and elevation than a nineteenth-century Frenchman could have done — owing to the circumstance that we Germans are as yet nearer to barbarism than the French; — perhaps even the most remarkable creation of Richard Wagner is not only at present, but for ever inaccessible, incomprehensible, and inimitable to the whole latter-day Latin race: the figure of Siegfried, that VERY FREE man, who is probably far too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too ANTI-CATHOLIC for the taste of old and mellow civilized nations.

He may even have been a sin against Romanticism, this anti-Latin Siegfried: well, Wagner atoned amply for this sin in his old sad days, when — anticipating a taste which has meanwhile passed into politics — he began, with the religious vehemence peculiar to him, to preach, at least, THE