up, aged grand-mamma! You have got to sing!" And Erda sings. Wagner's end has been achieved. Thereupon he immediately dismisses the old lady: "Why on earth did you come? Off with you! Kindly go to sleep again!" In short, a scene full of mythological awe, before which the Wagnerite _wonders_ all kinds of things.... --"But the substance of Wagner's texts! their mythical substance, their eternal substance:"--Question: how is this substance, this eternal substance tested? The chemical analyst replies: Translate Wagner into the real, into the modern,--let us be even more cruel, and say: into the bourgeois! And what will then become of him?--Between ourselves, I have tried the experiment. Nothing is more entertaining, nothing more worthy of being recommended to a picnic-party, than to discuss Wagner dressed in a more modern garb: for instance Parsifal, as a candidate in divinity, with a public-school education (--the latter, quite indispensable _for pure_ foolishness). What _surprises_ await one! Would you believe it, that Wagner's heroines one and all, once they have been divested of the heroic husks, are almost Indistinguishable from Mdme. Bovary!--just as one can conceive conversely, of Flaubert's being _well able_ to transform all his heroines into Scandinavian or Carthaginian women, and then to offer them to Wagner in this mythologised form as a libretto. Indeed, generally speaking, Wagner does not seem to have become interested in any other problems than those which engross the little Parisian decadents of to-day. Always five paces away from the hospital! All very modern problems, all problems which are at home _in big cities!_ do not doubt it!... Have you noticed (it is in keeping with this association of ideas) that Wagner's heroines never have any children?--They _cannot_ have them,... The despair with which Wagner tackled the problem of arranging in some way for Siegfried's birth, betrays how modern his feelings on this point actually were.--"emancipated woman"--but not with any hope of offspring.--And now here is a fact which leaves us speechless: Parsifal is Lohengrin's father! How ever did he do it?--Ought one at this juncture to remember that "chastity works miracles"?... _Wagnerus dixit princeps in castitate auctoritas._ 10. And now just a word _en passant_ concerning Wagner's writings: they are among other things a school of _shrewdness._ The system of procedures of which Wagner disposes, might be applied to a hundred other cases,--he that hath ears to hear let him hear. Perhaps I may lay claim to some public acknowledgment, if I put three ox the most valuable of these procedures into a precise form. Everything that Wagner _cannot_ do is bad. Wagner could do much more than he does; but his strong principles prevent him. Everything that Wagner _can_ do, no one will ever be able to do after him, no one has ever done before him, and no one must ever do after him: Wagner is godly....