Wagner’s music, which may be said to have been the delight of millions of people, is not approved of by Nordau. He condemns it on the usual ground that it is novel, and that it differs from the standards accepted before Wagner. According to him, it is the music of an unsound mind, because it contains no distinct ideas in the shape of melodies. He objects to the Leit-motiv and to the unending melody, but it is difficult to harmonize what he says against the one with what he says against the other. Speaking of the Leit-motiv, he says: “To express ideas is not the function of music. Language provides for that as completely as could be desired. When the word is accompanied by song or orchestra, it is not to make it more definite, but to reinforce it by the intervention of emotion. Music is a kind of sounding-board in which the word has to awake something like an echo from the infinite.” Later on he says about melody: “It is a regular grouping of notes in a highly expressive series of tones. Melody in music corresponds to what in language is a logically constructed sentence distinctly presenting an idea, and having a clearly marked beginning and ending.”

Music being an art which exclusively appeals to emotion, it is not surprising that any attempt to measure its value by a reasoning process should result in utter failure. But this is no excuse for an author to contradict himself so flatly as Nordau does in the above passages. To say on one page that “to express ideas is not the function of music,” and on another page to say that melody is indispensable to music, because it “corresponds to a logically constructed sentence distinctly presenting an idea.” Again he says: “Melody may be said to be an effort to say something definite,” and how can this harmonize with the other mission of music: “to awake something like an echo from the infinite.” The latter expression is not only a true definition of the mission of music, but also an exact description of the aim of Wagner’s music.

Nordau feels that his scientific reasoning about music will affect no one who has heard the music of Wagner, and that those who admire it will be slow to believe that an unsound mind could have accomplished such complicated, intricate, and complete work. To prepare his reader’s mind for his rash conclusion, he once more goes to the lunatic asylum for his arguments, in order to show that a man may be a lunatic and yet be a good musician. But here again he is strangely blind to the fact that such arguments tell directly against his theory. He cites cases of lunatics who “improvised on the piano,” who “sang very beautiful airs and at the same time improvised two different themes on the piano... who composed very beautiful, new, and melodious tunes.”

The remarkable thing about the music of his maniacs is that it is tuny and melodious, and consequently the only rational music, according to Nordau, while Wagner’s music is condemned by him, and Wagner himself is held up as a lunatic because his music is not like that of acknowledged lunatics! It stands to reason that a weak mind could follow and repeat a style of music which it has heard for years, but that it requires a strong and sound mind to break a new road in the domain of music with the full approval of millions of musical people.

Nordau also feels the necessity of backing up his opinion by authorities. He sees a conclusive proof of Wagner’s inferiority in the criticism of professional musicians and composers. He might as well form his opinion of an actress on the criticism of her by her most dangerous rival. It seems that Hiller and Schumann would not acknowledge Wagner’s musical endowment, but attributed his success to the libretti written by himself. Regarding this Nordau exclaims: “The same old story: musicians regard him as a poet, and poets as a musician.” This means that our alienist is, or pretends to be, so utterly innocent of humour and satire as to accept this very common way of minimizing the talent of a rival as a trustworthy judgment. It is the commonest thing in the world for a man to deny his rival’s talent in his own specialty, and then, in order to strengthen the effect of his opinion and to give it the colour of impartiality, to acknowledge in him talents outside that specialty. Practical men, when they hear one musician run down another musician, generally conclude that the latter has a dangerous talent. Voltaire, in speaking of a writer none of whose works were in existence, said that he must have been a man of genius judging from the savage attacks made upon him by another writer.

Hiller and Schumann are the only authorities whom Nordau can point to in support of his views, and he himself raises some doubts whether their dislike of Wagner’s music was not due to the difficulty of immediately appreciating a tendency so novel as Wagner’s. Our alienist is only able to add that Rubinstein can only make some important reservations, and that it was some time before Hanslick struck his colours. In view, then, of the enormous literature that has grown up around Wagner and Wagnerism, Nordau’s habit of referring to authorities in this instance simply has the effect of showing that he stands unsupported in his opinion by all musical authorities. It is irresistibly comic to notice how Nordau regrets that the brochure—Der Fall Wagner—in which Nietzsche attacks Wagner, is quite as “insanely delirious” as another brochure written by the same writer twelve years before in deification of Wagner. Had it not been for this awkward circumstance, Nordau, it seems, would have been only too glad to exalt Nietzsche—the man whom in another part of his work he strenuously endeavours to prove an imbecile—to the rank of an authority. His amazing lack of logic prevents him from seeing that a certificate of lunacy issued by a lunatic is really a certificate of sanity, in virtue of the logical axiom that two negatives are equal to one affirmative.

Such faults and defects as may be found in Wagner’s prose writings have little importance in relation—and are almost irrelevant—to the question of his supposed degeneracy. He had to deal with subjects which, though intensely real to our emotional nature, can only be treated inadequately in words. Whatever we may think of Wagner’s style, there can be little doubt that he has succeeded in making himself understood by a great number of people whose emotional nature sympathizes with that of Wagner, and whom even Nordau would not undertake to prove to be mentally deranged or morally degenerate. Wagner’s writings have the defect, very general among German writers, and conspicuous in Nordau, of being verbose. They all make us crave for “Der langen Rede, kurzen Sinn.”

