_and_ to virtue! (once again the case in "Tannhauser"). That
not going to bed at the right time may be followed by the worst
consequences (once again the case of "Lohengrin").--That one can never be
too sure of the spouse one actually marries (for the third time, the case
of "Lohengrin"). "Tristan and Isolde" glorifies the perfect husband who,
in a certain case, can ask only one question: "But why have ye not told me
this before? Nothing could be simpler than that!" Reply:

"That I cannot tell thee.
And what thou askest,
That wilt thou never learn."

"Lohengrin" contains a solemn ban upon all investigation and questioning.
In this way Wagner stood for the Christian concept, "Thou must and shalt
_believe_". It is a crime against the highest and the holiest to be
scientific.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} The "Flying Dutchman" preaches the sublime doctrine that
woman can moor the most erratic soul, or to put it into Wagnerian terms
"save" him. Here we venture to ask a question. Supposing that this were
actually true, would it therefore be desirable?--What becomes of the
"eternal Jew" whom a woman adores and _enchains_? He simply ceases from
being eternal, he marries,--that is to say, he concerns us no
longer.--Transferred into the realm of reality, the danger for the artist
and for the genius--and these are of course the "eternal Jews"--resides in
woman: _adoring_ women are their ruin. Scarcely any one has sufficient
character not to be corrupted--"saved" when he finds himself treated as a
God--he then immediately condescends to woman.--Man is a coward in the face
of all that is eternally feminine, and this the girls know.--In many cases
of woman's love, and perhaps precisely in the most famous ones, the love
is no more than a refined form of _parasitism_, a making one's nest in
another's soul and sometimes even in another's flesh--Ah! and how
constantly at the cost of the host!

We know the fate of Goethe in old-maidish moralin-corroded Germany. He was
always offensive to Germans, he found honest admirers only among Jewesses.
Schiller, "noble" Schiller, who cried flowery words into their ears,--he
was a man after their own heart. What did they reproach Goethe with?--with
the Mount of Venus, and with having composed certain Venetian epigrams.
Even Klopstock preached him a moral sermon; there was a time when Herder
was fond of using the word "Priapus" when he spoke of Goethe. Even
"Wilhelm Meister" seemed to be only a symptom of