It has been denied that the mental development of Nietzsche underwent any revolution or breach of continuity in the year 1876. German disciples have attempted to prove the consistency of that development, and in the April number of the "Savoy" Magazine Mr. Havelock Ellis remarks, with reference to Nietzsche's Polish descent, that he was "not Teuton enough to abide for ever with Wagner." But in any case the apostacy of Nietzsche from Wagner is a painful subject. When he satirises Germany as the "flat-land" of Europe, the land of the Hyperboreans and worshippers of Woden, the god of bad weather, when he accuses the Germans of loving everything nebulous and ambiguous and hating clearness, consistency, and logic, we may remember that though Germany was the land of his birth Nietzsche was not a German by blood. But to Wagner he had been bound by ties of personal friendship as well as by fervent artistic admiration, so that no sufficient excuse can be offered for the appalling diatribe in which he smothers with ridicule both Wagner himself and everything connected with the Wagnerian art. The plea of insanity can scarcely be allowed. There is too much method in Nietzsche's madness. Moreover, he is no vulgarian like Nordau, lecturing in a muddy pathological jargon about subjects completely over his head. Nietzsche knew what he was talking about; if he had not first been the most enthusiastic of Wagner's disciples he could not have become so formidable an enemy. But though we may wish that on arriving at a new mental standpoint he had dealt more gently with his former friends, yet the temper which leads a writer to disregard every other consideration in sheer intentness on the truth of the matter in hand is a quality not to be slightly discounted.