The correspondence of King Ludwig and Wagner, of Ludwig and Josef Kainz, the actor, throws much light on the enigmatic character of Parsifal. Wagner needed money and encouragement, badly. So it is not difficult to conceive of him playing up to every romantic extravagance of the young king—“le seul vrai roi de ce siècle,” as Paul Verlaine poetically called the monarch, whose madness admirably matched his own. Read in this sense, the psychology of Kundry’s kiss and its repelling effect and its arousing of pity for Amfortas in Parsifal is no longer a mystery. Wagner never erred in his morbid musical psychology, and he thus symbolized Amfortas—Wagner—as being rescued from suffering by Parsifal—Ludwig. Wagner had been ever an ungrateful man, but for the King he entertained the most exalted sentiment of gratitude. There is a psychiatric literature on this esoteric subject in German and French beginning with Oskar Panizza, ending with the remarkable study of Hanns Fuchs, entitled Richard Wagner. Parsifal will long remain a rare and stimulating spectacle to those for whom religious feeling must be dramatized to be endurable. The stern simplicities of doctrinal truths have no attraction for such. Wagner, luxuriously Byzantine in his faiths, erected a lordly pleasure drama in which the mystically inclined, the admirer of theatrical pomps, and the esoteric worshipper could all find solace, amusement, and consolation. Yet Parsifal’s pale virtue can never stir us to higher issues, as do the heroic sacrifices of Tannhäuser or Senta. Parsifal is the predestinated one, predestined to save the life of the King. Lacking freedom of will, he is not a human being that provokes our sympathy—but why demand logic, even dramatic logic, of Wagner? He was first a musician, then a poet and a philosopher; and in the last of these three was least. Parsifal is his final offering to the world. It is the work of a man who had outlived his genius. Nietzsche quotes with approval the exclamation of a musician: “I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music.” We are all Wagnerians whether we rebel at Parsifal or not. III NIETZSCHE THE RHAPSODIST Tell me, where is justice to be found which is love with seeing eyes?—_Also sprach Zarathustra._ I A sane and complete estimate of the life and philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche has yet to be made in English. Mentally dead since 1889, his death, in a private retreat at Weimar in 1900, created little stir; yet we predict that this great, if rhapsodical thinker, will occupy a place in the pantheon of philosophers. Like Emerson, he formulated no system; he is a stimulus to thought, an antiseptic critic of all philosophies, religions, theologies, and moral systems, an intellectual rebel, a very Lucifer among ancient and modern thinkers.