Translations:CP 02844/7/en
Frédéric Masson, whose style of an old grumbler I have often enjoyed in the past, is far too much at the present time the embodiment of French “culture”. If he is sincere in finding the Meistersingers inept and self inflicted through snobbery, he is more to be pitied than those people he declares to be afflicted with “Wagneritis”[1]. If instead of being at war with Germany we had been at war with Russia, what would people have said about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky? It is simply that, since contemporary German literature is so dull that we can’t even discover a single name and a title which the critics of “Foreign Literature” tell us about from time to time only for us to forget them straight away, and not knowing where to start, we limit ourselves to Wagner[2].