increases exhaustion--_therefore_ he attracts
the weak and exhausted to him. Oh, the rattlesnake joy of the old Master
precisely because he always saw "the little children" coming unto him!

I place this point of view first and foremost: Wagner's art is diseased.
The problems he sets on the stage are all concerned with hysteria; the
convulsiveness of his emotions, his over-excited sensitiveness, his taste
which demands ever sharper condimentation, his erraticness which he togged
out to look like principles, and, last but not least, his choice of heroes
and heroines, considered as physiological types (--a hospital ward!--): the
whole represents a morbid picture; of this there can be no doubt. _Wagner
est une nevrose_. Maybe, that nothing is better known to-day, or in any
case the subject of greater study, than the Protean character of
degeneration which has disguised itself here, both as an art and as an
artist. In Wagner our medical men and physiologists have a most
interesting case, or at least a very complete one. Owing to the very fact
that nothing is more modern than this thorough morbidness, this
dilatoriness and excessive irritability of the nervous machinery, Wagner
is the _modern artist par excellence_, the Cagliostro of modernity. All
that the world most needs to-day, is combined in the most seductive manner
in his art,--the three great stimulants of exhausted people: _brutality_,
_artificiality_ and _innocence_ (idiocy).

Wagner is a great corrupter of music. With it, he found the means of
stimulating tired nerves,--and in this way he made music ill. In the art of
spurring exhausted creatures back into activity, and of recalling
half-corpses to life, the inventiveness he shows is of no mean order. He
is the master of hypnotic trickery, and he fells the strongest like
bullocks. Wagner's _success_--his success with nerves, and therefore with
women--converted the whole world of ambitious musicians into disciples of
his secret art. And not only the ambitious, but also the _shrewd_.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} Only
with morbid music can money be made to-day; our big theatres live on
Wagner.

6.

--Once more I will venture to indulge in a little levity. Let us suppose
that Wagner's _success_ could become flesh and blood and assume a human
form; that, dressed up as a good-natured musical savant, it could move
among budding artists. How do you think it would then be likely to express
itself?--

My friends, it