There is another and a graver charge to be brought against some
writers whose works are popularly read in England, to which it will be
my duty to return. I have said enough here to show the state of Wagner
criticism in this country. Abroad it is little better. Wagner is
indeed fashionable. His works are regularly performed in every capital
in Europe, and he has probably saved the existence of the costly
_Hoftheater_ in Germany. But success, in the sense in which he
understood it, he has not yet achieved. It is very questionable
whether his influence has on the whole been for good, either upon
musicians and dramatists, or upon the public. It is not his fault.
Nothing would show more convincingly the utter inability of the modern
public to appreciate the highest and best in art than the literature
which has gathered round the great name of Wagner. In all the vast
mass how much is there which was worth the writing, or can be read
with any profit by reasonable people? I think that, putting aside
purely technical works on music, stage-management, etc., the number of
really good books could be counted on the fingers. The rest is feeble
rhapsody on the one hand, malicious misrepresentation on the other. Of
works of first-rate importance, works that really add anything solid
to our knowledge, I only know one: Nietzsche's _Geburt der
Tragoedie_. Of others the best are mostly in French. Lichtenberger's
_R. Wagner_ is admirable so far as it goes, but treats the
subject exclusively from the literary standpoint. The small treatise
of our marvellous countryman, Mr. H. S. Chamberlain, _Le drame
wagnerien_[4] (Paris, 1894), is thoughtful and suggestive, and
quite worthy of close attention, as are also the works of Kufferath,
Golther, etc. There may be a few more, mostly of small compass, but
not many. Glasenapp's great biography, a work of astounding industry,
and invaluable to the student, can scarcely be included among the good
books because of its terrible literary style and its fulsome