Mügge throws out a hint that in breaking with Wagner, Nietzsche was possibly fleeing from himself, and he quotes a note from him to Frau Cosima: “Ariadne, I love you! Dionysus.” Whatever may have been the cause, or the many causes, of the rupture, its violence was, at any rate on Nietzsche’s side, maniacal. His venom was not less poisonous than that which Devadatta poured out upon the Buddha. Not content with having hurled his Jupiter, as he called him, from his throne on high Olympus, he must needs pursue him into the depths, trampling on him, and covering with mud the man whom he had once beslavered with the most fulsome adulation. Strange litanies for the high priest of the goddess of Friendship to intone! Far less intelligible is the change of front in regard to Wagner’s music. That the man who, for the apotheosis of Wagner’s art, wrote “The Birth of Tragedy in Music,” should so completely eat his words as to the worth of the music because he had ceased to love the musician is almost unthinkable. In the first period he tells us that: “From a novice trying his strength, Wagner became a thorough master of music and of the theatre.... No one will any longer deny him the glory of having given us the supreme model for lofty artistic execution. The renewer of the simple drama, the discoverer of the position due to art in true German society, the poetic interpreter of old views of life, the philosopher, the historian, the æsthete and critic, the master of languages, the mythologist and the myth poet, who for the first time included all these wonderful and beautiful products of a primitive imagination in a single Ring, upon which he engraved the runic characters of his thoughts—what an abundance of knowledge Wagner must have had in order to have become all that!” Again: “Over the coming of Wagner there hovers a necessity which both justifies it and makes it glorious.” “Wagner, in his capacity as supreme master of form, points out the way, like Aeschylus, to a future art.” “In the life of this great man, the period over which as a golden reflection there is stretched the splendour of a supreme perfection.... He produces _Tristan and Isolde_, this _opus metaphysicum_ of all art; the _Meistersinger of Nürnberg_; the _Ring of the Nibelungs_; his work of Bayreuth.”[17] There is much more in the same strain, but when we come to the second period it is another Nietzsche who speaks. He now attacks his former idol with the most ferocious rancour, for which only insanity could account; and yet that he was not then mad is proved by other utterances of his in regard to that same art of music. For instance: “Mendelssohn was the beautiful interlude of German music, quickly admired and then quickly forgotten. Schumann was the last who founded a school. Though incessantly glowing with happiness or throbbing with impersonal suffering, he was a purely German event, and not, as Beethoven and Mozart had been, a European phenomenon.”