That Nordau should have anticipated Nietzsche in this country is a public calamity. The talk about Wagner's degeneracy and decadence had thus passed into a tiresome cant, and now that the real source of the only serious anti-Wagnerian criticism makes its appearance the task of disengaging the important side of that criticism seems almost hopeless. A few of the leading points against Wagner's works may, however, be mentioned here--the want of life in the whole and the excess of life in the small parts, the internal anarchy, the distress and torpor alternating with disturbance and chaos, the dwelling on the pathetic note till taste is overcome and resistance overthrown, the hypnotic character of Wagner's influence, his musty hierarchic perfumes, his wealth of colours and demi-tints, his mysteries of vanishing light that spoil us for other music--these are some of the characteristics of decadent art upon which the case against Wagner is based, and it is impossible to deny either the acuteness of Nietzsche's observation or the damaging character of his indictment. On the other hand, it must be remembered that the renovation of musical drama under Wagner's influence is an unquestionable fact. Wagner saved us from the period when operas were concocted from point to point by the most distinguished composer of the day with a view to the tastes of the Parisian Jockey Club. Wagner brought back dignity and poetry; he brought back sincerity, he infused a strain of powerful and far-reaching vitality into the art that he practised. The enthusiasm of the Wagnerian renascence absorbed nearly all that was commanding in the musical talent of the time; it affected even the Italian school, which had hitherto pursued an absolutely independent line of development. Admitting, therefore, that Nietzsche is often right in detail, just as Voltaire is now and then right when he finds fault with "Hamlet," we are disposed to reject Nietzsche's general conclusion no less emphatically than Voltaire's description of Shakspere as a drunken savage. The truth is that decadence or decline in one principle of vitality often means awakening energy in another. Nietzsche had latterly worked himself to a point of view from which the mystery of northern poetry and the vividly imaginative detail of Gothic art are intolerable. His remarks about Wagner's want of taste in the disposition of broad masses and his over-liveliness in minute detail are like a criticism of Strasburg Cathedral by an ancient architect; his view of the Wagnerian drama as concerned with problems of hysteria and as exhibiting a gallery of morbid personages is like an indictment by a Roman patrician of the entire "Corpus Poeticum Boreale." Nietzsche was all his life a stranger to tolerance and compromise, and towards the end this peculiarity became greatly accentuated. His failing health attracted him to southern climates, and he presently decreed that the north was no longer to exist.