It is, indeed, _Wagner in Bayreuth_ which brings to an end Nietzsche’s first period, and leads up to the crash which inaugurated his later period. Hitherto Nietzsche’s work was unquestionably sane both in substance and form. No doubt it had called forth much criticism; work so vigorous, sincere, and independent could not fail to arouse hostility. But as we look back to-day, these fine essays represent, with much youthful enthusiasm, the best that was known and thought in Germany a quarter of a century ago. Nietzsche’s opinions on Wagner and Schopenhauer, on individualism and democracy, the significance of early Hellenism for moderns, the danger of an excessive historical sense, the conception of culture less as a striving after intellectual knowledge than as that which arouses within us the philosopher, the artist, and the saint--all these ideas, wild as some of them seemed to Nietzsche’s German contemporaries, are the ideas which have now largely permeated European culture. The same cannot be said of his later ideas. It was at the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 that this chapter in Nietzsche’s life was finally closed. His profound admiration for Wagner, his intimate intercourse with the greatest figure in the German world of art, had hitherto been the chief fact in his life. All his ideals of life and his hopes for the future had grown up around the figure of Wagner, who seemed the leader into a new Promised Land. During the previous two years, however, Nietzsche had seen little of Wagner, who had left Switzerland, and he had been unable to realise either his own development or Wagner’s. Whatever enthusiasm Nietzsche may have felt in early life for a return to German heathenism, he was yet by race and training and taste by no means allied to primitive Germanism; it was towards Greece and towards France that his conception of national culture really drew him. Wagner was far more profoundly Teutonic, and in the Nibelung cycle, which Nietzsche was about to witness for the first time on the stage, Wagner had incarnated the spirit of Teutonic heathenism with an overwhelming barbaric energy which, as Nietzsche could now realise, was utterly alien to his own most native instincts. Thus it was that Bayreuth marked the crisis of a subtle but profound realisation, the most intense self-realisation he had yet attained.