art
presses with the weight of a hundred atmospheres: do but submit, there is
nothing else to do.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} 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.----

Was Wagner a musician at all? In any case he was something else to _a much
greater degree_--that is to say, an incomparable _histrio_, the greatest
mime, the most astounding theatrical genius that the Germans have ever
had, our _scenic artist par excellence_. He belongs to some other sphere
than the history of music, with whose really great and genuine figure he
must not be confounded. Wagner _and_ Beethoven--this is blasphemy--and above
all it does not do justice even to Wagner.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} As a musician he was no more
than what he was as a man, he _became_ a musician, he _became_ a poet,
because the tyrant in him, his actor's genius, drove him to be both.
Nothing is known concerning Wagner, so long as his dominating instinct has
not been divined.

Wagner was _not_ instinctively a musician. And this he proved by the way
in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise terms, all
style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it, _i.e._, a
rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a means of
accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the
psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand as
an inventor and an innovator of the first order--_he increased the powers
of speech __ of music to an incalculable degree_--he is the Victor Hugo of
music as language, provided always we allow that under certain
circumstances music may be something which is not music, but
speech--instrument--_ancilla dramaturgica_. Wagner's music, _not_ in the
tender care of theatrical taste, which is very tolerant, is simply bad
music, perhaps the worst that has ever been composed. When a musician can
no longer count up to three, he becomes "dramatic," he becomes
"Wagnerian".{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}

Wagner almost discovered the magic which can be wrought even now by means
of music which is both incoherent and _elementary_. His consciousness of
this attai