Madame V. P. was no doubt Nietzsche's companion[2] when he heard the prelude to _Parsifal_ at the concerts in the Casino at Monte Carlo. He listened without any bitterness, with the sudden indulgence of a worn-out adversary. "I loved Wagner," he wrote in September to Peter Gast; "I still love him." Assuredly he still loved him, when he could speak as he did of this symphony which he had just heard. "I do not seek to know whether this art can or should serve some end," he wrote to Peter Gast, "I ask myself: Has Wagner ever done better? And I find this: the most exact conscience and psychological precision in the manner of relating, expressing, and communicating emotion; the shortest and most direct form; every nuance of sentiment defined with an almost epigrammatical brevity: such descriptive clearness that in listening to this music one thinks of some buckler of marvellous workmanship; lastly, a sentiment, a musical experience of a soul which is extraordinary and sublime; a "haughtiness," in the formidable meaning of the word; ... a sympathy, a penetration, which enters like a knife into the soul--and a pity for what he has discovered and judged at the bottom of that soul. Such beauties one finds in Dante and nowhere else. What painter has ever painted so melancholy a look of love as Wagner in the last accents of his prelude?" How easy it would have been for him to be a great critic, equal in his delicacy, superior in the largeness of his views, to that Sainte-Beuve whom he esteemed so highly! He knew it, and found it hard to resist the seductions of that "dilettantism of analysis"--the expression is his own. His best readers of ten remarked this. "What a historian you are!" Burckhardt used to say, and Hippolyte Taine repeated it. It did not satisfy Nietzsche. He despised the calling of historian or of critic. He was informed by a young German whom he met at Nice that the professors of Tübingen took him as a merely dissolvent mind, radical and nihilistic; it saddened him. He had not torn himself from the romanticism of pity and love to sink at last in the inverse romanticism of violence and energy. He admired Stendhal, but did not intend to be a Stendhalian. The Christian belief had nourished his infancy, the disciplines of Pforta had ripened it, Pythagoras, Plato, Wagner had increased, elevated his desires. He wished to be a poet and a moralist, an inventor of virtues, venerations, and serenities: none of his readers, none of his friends, had understood this intention. In correcting the proofs of _The Dawn of Day,_ he re-read this old page, the truth of which still held good.