In spite of the adverse criticism with which the above preface has met at the hands of many reviewers since the summer of last year, I cannot say that I should feel justified, even after mature consideration, in altering a single word or sentence it contains. If I felt inclined to make any changes at all, these would take the form of extensive additions, tending to confirm rather than to modify the general argument it advances; but, any omissions of which I may have been guilty in the first place, have been so fully rectified since, thanks to the publication of the English translations of Daniel Halévy's and Henri Lichtenberger's works, "The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche,"[2] and "The Gospel of Superman,"[3] respectively, that, were it not for the fact that the truth about this matter cannot be repeated too often, I should have refrained altogether from including any fresh remarks of my own in this Third Edition. In the works just referred to (pp. 129 _et seq._ in Halévy's book, and pp. 78 _et seq._ in Lichtenberger's book), the statement I made in my preface to "Thoughts out of Season," vol. i., and which I did not think it necessary to repeat in my first preface to these pamphlets, will be found to receive the fullest confirmation. The statement in question was to the effect that many long years before these pamphlets were even projected, Nietzsche's apparent _volte-face_ in regard to his hero Wagner had been not only foreshadowed, but actually stated in plain words, in two works written during his friendship with Wagner,--the works referred to being "The Birth of Tragedy" (1872), and "Wagner in Bayreuth" (1875) of which Houston Stuart Chamberlain declares not only that it possesses "undying classical worth" but that "a perusal of it is indispensable to all who wish to follow the question [of Wagner] to its roots."[4] The idea that runs through the present work like a leitmotif--the idea that Wagner was at bottom more of a mime than a musician--was so far an ever present thought with Nietzsche that it is even impossible to ascertain the period when it was first formulated. In Nietzsche's wonderful autobiography (_Ecce Homo,_ p. 88), in the section dealing with the early works just mentioned, we find the following passage: "In the second of the two essays [Wagner in Bayreuth] with a profound certainty of instinct, I already characterised the elementary factor in Wagner's nature as a theatrical talent which, in all his means and aspirations, draws its final conclusions." And as early as 1874, Nietzsche wrote in his diary:--"Wagner is a born actor. Just as Goethe was an abortive painter, and Schiller an abortive orator, so Wagner was an abortive theatrical genius. His attitude to music is that of the actor; for he knows how to sing and speak, as it were out of different souls and from absolutely different worlds (_Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_)".