The whole history of this Wagner episode in Nietzsche’s life is full of interest. The circumstantial narrative in the second volume of the _Leben Nietzsche’s_ renders it clear at every point, and reveals a tragedy which has its significance for the study of genius generally. Nietzsche, it must be remembered, was more than thirty years younger than Wagner. He was younger, and also he was less corrupted by the world than Wagner. The great artist of the music-drama possessed, or had acquired, a practical good sense in all that concerned the realisation of his own mighty projects such as always marks the greatest and most successful of the world’s supreme artists. Like Shakespeare, he knew that the dyer’s hand must ever be a little subdued to what it works in, if the radiant beauty of his stuffs is ever to be perfectly achieved. But Nietzsche could never endure any fleck on his hand; he shrank with horror from every soiling contact; he was an artist who regarded life itself as the highest art. He could never have carried through the rough task of dying the gorgeous garments of a narrower but more perfectly attainable art. Nietzsche’s idealised admiration for Wagner was complicated, after his appointment to the Basel chair, by a deep personal friendship for the Master, the chief friendship of his life. And his friendships were deeper than those of most; although they show no traces of sexual tincture they were hypertrophied by the defective sexuality of the man who always regarded friendship as a more massive and poignant emotion than love. That there were on either side any petty faults to cause a rift in friendship there is no reason whatever to believe. Nietzsche was above such, and Wagner’s friendship was always hearty until he realised that Nietzsche was no longer his disciple, and then he dropped him, silently, as a workman drops a useless tool. In addition it must be noted that Nietzsche was probably at this time often over-strained, almost hysterical,--at least so, we may gather, he impressed Wagner, who urged him to marry a rich wife and to travel,--and he was still afflicted by a disorder which not even genius can escape in youth, he was still something of what we vulgarly call a “prig”; he had not yet quite outgrown “the youthful Jesus in the Temple.” “Your brother with his air of delicate distinction is a most uncomfortable fellow,” said Wagner to Frau Förster-Nietzsche; “one can always see what he is thinking; sometimes he is quite embarrassed at my jokes--and then I crack them more madly than ever.” Wagner’s jokes, it appears, were of a homely and plebeian sort, not appealing to one who lived naturally and habitually in an atmosphere of keen intellectual activity. Bearing all this in mind, one can imagine the impression made upon Nietzsche by the inaugural festival at Bayreuth for which he had just written an impassioned and yet philosophic prologue. Wagner was absorbed in using