m of procedure, a reform of all principles, a crisis in taste.

At this point I shall only stop to consider the question of _style_. How
is _decadence_ in _literature_ characterised? By the fact that in it life
no longer animates the whole. Words become predominant and leap right out
of the sentence to which they belong, the sentences themselves trespass
beyond their bounds, and obscure the sense of the whole page, and the page
in its turn gains in vigour at the cost of the whole,--the whole is no
longer a whole. But this is the formula for every decadent style: there is
always anarchy among the atoms, disaggregation of the will,--in moral
terms: "freedom of the individual,"--extended into a political theory
"_equal_ rights for all." Life, equal vitality, all the vibration and
exuberance of life, driven back into the smallest structure, and the
remainder left almost lifeless. Everywhere paralysis, distress, and
numbness, or hostility and chaos both striking one with ever increasing
force the higher the forms of organisation are into which one ascends. The
whole no longer lives at all: it is composed, reckoned up, artificial, a
fictitious thing.

In Wagner's case the first thing we notice is an hallucination, not of
tones, but of attitudes. Only after he has the latter does he begin to
seek the semiotics of tone for them. If we wish to admire him, we should
observe him at work here: how he separates and distinguishes, how he
arrives at small unities, and how he galvanises them, accentuates them,
and brings them into pre-eminence. But in this way he exhausts his
strength the rest is worthless. How paltry, awkward, and amateurish is his
manner of "developing," his attempt at combining incompatible parts. His
manner in this respect reminds one of two people who even in other ways
are not unlike him in style--the brothers Goncourt; one almost feels
compassion for so much impotence. That Wagner disguised his inability to
create organic forms, under the cloak of a principle, that he should have
constructed a "dramatic style" out of what we should call the total
inability to create any style whatsoever, is quite in keeping with that
daring habit, which stuck to him throughout his life, of setting up a
principle wherever capacity failed him. (In this respect he was very
different from old Kant, who rejoiced in another form of daring, _i.e._:
whenever a principle failed him, he endowed man with a "capacity" which
took its place{~