Wagner was a phenomenon in this century just as he will be one in the time to come, and no one is more fruitful than he in remarks of every sort.... He was a man belonging to another age. Nevertheless, he found a way to our nerves and our brains far more easily than one would have thought. If imagination has representatives, he was one of the giants. A Northern imagination, it is true, on which all the beauties and faults of the North have left their impress. He insists, he insists with violence and tenacity, he insists so pitilessly! He is afraid that we haven’t understood. That language of motives which he has imagined, and of which he makes such magnificent use, has the fault of leaving us very often with an impression of weariness.... Still, it was absolutely necessary for him to invent that system of motives.... His characters seem clothed in sound.... In Richard Wagner the imagination is so representative and violent that it saturates his work to overflowing with all the sounds of nature and leaves a limited space for the episodes. The passion between Tristan and Isolde plunges into the tumult of the ocean which overwhelms it; then it appears on the surface, then it plunges under again. One invincible power raises the waves and the souls by a single movement. In the poem, water, fire, the woods, the blossoming and mystic meadow, the holy spot become the more powerful characters. In this paganism of to-day all nature has become divine. Wagner’s pantheism has never been sufficiently realized. For me his dramas deal with the elemental forces, rather than with men and women. Daudet evidently recognized this fact. Wagner was a pagan. The romancer says: “Your generation is accustomed to these splendors, this torrent of heroism and life, but you cannot present to your fancy the impression which that music exercised on men of my age.... There is everything in Wagner.... Turning his face toward Gayety he wrote the Meistersinger; turning toward Pain, Love, Death, the _Mutter_ of Goethe, he wrote Tristan und Isolde. He made use of the entire human pianoforte, and the entire superhuman pianoforte. Cries, tears, the distortion of despair, the trickling of water over rocks, the sough of the wind in the trees, frightful remorse, the song of the shepherd and the trumpets of war—his tremendous imagination is always at white heat, and always ready.” Daudet wisely refuses to discuss Wagner’s methods:—