"Wagner’s sensualism is not only more elemental than mere ostentation, but also more genuine and spontaneous than the whole ‘blood, death and lust’ mysticism of his time. It was not without reason that for many of the most sensitive minds of the century his work signified the very essence of art—the paradigm which first revealed the meaning and underlying principle of music to them. It was certainly the last and perhaps the greatest revelation of romanticism, the only form of it that is still alive today. No other allows us to apprehend so intimately with what intoxication of the senses it impressed itself on the contemporary public, and how much it was felt to be a revolt against all dead conventions and the discovery of a young, blissful and forbidden world. It is comprehensible, although at first surprising, that Baudelaire, who was himself not musical at all, but the only one of Wagner’s contemporaries whose accents create in us the same feeling of happiness as the Tristan music, was the first to recognize the significance of Wagner’s art."