from me to value Wagner's
music _in extenso_ here--this is scarcely a fitting opportunity to do
so;--but I think it might well be possible to show, on purely psychological
grounds, how impossible it was for a man like Wagner to produce real art.
For how can harmony, order, symmetry, mastery, proceed from uncontrolled
discord, disorder, disintegration, and chaos? The fact that an art which
springs from such a marshy soil may, like certain paludal plants, be
"wonderful," "gorgeous," and "overwhelming," cannot be denied; but true
art it is not. It is so just as little as Gothic architecture is,--that
style which, in its efforts to escape beyond the tragic contradiction in
its mediaeval heart, yelled its hysterical cry heavenwards and even melted
the stones of its structures into a quivering and fluid jet, in order to
give adequate expression to the painful and wretched conflict then raging
between the body and the soul.

That Wagner, too, was a great sufferer, there can be no doubt; not,
however, a sufferer from strength, like a true artist, but from
weakness--the weakness of his age, which he never overcame. It is for this
reason that he should be rather pitied than judged as he is now being
judged by his German and English critics, who, with thoroughly neurotic
suddenness, have acknowledged their revulsion of feeling a little too
harshly.

"I have carefully endeavoured not to deride, or deplore, or detest{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}" says
Spinoza, "but to understand"; and these words ought to be our guide, not
only in the case of Wagner, but in all things.

Inner discord is a terrible affliction, and nothing is so certain to
produce that nervous irritability which is so trying to the patient as
well as to the outer world, as this so-called spiritual disease. Nietzsche
was probably quite right when he said the only real and true music that
Wagner ever composed did not consist of his elaborate arias and overtures,
but of ten or fifteen bars which, dispersed here and there, gave
expression to the composer's profound and genuine melancholy. But this
melancholy had to be overcome, and Wagner with the blood of a _cabotin_ in
his veins, resorted to the remedy that was nearest to hand--that is to say,
the art of bewildering others and himself. Thus he remained ignorant about
himself all his life; for there was, as Nietzsche rightly points out (p.
37, _note_), not sufficient pride in the man for him to desire to know or
to suffer g