ry decadent!{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} Incidentally, the _plots_ that Wagner knows how
to unravel with the help of dramatic inventions, are of quite another
kind. For example, let us suppose that Wagner requires a female voice. A
whole act without a woman's voice would be impossible! But in this
particular instance not one of the heroines happens to be free. What does
Wagner do? He emancipates the oldest woman on earth, Erda. "Step up, aged
grandmamma! You have got to sing!" And Erda sings. Wagner's end has been
achieved. Thereupon he immediately dismisses the old lady. "Why on earth
did you come? Off with you! Kindly go to sleep again!" In short, a scene
full of mythological awe, before which the Wagnerite _wonders_ all kinds
of things.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}

--"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!{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} Have you
noticed (it is in keeping with this association of ideas) that Wagner's
heroines never have any children?--They _cannot_ have them.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} 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
w