(though Shakespeare might be tolerated), looking at what is called German painting, listening to German music, dreaming thin, mystical German dreams and munching thick German sausages. Thus should the inhabitants of a small subsidiary State, whose kings could be, and had been, made and unmade by other kings, create for themselves a new heaven on earth and become the wonder of the world. It is very like sheer lunacy. But this account is no exaggeration of Wagner's doctrine and plans. The one truth which emerges and speaks unequivocally is that Richard, deeply dissatisfied with the theatre of the day, and tracing its sad degeneracy to the corrupt state of society, wished to see society upraised, not that men and women might live more happily, but that a finer, nobler theatre might flourish. The most magnificent egotist of the century, it seemed to him the prime concern of mankind that Richard Wagner's works should be understood and loved. Being an egotist also, if I may say so, on a national scale, he thought humanity could only be redeemed by German art. Disregarding the fact that Germany has had no painters, no poet of the first rank, no genuine dramatist, and that before "our art," as he persistently calls music, had got a root in Germany, three great schools had flourished, the English, the Flemish and the Italian--disregarding all this, he looked for the regeneration of the human species by means of the efforts of German artists alone. It is comical, and, I say, very like lunacy. Mr. Ernest Newman will have it that Wagner's was only a very mediocre intellect. The cold truth is that only a mighty intellect, gone wrong on one point, could have evolved the idea of such a new social system. For, mark you, Wagner propounded no scheme for the regeneration of humanity: he assumed that it could regenerate itself by wishing, or willing, and that then the thousand years of peace would commence, with Richard as conductor-in-chief. He could not see that humanity cannot jump out of its shadow and regenerate itself, any more than gentlemen of intelligence gone wrong on one point can see that Bacon could not have written Shakespeare's plays, or that perpetual motion is a crazy impossibility.