Here, too, it is profitable to notice how Nietzsche translated an idea from speculation into life. The hypothesis of the future Superman allowed him a noble view of friendship. He has often been compared to Whitman, partly, no doubt, because the rhythmical _Zarathustra_ reminded his readers of the triumphant, unrhymed movement of the sooth-saying _Leaves of Grass_. But his friendship is very different from Whitman’s. Whitman’s the hand-grip, the smile at meeting, the large tolerance, the collaboration in simple things; Nietzsche’s a friendship more exacting. He would have thought Whitman’s friend a neighbour, and he said, “Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the friend. Let the friend be the festival of earth to you, and a foretaste of the Superman,” and “Let the future and the farthest be the motive of thy to-day; in thy friend shalt thou love the Superman as thy motive.” A friend for Nietzsche was one who fulfilled desires that he could not realise himself. Not the least profound of his observations was this: “Our faith in others betrayeth wherein we would fain have faith in ourselves.” His own friendship with Wagner provides a commentary of fact. Begun in the belief that Wagner was bringing to earth such an art as that of which Nietzsche dreamed, and ended in the disillusion confirmed by “the preponderance of ugliness, grotesqueness, and strong pepper” in the first performances at Bayreuth, it was at once the greatest inspiration and the greatest disappointment of his life. Nietzsche, who had published _The Birth of Tragedy_ to serve Wagner, wrote _The Case of Wagner_ to destroy him, or, perhaps, to cleanse himself of a mistaken admiration. But listen to his clear-sighted comment: “I gained an insight into the injustice of _idealism_, by noticing that I avenged myself on Wagner for the disappointed hopes I had cherished of him.”