Friedrich Nietzsche looked on, listened, observed, and then fled to Naumburg. "My despair was deep," he has written; "there was nothing that did not seem criminal to me." He was rediscovering the world after ten months of solitude, and finding it even more cowardly and more miserable than he had ever judged it to be. There was worse to endure, for he was discontented with himself. He recalled his last meditations. "I call myself the last philosopher, because I am the last man." And he questioned himself: Was he really "the last philosopher"? "the last man"? Had he not flattered himself in assigning himself a rôle so difficult and magnificent? Had he not been ungrateful, cowardly, and vile, like the others, in abandoning the struggle at the decisive moment to shut himself up in his solitude and his selfish dreams? Had he not forgotten his master? He accused himself; remorse accentuated his despair. "I should not think of myself," was his reproach--"Wagner alone is a hero--Wagner, so great in misfortune, great as of old at Triebschen. It is he whom we must serve. I must henceforth be vowed to help him." It had been his intention to publish a few chapters of his book on _The Philosophers of Tragic Greece._ He abstained from this delight; put away in a drawer--not without a pang--his almost finished manuscript. He wished to "spit out lava," to insult Germany and treat her like a brute, since, imbecile brute that she was, she would only yield to brutality. "I return from Bayreuth in such a state of persistent melancholy," he wrote to Rohde, "that the only hope for me is holy wrath." Friedrich Nietzsche looked for no joy in the work which he was about to undertake. To attack is to recognise, to condescend, to lower oneself. He would have preferred to have had no traffic with base humanity. But here was Richard Wagner; was it to be borne that he should be tormented and trammelled? that the Germans should sadden him as they saddened Goethe, and break him, as they broke Schiller? To-morrow other men of genius would be born: was it not necessary to fight from to-day to assure them their liberty and the freedom of their lives? It is impossible to ignore the masses that beset us. It is a bitter destiny, but one that may not be eluded. It is the destiny of the best-born, and above all of the best Germans, heroes begotten and misunderstood by a race insensible to beauty.