This is a fair sample of Nordau’s logic. For the sake of clearness, we recapitulate the logical _tour de force_ he has been compelled to exercise in order to arrive at such an absurdity: Wagner, like all poets and dramatists before him, creates a love scene. Love is an erotic emotion. Eroticism is a disease of the mind. Tom-cats are erotically influenced. The characters on the stage remind Nordau of tom-cats. The obsession of a “tom-cat in convulsions over a root of valerian” suggests a raving madman. Consequently Wagner is mad. Such is the use a scientist is tempted to make of his science when he throws self-criticism overboard. When Nordau says of Wagner that he has been all his life an erotic, he is fair enough to add in parentheses, “in a psychiatric sense.” But this is not enough. The word “psychiatric” is a strictly scientific word, not to be found in any ordinary English dictionary; and the ordinary reader might easily conclude that, instead of removing Wagner’s eroticism into the deep recesses of his soul, it might have been used by the author, as so many scientific words have been used, in order to aggravate his charge. In order to justify his opinion with regard to Wagner’s erotic madness, he says: “The most ordinary incitements, even those farthest removed from the province of sexual instincts, never fail to awaken in his consciousness voluptuous images of an erotic character.” Why “sexual instincts”? Why not love-instincts, an expression which had so much better fitted in with the scenes Wagner represents? But, as it suits Nordau’s purpose to keep his reader’s mind upon love in its lowest, most animal form, we shall let it pass. We must however express our astonishment at the example he gives in order to show how incitements, “far removed from the province of sexual instincts,” caused Wagner’s mind to revert to voluptuous images. The “farthest removed incitements” which Nordau quotes is the description by Wagner of a ballet—a _pas de trois_—evidently intended to represent the blending of the beautiful with love, to give Wagner’s own words, “love and life, the joy and wooing of art.” What on earth, then, would more arouse such eroticism that might be found in a man than a ballet representing love and life? And this especially when we consider the modern freedom with regard to the costume of ballet girls. In order to show what Nordau considers to be the outcome of erotic madness in Wagner’s choregraphic representation of love, life, and art, we give _in extenso_ the passage from _Art-Work of the Future_, to which he refers: