would not form the highest idea of Wagner from that which pleases them in him to-day. All that was only devised for convincing the masses, and people like ourselves recoil from it just as one would recoil from too garish a fresco. What concern have we with the irritating brutality of the overture to the “Tannhauser”? Or with the Walkyrie Circus? Whatever has become popular in Wagner’s art, including that which has become so outside the theatre, is in bad taste and spoils taste. The “Tannhauser” March seems to me to savour of the Philistine; the overture to the “Flying Dutchman” is much ado about nothing; the prelude to “Lohengrin” was the first, only too insidious, only too successful example of how one can hypnotise with music (—I dislike all music which aspires to nothing higher than to convince the nerves). But apart from the Wagner who paints frescoes and practises magnetism, there is yet another Wagner who hoards small treasures: our greatest melancholic in music, full of side glances, loving speeches, and words of comfort, in which no one ever forestalled him,—the tone-master of melancholy and drowsy happiness.… 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.——