ere.--Siegfried "emancipated woman"--but not with any hope of
offspring.--And now here is a fact which leaves us speechless: Parsifal is
Lohengrin's father! How ever did he do it?--Ought one at this juncture to
remember that "chastity works miracles"?{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}

_Wagnerus dixit princeps in castitate auctoritas._

10.

And now just a word _en passant_ concerning Wagner's writings: they are
among other things a school of _shrewdness_. The system of procedures of
which Wagner disposes, might be applied to a hundred other cases,--he that
hath ears to hear let him hear. Perhaps I may lay claim to some public
acknowledgment, if I put three of the most valuable of these procedures
into a precise form.

Everything that Wagner _cannot_ do is bad.

Wagner could do much more than he does; but his strong principles prevent
him.

Everything that Wagner _can_ do, no one will ever be able to do after him,
no one has ever done before him, and no one must ever do after him. Wagner
is godly.

These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner's writings;--the
rest is merely--"literature".

--Not every kind of music hitherto has been in need of literature; and it
were well, to try and discover the actual reason of this. Is it perhaps
that Wagner's music is too difficult to understand? Or did he fear
precisely the reverse--that it was too easy,--that people might _not
understand it with sufficient difficulty_?--As a matter of fact, his whole
life long, he did nothing but repeat one proposition: that his music did
not mean music alone! But something more! Something immeasurably more!{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
"_Not music alone_"--_no_ musician would speak in this way. I repeat,
Wagner could not create things as a whole; he had no choice, he was
obliged to create things in bits, with "motives," attitudes, formulae,
duplications, and hundreds of repetitions, he remained a rhetorician in
music,--and that is why he was at bottom _forced_ to press "this means"
into the foreground. "Music can never be anything else than a means": this
was his theory, but above all it was the only _practice_ that lay open to
him. No musician however thinks in this way.--Wagner was in need of
literature, in order to persuade the whole world to take his music
seriously, profoundly, "because it _meant_ an infinity of things", all his
life he was the commentator of the "Idea."--What does Elsa stand for? But
without a doubt, Elsa is "the