That—although I should not agree as to Mendelssohn being forgotten—appears to me to be, as regards Schumann, a fine piece of criticism. Apparently it was only when thinking of Wagner that he was up to that time insane. Then he could lash himself into a fury! Witness: “I call the Wagnerian orchestration the Sirocco; Bizet’s” (of whose success Wagner was supremely jealous) “orchestral music is almost the sole orchestration that I can still endure.... Schopenhauer was the philosopher of decadence. His art is morbid.... Wagner has been ruinous to music. Was Wagner a musician at all? He was at least something else in a higher degree—that is to say, an unsurpassable _actor_. Wagner was, above all, a stage-player, and he excels in ubiquity and nullibiety.... Parsifal is a candidate for divinity with a public-school education. We are so far pure fools already ... a typical telegram from Bayreuth: _Bereits bereut_ (rued already)! Ah! this old _thief_! This old _magician_! This _Cagliostro_ of modernity!... Wagner is a Romanist, and he made the poor devil, the country lad Parsifal, a Roman Catholic. I despise every one who does not regard Parsifal as an outrage on morals.” [Illustration: RICHARD WAGNER. _From a photograph._ [_To face p. 218._] Perhaps Wagner’s faithful disciples were right when they ascribed all outpouring of the vials of wrath to _jalousie de métier_; for Nietzsche, too, was not only poet and philosopher, but composer, and when he submitted an opera of his own to Wagner, the great man, as the Eastern saying is, made sour noses at it. It is dangerous to carry a book with you into a garden; it will make your mind wander much further than your feet. Here have I been rambling on, carried away not so much by any feeling for Nietzsche, who is, after all, not much more than a name to me, as by the interest which attaches to all that concerns Wagner. For, let his enemies say what they will, he was a man of genius, of most compelling genius, and who that ever had speech of Frau Cosima could avoid being bewitched. To me it has only been given to know her in her old age, but I fell at once under the spell of that most sweet and dainty personality. Very feeble in health, and unable to speak for long, she had retained all the serene charm which, in the heyday of her youth and beauty, earned for her the name of “the unique woman.” I felt how bright a part she must have played in the brilliant trio at Triebschen, and how sad it is that there should be no record of the symposia of the sunny days of that happy friendship before it was disturbed by mad envy and malice.