Wagner was a man with hundreds of ideas; he tried them all, retaining some and discarding others.  Some half-dozen have fixed themselves immutably in certain minds, and an undue importance is given to them, an importance that Wagner would never have allowed.  The absurd idea, propounded in the heat of controversy, that all the arts were to wax to one art in the music drama, that even sculpture was to be represented by attitudes of the actors and actresses!  Wagner had written this thing in order to confound his enemies and bring the weak-kneed to his side, or maybe, it was merely written to make himself clear to himself.  For it was impossible that a man of genius should be so seriously wanting in appreciation of sculpture as to think with the centre of his brain, that an actor standing, his hand on his hip, could fill the place hitherto occupied in the mind by, let us say, the Hermes of Praxiteles.  Yet this idea still obtained at Bayreuth, and Rosa Sucher walked about, her arms raised and posed above her head, in the conventional, statuesque attitude designed for the decoration of beer gardens.

“It really is very sad,” Evelyn said, her eyes twinkling with the humour of the idea, “that anyone should think that such figuration could replace sculpture.”

“But you will not deny that the actor and the actress can supply part of the picturesqueness of a dramatic action.”

“No, indeed; but not by attitudinising, but by gestures that tell the emotion that is in the mind.”

By some obscure route of which they were not aware, these artistic discussions wound around the idea which dominated their minds, and they were led back to it continually.  The story of “Tristan and Isolde” seemed to be their own story, and when their eyes met, each divined what was passing in the other’s mind.  The music was afloat on the currents of their blood.  It gathered in the brain, paralysing it, and the nervous exhaustion was unbearable about six, when the servant had taken away the tea things; and as the afternoon drooped and the beauty of the summer evening began in the park, speech seemed vain, and they could not bring themselves to argue any longer.

It was quite true that she had begun to feel the blankness of the positivist creed, if it were possible to call it a creed.  There seemed nothing left of it, it seemed to have shrivelled up like a little withered leaf; true or false, it meant nothing to her, it crushed up like a dried leaf, and the dust escaped through her fingers.  Then without any particular reason she remembered a phrase she had heard in the theatre.

“As I always says, if one man isn’t enough for a woman, twenty aren’t too many.”