y is to suggest atmosphere and nothing more.
It cannot be a picture; it can only be an imitation of a picture.

(vi) An actor who tried to look like a statue going through a variety
of poses would only make the audience laugh; or we should think he had
been taken ill.

At every point Wagner's reasoning goes to the ground. His basic facts
are no facts, and his reasoning is absurd. All the essays on music and
on drama and on the music-drama are as much an expression of himself
as his music-dramas. I have in earlier chapters gone so far as even to
labour the point that he could not get on in music without the aid of
drama; and as he could never look beyond himself nor imagine that
what he could not do--_i.e._ compose pure music--some one else--_e.g._
Schumann or Brahms--could do, he went out with absolute confidence to
persuade the world that he was right and all others were wrong. To
those who may be interested in the study of Wagner, the mighty
creative artist, as a cerebral curiosity, I commend Mr. Newman's book
aforementioned. Mr. Newman points out that Wagner was so magnificently
self-centred that he attributed all opposition to "misunderstanding."
To him it was incomprehensible that any one should say, "Yes, I
perfectly understand your argument; but I beg leave not to agree with
you." Any one who said that at once aroused his suspicions; such an
one, thought Wagner, cannot possibly be sincere. Hence the hot
denunciations of all and sundry who differed from him; hence the
nightmare phantom of an organized body of "persecutors." Had he not
been blinded by his wrath, and looked a little closer, he might have
seen that the persecutors, far from being an organized body or
confederacy, were fighting angrily, bitterly, amongst themselves. Many
of them had this in common: they could not understand and did not like
Wagner's music. That is different from the "wilful misunderstanding"
Wagner moaned about. These musicians could not help themselves; as
Sancho Panza remarks, "Man is as God made him, and generally a good
deal worse."

The essay which provoked the widest and fiercest hostility, especially
amongst the Jews, was the _Judaism in Music_. Wagner started from two
premises, (i) That the Jews, being alien in thought and feeling, could
not express themselves in _our (i.e._ German) art; and (2) that had
they thought and felt like Germans, they would have succeeded no
better; for music--that is, song--is idealized speech, a