When Nordau says a painter, he evidently restricts the meaning of the word to its narrowest sense, and makes it difficult to at all class a man who, like Wagner, evolved and produced pictures of such grandeur and such beauty as those our alienist so well describes. The fact that the artist uses actual perspective, real draperies, living people, actual fire, that he selects his own light, and personally arranges this mass of objects so as to exactly reproduce the daring conception of his mind—all this should surely not be cited as so many proofs of the unhealthiness of his genius. Would he have been a greater, a sounder genius, had his ability been restricted to sketching and colouring his conceptions on cardboard or canvas? Should then a painter’s genius be confined to the production of pictures suitable only to decorate Philistine houses and official galleries? Because Nordau’s pedantic tendencies have formed such a Philistine idea about the art of painting, is it right to deny true genius to a man who has produced unapproachable pictures on a colossal scale, not by the means of brushes and pigments, but by materials infinitely more difficult to handle? But these masterpieces of painting do not alone bear witness to Wagner’s powers. His paintings are not fixed; they are movable. They represent actually an enchanting succession of pictures. The true genius _à la_ Nordau gives us the pictures of figures in motion that never move, and tires us with a Quintus Curtius suspended in mid-air half way down a chasm, until we wish him at the bottom of it. Such a moving picture of Wagner’s is not thrust upon us suddenly in the manner of gallery pictures, but is presented to us as the fit illustration of a beautiful poem, and often as the climax of a series of other pictures which explain it, relieve it, and work up our emotions for its reception. To this must be added that the same painter-genius, the same dramatist, the same poet, has created the wondrous and enchanting music which accompanies the poem and the pictures. And because he has done all this, because he has not followed the routine of other German painters, because he has dared to and succeeded in transporting his audiences into the highest possible region of imagination, and given them a glimpse of real creative powers, he is to be classed as a degenerate; to rank among those of whom humanity is ashamed, and whose degraded state is to warn us of the coming decay of our race. Can any one with a grain of humour read Nordau’s attacks on Wagner without imagining an irascible toy-terrier barking at the moon?