It may therefore be said of the men of the English-speaking countries that their “ideas revolve about women,” and it will be difficult to persuade us Englishmen that respect, admiration, and love for women are the signs of a degenerate mind. Coleridge well expresses the English feeling—a feeling which, under circumstances similar to those prevailing in England, would be universal: “All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame.” Wagner’s music, which may be said to have been the delight of millions of people, is not approved of by Nordau. He condemns it on the usual ground that it is novel, and that it differs from the standards accepted before Wagner. According to him, it is the music of an unsound mind, because it contains no distinct ideas in the shape of melodies. He objects to the _Leit-motiv_ and to the unending melody, but it is difficult to harmonize what he says against the one with what he says against the other. Speaking of the _Leit-motiv_, he says: “To express ideas is not the function of music. Language provides for that as completely as could be desired. When the word is accompanied by song or orchestra, it is not to make it more definite, but to reinforce it by the intervention of emotion. Music is a kind of sounding-board in which the word has to awake something like an echo from the infinite.” Later on he says about melody: “It is a regular grouping of notes in a highly expressive series of tones. Melody in music corresponds to what in language is a logically constructed sentence distinctly presenting an idea, and having a clearly marked beginning and ending.” Music being an art which exclusively appeals to emotion, it is not surprising that any attempt to measure its value by a reasoning process should result in utter failure. But this is no excuse for an author to contradict himself so flatly as Nordau does in the above passages. To say on one page that “_to express ideas is not the function of music_,” and on another page to say that melody is indispensable to music, because it “corresponds to a logically constructed sentence _distinctly presenting an idea_.” Again he says: “Melody may be said to be an effort to say something definite,” and how can this harmonize with the other mission of music: “to awake something like an echo from the infinite.” The latter expression is not only a true definition of the mission of music, but also an exact description of the aim of Wagner’s music.