The middle-age crisis in Friedrich Nietzsche’s life began when he left Bayreuth in August, 1876, after the performance of _The Ring of the Niebelung_. He was then thirty-two years of age. Now it was that his disenchantment with Wagner, whom he had regarded as a superman and often called Jupiter, “one who might bring the type of man to a higher degree of perfection,”[21] began. He had thought Wagner “near to the divine,” but he now found much of his music dull and recitative and thought that in _Parsifal_ he had violated his own atheism as a concession to the public; and so he “refused to recognize a genius who was not honest with himself.” He abhorred Wagner’s new “redemption philosophy” but for months and years could not bring himself to an open break with him and was for a long time plunged in the depths of gloom. He now became truly lonely and went through a complete inner revolution. He realized that he must henceforth stand alone and work out the problem of life by himself. His anxiety as to how the venerable Wagner would receive his _Human, All Too Human_ was pathetic. When he found he could not publish it anonymously, he revised and toned down many of his criticisms; and deep, indeed, was his grief when, despite the almost fawning letter that accompanied a copy of his book to Wagner, the latter lacked the greatness of soul to understand his sincerity and broke with him forever. At the same time he was emancipating his thought from Schopenhauer, who had hitherto been his sovereign master in the philosophic field. Now it was that he almost completely wrecked his life by living according to the precepts of Cornaro, and his letters show the intense struggle with which he finally resolved to find his own way through life and to abandon his soul to self-expression. He finally resigned his chair of classic literature at Bâle and a little later sorted his manuscripts and commissioned his sister to burn half of them. This she refused to do, and it was just these that were the basis of some of the best things he wrote later. After trying residence in many places and various cures, and experimenting with many regimens, he finally resolved to become his own doctor, and it was by his own efforts that he succeeded in prolonging the efficient period of his life. But he felt he had at last struck the right road in _The Dawn of Day_, which marked the opening of his campaign against popular morality. From this time on, too, he had a deep, new, intense love of nature and was inspired henceforth by the conviction that he must be the midwife of the superman in the world. This apostle of a “New Renaissance” was not unlike his Zarathustra, who retired to the mountains at thirty and at forty came down to the haunts of men with a new message for them.