At Basel Nietzsche lived in close communion with Wagner and Frau Cosima, who at this time regarded him as the prophet of the music-drama. The essay on Wagner, which starts from the standpoint reached in the previous essays, seems to justify this confidence. There is a deep analogy for those to whom distance is no obscuring cloud, Nietzsche remarks, between Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer and Empedocles, Wagner and Æschylus. “The world has been orientalised long enough, and men now seek to be hellenised.” The Gordian knot has been cut and its strands are fluttering to the ends of the world; we need a series of Anti-Alexanders mighty enough to bring together the scattered threads of life. Wagner is such an Anti-Alexander, a great astringent force in the world. For “it is not possible to present the highest and purest operations of dramatic art, and not therewith to renew morals and the state, education and affairs.” Bayreuth is the sacred consecration on the morning of battle. “The battles which art brings before us are a simplification of the actual battles of life; its problems are an abbreviation of the endlessly involved reckoning of human action and aspiration. But herein lies the greatness and value of art, that it calls forth the appearance of a simpler world, a shorter solution of the problems of life. No one who suffers in life can dispense with that appearance, just as no one can dispense with sleep.” Wagner has simplified the world, Nietzsche continues; he has related music to life, the drama to music; he has intensified the visible things of the world, and made the audible visible. Just as Goethe found in poetry an expression for the painter’s vocation he had missed, so Wagner utilised in music his dramatic instinct. And Nietzsche further notes the democratic nature of Wagner’s art, so strenuously warm and bright as to reach even the lowliest in spirit. Wagner takes off the stigma that clings to the word “common,” and brings to all the means of attaining spiritual freedom. “For,” says Nietzsche, “whosoever will be free, must make himself free; freedom is no fairy’s gift to fall into any man’s lap.” Such are the leading thoughts in an essay which remains an interesting philosophic appreciation of the place of Wagner’s art in the modern world; yet one may well admit that it is often over-strained, with a strain that expresses the obscure struggle of nascent antagonism.