The fundamental idea in Wagner’s great work—The Art-Work of the Future—is that the arts should co-operate, and that each individual art should attain to its perfection in conjunction with other arts. Nordau in no way disproves the soundness of this view by saying that “Goethe’s lyric poetry and the Divina Commedia” need no landscape painting, that “Michael Angelo’s ‘Moses’ would hardly produce a deeper impression surrounded by dancers and singers,” and that “the ‘Pastoral Symphony’ does not require a complement of words in order to exercise its full charm.”

With that logic peculiar to Nordau, he quotes a passage from Schopenhauer in which this thinker mildly deprecates such co-ordination of the arts as was to be found in the operas of his time, and our alienist wishes us to accept this as a proof of insanity in Wagner’s admiration for the opera. He forgets the important fact that Wagner’s greatness is proved by the way in which he has succeeded in obliterating at least the worst defects of the opera as it existed before him, and that he has rendered it a complete and harmonious expression of combined and elevated arts. The quoted passage from Schopenhauer could be no condemnation of Wagner’s operas as it was written before they saw the light. In the operas, as they used to be, there was much that tended to disturb the imagination and even to arouse laughter. The most exasperating incongruities were indulged in. An exciting hunting chorus would be played and sung while two rows of lady supers would walk in from each side of the wings in Indian file, each bearing as a hunting implement a yard-long piece of wood surmounted by a piece of tin. The impossible dresses, the demure demeanour, the solemn faces, the absurd lances—carried like candles in a nuns’ procession—all this clashed so terribly with the music and the theme as to suggest a burlesque. A band of conspirators afraid of being detected, yet shouting at the top of their voices some compromising chorus; a man with a deadly wound rising to his feet and singing a lively and complicated aria; a messenger in the hottest haste delivering a message in a slow and long-drawn recitative; an intensely modern consumptive lady dying amid ancient surroundings, trilling in her last gasps musical complexities, during a quarter of an hour, with a marvellously strong and healthy voice—such, and many other absurdities, disfigured the opera before Wagner and Gounod, and well deserved the condemnation of Schopenhauer.

Wagner’s assertion that the natural evolution of each art leads to the surrender of its independence and to its fusion with other arts is looked upon by Nordau as delirious. To prove this he falls back on biology, and points out that nature develops from the simple to the complex, that originally similar parts develop into separate organs of different structure and independent functions. Why on earth should there necessarily be an analogy between the growth of plants and animals, and between the development of the arts? Any other writer who had been unfortunate enough to indulge in such profound mysticism would certainly have been condemned by Nordau to the lunatic asylum. Even if we admit the analogy as permissible, he gains very little by it: for when he speaks of nature as always proceeding from the simple to the complex he describes exactly the development of the arts into the opera—music, poetry, and dancing representing each the simple, and the opera representing the complex. What would Nordau think of a mad doctor who based his verdict of insanity on such reasoning?

The attentive student of Nordau’s impeachment of Wagner cannot fail to see that, despite all his efforts to brand him as a degenerate, he has only succeeded in throwing the grand power of that genius into bolder relief. Instead of inducing us to look upon Wagner as a sign of degeneration, he has impressed us with the fact that Wagner’s work constitutes an awakening from the slumber in which Philistinism and conventionalism have so long enwrapped humanity, and opened a new vista for the ennobling mission of the arts.

While we must reject Nordau’s clinging to that pedantry and conventionalism which limit the mission of the arts to the production of isolated pictures for public galleries and the salons of modern Mæcenases, statues for public places, and compositions of Kammer-musik for drawing-rooms, we at the same time do not believe that the opera, even as regenerated by the genius of a Wagner, is the highest expression of the arts. There will come a day when the illusions of the stage will be realities, when we shall dispense with the dusty sceneries, the garish footlights, the painted faces, the prudish trappings, which go to make up the mirage which heralds an ideal future. The arts, instead of being relegated to the nursery in order to make room for science, as Nordau prophesies, will become its aim. When science has given us health, strength, and beauty, an extended power over nature’s forces, when it has solved the terrible social problem on the basis of liberty and progress, then will science be the handmaiden of the arts. Then will the answer be granted to the poet’s prayer:

The arts, after having demonstrated in the opera their solidarity and their independence, will leave that artificial shelter and take up their abode in our homes and in our civic buildings, in our streets, and in our public places, in our arenas and in our temples.

A new renaissance lies ahead of us, and we are all struggling to reach it. The man who thinks and writes, the artist who paints or composes, the peasant at the plough, the miner in the bowels of the earth, all are contributing to further the advent of a new era when the life, the work, the pleasure, and the worship of a regenerate race shall be exalted by the arts, and present a realization of what Wagner dreamed while he created.