Nordau is extremely hard on those who have sung the praises of Wagner, and insinuates that they have been actuated by base motives when they have not been absolutely degenerated. According to him, admiration for Wagner’s works is a sure sign of mental unsoundness. And yet this same Nordau finds reasons for praising Wagner’s genius which a host of his panegyrists have overlooked. He says: “Wagner, as a dramatist is really an historical painter of the highest rank.... This [a fresco painter] he is in a degree never yet attained by any other dramatic author in the whole world of literature. Every action embodies itself for him in a series of most imposing pictures, which, when they are composed as Wagner has seen them with his inner eye, must overwhelm and enrapture the beholder. The reception of the guests in the hall of Wartburg; the arrival and departure of Lohengrin in the boat drawn by the swan; the gambols of the Rhine maidens in the river; the defiling of the gods over the rainbow-bridge towards the castle of Asgard; the bursting of the moonlight into Hunding’s hut; the ride of the Walküre over the battle-field; Brunhilde in the circle of fire; the final scene in ‘Götterdämmerung,’ where Brunhilde flings herself on to her horse and leaps into the midst of the funeral pyre, while Hagan throws himself into the surging Rhine, and the heavens are aflame with the glow from the burning palace of the gods; the love-feast of the knights in the castle of the Grail; the obsequies of Titurel and the healing of Amfortas—these are pictures to which nothing in art hitherto approaches.” It is strange that Nordau in his love for authorities should quote Nietzsche—a German author whom, in another part of his book, he makes out to be a hopeless degenerate and charlatan—in support of his views of Wagner! But Nietzsche has written a book called _Der Fall Wagner_, and that suffices. This Nietzsche calls Wagner a comedian, but Nordau insists upon his being a painter, and that “if he had been a healthy genius, endowed with intellectual equilibrium, that is what he would undoubtedly have become. His inner vision would have forced the brush into his hand, and would have constrained him to use it on canvas by means of colour.”