"Undoubtedly," continued Schönau, with a smile, "it is the mission of every poet to hold a looking-glass to nature; but with a difference. '_J'ai vu les mœurs de mon temps, et j'ai publié ces lettres_,' wrote Rousseau in the preface to his 'Nouvelle Héloise;' that may suffice for the novelist, the poet's half-brother, as Schiller calls him. We must be content if he presents to us good photographs of reality--instantaneous pictures; and more than content if these photographs come out stereoscopically, and appear almost like life--almost. For only the dramatist fulfils, and can fulfil, his mission in earnest, his aim having been from the first, and being still, to leave the impress of his style on the age and on the material world. The first thing necessary for this, however, is Shakespeare's golden rule--'Be not too tame.' And it is just because Wagner is not too tame--because he has the courage, which his enemies call audacity, to allow the salient points in the character of his age to appear, to allow the excrescences to grow out of the material world--it is this which raises him so far above his rivals in the estimation of all who have ears to hear and eyes to see." "I should like to kiss you!" exclaimed the Baroness. "Go on, my dear Schönau--go on!" Schönau bowed. "What are, however, the salient points of our age? Ask our philosophers--Schopenhauer, Hartmann----" "This will please you, Carla!" exclaimed the Baroness. "They will answer, the deep conviction of the insufficiency, wretchedness, misery--let me say the word--worthlessness of this our earthly life; and combined with this, the conscious-unconscious longing after the Nirvana, the sweet Nothing--the beginning and foundation of things, which appears to our troubled nature as the only deliverance and last haven of refuge from the desolation and error of this life, and to which we should undoubtedly fly were it not for our will--our gigantic, invincible, indestructible will--that cares for nothing more than to live, to enjoy, to drink down the foaming cup of life, of love, to its last bitter drops. Renunciation there, enjoyment here, both to overflowing; because each is aware of the other, each hates the other, like the hostile brothers. And in this constantly renewed contest between irreconcilable contradictions; in this sensation of being torn backwards and forwards in the wildest confusion, the maddest tumult, the most entangled whirl; in this witches' Sabbath, this will-o'-the-wisp dance, and this halo of falling stars of modern humanity, hurrying from hell to heaven, from heaven to hell, raging and vanishing into mist; in this everything, and something more, turned into endless sing-song and eternal clang--the most horrible Past painted into a rosy-red caricature of the Present, while the eyes of a spectral Future stare from the empty sockets--the flute-notes of soft enjoyment, the violin-tones of fading bliss, drowned by the crashing