Hiller and Schumann are the only authorities whom Nordau can point to in support of his views, and he himself raises some doubts whether their dislike of Wagner’s music was not due to the difficulty of immediately appreciating a tendency so novel as Wagner’s. Our alienist is only able to add that Rubinstein can only make some important reservations, and that it was some time before Hanslick struck his colours. In view, then, of the enormous literature that has grown up around Wagner and Wagnerism, Nordau’s habit of referring to authorities in this instance simply has the effect of showing that he stands unsupported in his opinion by all musical authorities. It is irresistibly comic to notice how Nordau regrets that the brochure—_Der Fall Wagner_—in which Nietzsche attacks Wagner, is quite as “insanely delirious” as another brochure written by the same writer twelve years before in deification of Wagner. Had it not been for this awkward circumstance, Nordau, it seems, would have been only too glad to exalt Nietzsche—the man whom in another part of his work he strenuously endeavours to prove an imbecile—to the rank of an authority. His amazing lack of logic prevents him from seeing that a certificate of lunacy issued by a lunatic is really a certificate of sanity, in virtue of the logical axiom that two negatives are equal to one affirmative. Such faults and defects as may be found in Wagner’s prose writings have little importance in relation—and are almost irrelevant—to the question of his supposed degeneracy. He had to deal with subjects which, though intensely real to our emotional nature, can only be treated inadequately in words. Whatever we may think of Wagner’s style, there can be little doubt that he has succeeded in making himself understood by a great number of people whose emotional nature sympathizes with that of Wagner, and whom even Nordau would not undertake to prove to be mentally deranged or morally degenerate. Wagner’s writings have the defect, very general among German writers, and conspicuous in Nordau, of being verbose. They all make us crave for “Der langen Rede, kurzen Sinn.” The fundamental idea in Wagner’s great work—_The Art-Work of the Future_—is that the arts should co-operate, and that each individual art should attain to its perfection in conjunction with other arts. Nordau in no way disproves the soundness of this view by saying that “Goethe’s lyric poetry and the _Divina Commedia_” need no landscape painting, that “Michael Angelo’s ‘Moses’ would hardly produce a deeper impression surrounded by dancers and singers,” and that “the ‘Pastoral Symphony’ does not require a complement of words in order to exercise its full charm.”