so perfect that no separation can be made without a loss of vital force. Wagner discerned in the theatre the source of such art influence as reached the great mass of the people. Looking upon its managers and its public as they actually appeared before his eyes, he saw the theatre in the hands of those to whom art was nothing and gain everything, while the public, jaded and sated, ceaselessly clamored for new sensations. Continued attempts of the money-seeking managers to satisfy this public demand, which was in its very nature insatiable, had led to a condition of opera in which the music had no organic connection with the text, the pageantry and ballets no logical relation to the pictorial ensemble. Turning his gaze backward to the home of true art, Greece, he saw a drama in which poetry, action, and music were indissolubly united. “Thus,” he says, “we can by no means recognize in our theatrical art the genuine drama; that one, indivisible, supreme creation of the mind of man. Our theatre merely offers the convenient _locale_ for the tempting exhibition of the heterogeneous wares of art manufacture. How incapable is our stage to gather up each branch of art in its highest and most perfect expression—the drama—it shows at once in its division into the two opposing classes, play and opera; whereby the idealizing influence of music is forbidden to the play, and the opera is forestalled of the living heart and lofty purpose of actual drama. Thus on the one hand the spoken play can never, with but few exceptions, lift itself up to the ideal flight of poetry; but, for very reason of the poverty of its means of utterance,—to say nothing of the demoralizing influence of our public life,—must fall from height to depth, from the warm atmosphere of passion to the cold element of intrigue. On the other hand the opera becomes a chaos of sensuous impressions jostling one another without rhyme or reason, from which each one may choose at will what pleases best his fancy; here the alluring movements of a dancer, there the _bravura_ passage of a singer; here the dazzling effect of a triumph of the scene painter, there the astounding efforts of a Vulcan of the orchestra....”