—“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.—Siegfried “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 of 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. These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner’s writings;—the rest is merely—“literature”.