
people. It took a good half-hour to pack them and pair them into
the train--and it was the longest train we have yet seen in
Europe. Nuremberg had been witnessing this sort of experience a
couple of times a day for about two weeks. It gives one an
impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial pilgrimage.
For a pilgrimage is what it is. The devotees come from the very
ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in
his own Mecca.

If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or
anywhere else in America, and you conclude, by the middle of May,
that you would like to attend the Bayreuth opera two months and a
half later, you must use the cable and get about it immediately
or you will get no seats, and you must cable for lodgings, too.
Then if you are lucky you will get seats in the last row and
lodgings in the fringe of the town. If you stop to write you
will get nothing. There were plenty of people in Nuremberg when
we passed through who had come on pilgrimage without first
securing seats and lodgings. They had found neither in Bayreuth;
they had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone
to Nuremberg and found neither beds nor standing room, and had
walked those quaint streets all night, waiting for the hotels to
open and empty their guests into trains, and so make room for
these, their defeated brethren and sisters in the faith. They
had endured from thirty to forty hours' railroading on the
continent of Europe--with all which that implies of worry,
fatigue, and financial impoverishment--and all they had got and
all they were to get for it was handiness and accuracy in kicking
themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two
towns when other people were in bed; for back they must go over
that unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled.
These humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and
apologetic look of wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with
drowsiness, their bodies were adroop from crown to sole, and all
kind-hearted people refrained from asking them if they had been
to Bayreuth and failed to connect, as knowing they would lie.

We reached here (Bayreuth) about mid-afternoon of a rainy
Saturday. We were of the wise, and had secured lodgings and
opera seats months in advance.

I am not a musical critic, and did not come here to write
essays about the operas and deliver judgment upon their merits.
The little children of Bayreuth could do that with a finer
sympathy and a