The awful, serious, sober ways of Nietzsche began to pall on Wagner--he would run away when he saw him coming, for Nietzsche had begun to give advice about how Wagner should regenerate the race, and also conduct himself. Now Richard Wagner had no intention of setting the world straight--he wanted to express himself, that was all, and to make enough money so he could be free to come and go as he chose. Once, at a picnic, Wagner climbed a tree and cawed like a crow; then hooted like an owl; he ate tarts out of a tin dish with a knife; a little later he stood on his head and yelled like a Congo chief. When Nietzsche tearfully interposed, Wagner told him to go and get married--marry the first woman who was fool enough to have him--she would relieve him of some of his silliness. Shortly after this, the great Wagner festival came on, and Bayreuth was filled with visitors who had read Nietzsche's book, and bought excursion-tickets to Bayreuth. Wagner was over his ears in work--an orchestra of three hundred players to manage, new music to arrange, besides the humdrum, but necessary, work of feeding and housing and caring for the throng. Of course he did not do all the work, but the responsibility was his. In this rush of work, Nietzsche was dropped out of sight--there was no time now for long conferences on the Over-Soul and Music of the Future. Nietzsche was snubbed. He went off to his garret and wrote a scathing criticism on the work of Richard Wagner. This divine music was not for the intellectual few at all--it was getting popular and it was getting bad. Wagner was insincere--commercial--a charlatan. Nietzsche was no longer interested in Wagner--he was interested only in Nietzsche. Literary men do not quarrel more than other men--it only seems as if they did. This is because your writer uses his kazoo in getting even with his supposed enemy--he flings the rhetorical stinkpot with precision, and his grievances come into a prominence all out of keeping with their importance. In Eighteen Hundred Eighty-eight, Nietzsche issued his little book, "The Fall of Wagner." After a person has greatly praised another, and wishes to say something particularly unkind about him, one horn of the dilemma must be taken. If you admit you were wrong in the first conclusion, you lay yourself open to the suspicion that you are also wrong in the second--that you are one who makes snap judgments. The safer way then is to cling close to the presumption of your own infallibility, without, of course, actually stating it, and claim that your idol has changed, backslidden--fallen. This then lends an aura of virtue to your action, as it shows a wholesome desire on your part not to associate with the base person, and also an altruistic wish to warn the world so it shall not be undone by him. Of all the bitter, unkind and malicious things ever uttered against Wagner, none contains more free alkali than the booklet by Nietzsche.