A lexicon of Wagner's most intimate phrases--a host of short fragments of from five to fifteen bars each, of music which _nobody knows...._ Wagner had the virtue of _décadents,_--pity.... 8. --"Very good! But how can this _décadent_ spoil one's taste if perchance one is not a musician, if perchance one is not oneself a _décadent?"_--Conversely! How can one _help_ it! _Just_ you try it!--You know not what Wagner is: quite a great actor! Does a more profound, a more _ponderous_ influence exist on the stage? Just look at these youthlets,--all benumbed, pale, breathless! They are Wagnerites: they know nothing about music,--and yet Wagner gets the mastery of them. Wagner's art presses with the weight of a hundred atmospheres: do but submit, there is nothing else to do.... Wagner the actor is a tyrant, his pathos flings all taste, all resistance, to the winds. --Who else has this persuasive power in his attitudes, who else sees attitudes so clearly before anything else! This holding-of-its-breath in Wagnerian pathos, this disinclination to have done with an intense feeling, this terrifying habit of dwelling on a situation in which every instant almost chokes one.---- Was Wagner a musician at all? In any case he was something else to _a much greater degree_--that is to say, an incomparable _histrio,_ the greatest mime, the most astounding theatrical genius that the Germans have ever had, our _scenic artist par excellence._ He belongs to some other sphere than the history of music, with whose really great and genuine figure he must not be confounded. Wagner _and_ Beethoven--this is blasphemy--and above all it does not do justice even to Wagner.... As a musician he was no more than what he was as a man: he _became_ a musician, he _became_ a poet, because the tyrant in him, his actor's genius, drove him to be both. Nothing is known concerning Wagner, so long as his dominating instinct has not been divined. Wagner was _not_ instinctively a musician. And this he proved by the way in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise terms, all style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it, _i.e.,_ a rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a means of accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand as an inventor and an innovator of the first order--he _increased the powers of speech of music to an incalculable degree_--: he is the Victor Hugo of music as language, provided always we allow that under certain circumstances music may be something which is not music, but speech--instrument--_ancilla dramaturgica._ Wagner's music, _not_ in the tender care of theatrical taste, which is very tolerant, is simply bad music, perhaps the worst that has ever been composed. When a musician can no longer count up to three, he becomes "dramatic," he becomes "Wagnerian." ...