"genius" freezes; round the corner the "saint" freezes; under a thick icicle the "hero" freezes; and in the end "faith" itself freezes. So-called "conviction" and also "pity" are considerably cooled--and almost everywhere the "thing in itself" is freezing to death. 2 This book was begun during the first musical festival at Bayreuth; a feeling of profound strangeness towards everything that surrounded me there, is one of its first conditions. He who has any notion of the visions which even at that time had flitted across my path, will be able to guess what I felt when one day I came to my senses in Bayreuth. It was just as if I had been dreaming. Where on earth was I? I recognised nothing that I saw; I scarcely recognised Wagner. It was in vain that I called up reminiscences. Tribschen--remote island of bliss: not the shadow of a resemblance! The incomparable days devoted to the laying of the first stone, the small group of the initiated who celebrated them, and who were far from lacking fingers for the handling of delicate things: not the shadow of a resemblance! _What had happened?_--Wagner had been translated into German! The Wagnerite had become master of Wagner!_--German_ art! the German master! German beer!... We who know only too well the kind of refined artists and cosmopolitanism in taste, to which alone Wagner's art can appeal, were beside ourselves at the sight of Wagner bedecked with German virtues. I think I know the Wagnerite, I have experienced three generations of them, from Brendel of blessed memory, who confounded Wagner with Hegel, to the "idealists" of the _Bayreuth Gazette,_ who confound Wagner with themselves,--I have been the recipient of every kind of confession about Wagner, from "beautiful souls." My kingdom for just one intelligent word I--In very truth, a blood-curdling company! Nohl, Pohl, and _Kohl_[1] and others of their kidney to infinity! There was not a single abortion that was lacking among them--no, not even the anti-Semite.--Poor Wagner! Into whose hands had he fallen? If only he had gone into a herd of swine! But among Germans! Some day, for the edification of posterity, one ought really to have a genuine Bayreuthian stuffed, or, better still, preserved in spirit,--for it is precisely spirit that is lacking in this quarter,--with this inscription at the foot of the jar: "A sample of the spirit whereon the 'German Empire' was founded." ... But enough! In the middle of the festivities I suddenly packed my trunk and left the place for a few weeks, despite the fact that a charming Parisian lady sought to comfort me; I excused myself to Wagner simply by means of a fatalistic telegram. In a little spot called Klingenbrunn, deeply buried in the recesses of the Bohmerwald, I carried my melancholy and my contempt of Germans about with me like an illness--and, from time to time, under the general title of "The Plough-share," I wrote a sentence or two down