[188] Charles Féré, Sensation et Mouvement. Paris, 1887.
[189] Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, p. 169: ‘It is only when the desire of the artistic sculptor has passed into the soul of the dancer, of the mimic interpreter, of him who sings and speaks, that this desire can be conceived as satisfied. It is only when the art of sculpture no longer exists, or has followed another tendency than that of representing human bodies—when it has passed, as sculpture, into architecture—when the rigid solitude of this one man carved in stone will have been resolved into the infinitely flowing plurality of veritable, living men ... it is only then, too, that real plastic will exist.’ And on p. 182: ‘That which it [painting] honestly exerts itself to attain, it attains in ... greatest perfection ... when it descends from canvas and chalk to ascend to the tragic stage.... But landscape-painting will become, as the last and most finished conclusion of all the fine arts, the life-giving soul, properly speaking, of architecture; it will teach us thus to organize the stage for works of the dramatic art of the future, in which, itself living, it will represent the warm background of nature for the use of the living, and not for the imitated man.’
[190] Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. Leipzig, 1883, Band X., p. 68.
[191] Compare also, in Das Bühnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth, 1882 (Gesammelte Schriften, Band X., p. 384): ‘This [the ‘sure rendering of all events on, above, under, behind, and before the stage’] anarchy accomplishes, because each individual does what he wishes to do, namely (?), what is right.’
[192] Edward Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen. Berlin, 1880, pp. 220, 243.
[193] Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Band VI., p. 3 ff.
[194] In a book on degeneration it is not possible wholly to avoid the subject of eroticism, which includes precisely the most characteristic and conspicuous phenomena of degeneration. I dwell, however, on principle as little as possible on this subject, and will, therefore, in reference to the characterization of Wagner’s erotic madness, quote only one clinical work: Dr. Paul Aubry, ‘Observation d’Uxoricide et de Libéricide suivis du Suicide du Meurtrier,’ Archives de l’Anthropologie criminelle, vol. vii., p. 326: ‘This derangement [erotic madness] is characterized by an inconceivable fury of concupiscence at the moment of approach.’ And in a remark on the report of a murder perpetrated on his wife and children by an erotic maniac—a professor of mathematics in a public school—whom Aubrey had under his observation, he says, ‘Sa femme qui parlait facilement et à tous des choses que l’on tient ordinairement le plus secrètes, disait que son mari était comme un furieux pendant l’acte sexuel.’ See also Ball, La Folie érotique. Paris, 1891, p. 127.
[195] Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, p. 229: ‘When the expression of their ideas eludes their grasp ... they resort ... to the continual italicizing of words and sentences,’ etc.
[196] Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner. Leipzig, 1889.
[197] Der Fall Wagner. Ein Musikanten-Problem. 2te Auflage. Leipzig, 1889.