The truth in this affair is not difficult to discern. When Wagner was still undiscovered—that is, the latter-day Wagner—Nietzsche sailed his soul abroad for spiritual adventures and found the composer of Tristan and Isolde full of spiritual irony. Exclusive, haughty, jealous—a noble sort of jealousy—he published the good news to the world. Then the mob, _hoi polloi_, began to buy excursion tickets to Bayreuth, and Nietzsche shudderingly withdrew. Wagner’s music was no longer unique, no longer to be savored by the intellectually aristocratic few. So he sailed his bark for newer, rarer, stranger enterprises and discovered—Nietzsche. After that the madhouse yawned for him, and the world lost a wonderful man, an ecstatic, semi-deranged man, a freethinker who out-topped all freethinkers, one of the greatest individualists since Stirner, and a soul of poetic richness. In 1888 Der Fall Wagner was published and Nietzsche’s friends and foes alike noted the decline of a brilliant intellect. The book is extraordinary. In it are flashes of dazzling fugitive ideation; but it lacks logic, nobility of design; above all, it lacks coherency. Wagner is as bitterly arraigned and attacked as the apostle of degeneration, as before he was hailed as the Dispenser of the New Evangel of music, poetry, and philosophy. It is a pity that this violent work should have introduced Nietzsche to the English-speaking world. It is too fantastic, too ill-balanced, to serve as a dignified polemic, or yet as a corrective. In Germany it but strengthened Wagner’s cause. Yet its occasional meteoric lucidity, its wit, its blows with a hammer, are at times extremely diverting. The last of his writings, it should be read the last. We say the last, for his Transvaluation of All Values—the first part of which is Antichrist, need not concern us here—was begun when the author was struck down. After Wagner, Bizet; after Parsifal, Carmen; for he swore that Bizet was the greater, Bizet the creator of La Gaya Scienza. Nietzsche had to swing to the other extreme musically after his secession from Wagnerism. But Bizet——!