Ostracism, exile, hatred, and stupid misunderstanding did not suppress Wagner. In his work he is often severe, stern, tragic, but the man himself bubbled with good-cheer. He made foolish puns, and routed the serious ones of earth by turning their arguments into airy jests. If in those early days he had been caught and carried in the death-tumbrel to the Place of the Skull, he would have remarked with Mercutio, "This is a grave subject." Finally, public opinion relaxed, and Wagner found his way back to Germany. He settled at the town of Bayreuth, and very slowly it dawned upon the thinking few that at Bayreuth there lived a Man. Among the very first who made this discovery was one Friedrich Nietzsche, an idealist, a dreamer, a thinker, and a revolutionary. Nietzsche was an honest man of marked intellect, whose nerves were worn to the quick by the pretense of the times--the mad race for place and power--the hypocrisy and phariseeism that he saw sitting in high places. He longed to live a life of genuineness--to be, not to seem. And so he had wandered here and there, footsore, weary, searching for peace, scourged forever by the world's displeasure. The trouble was, of course, that Nietzsche didn't have anything the world wanted. In the time of the Crusaders, the tired children would ask at night-time, when the tents were pitched, "Is this Jerusalem?" And the only answer was: "Jerusalem is not yet! Jerusalem is not yet!" In Wagner, Nietzsche felt that at last he had found the Moses who would lead the people out of captivity, into the Promised Land of Celestial Art. Nietzsche came and heard the Wagnerian music and was caught as flotsam in its whirling eddies. He read everything that Wagner had written, and having come within the gracious sunshine of the great man's presence, he rushed to his garret and in white heat wrote the most appreciative criticism of Wagner and his work that has ever, even yet, been penned. This booklet, "Wagner at Bayreuth," is a masterpiece of insight and erudition, written by a man of imagination, who saw and felt, and knew how to mold his feelings into words--words that burn. It is a rhapsody of appreciation. Art is more a matter of heart than of head. The book had a wide circulation, helped on, they do say, by the Master himself, who confessed that in the main the work rang true. The publication of the book sort of linked these two men, Wagner and Nietzsche. The disciple sat at the feet of the elder man, and vowed he would be in literature what Wagner was in music. He gazed on him, fed on him, quoted him, waiting in patience for the pearls of thought. Now Wagner was a natural man--a natural son of God. He had the desires, appetites and ambitions of a man. If he voiced great thoughts and wrote great scores, he did these things in a mood--and never knew how. At times he was coarse, perverse, irritable.