“Your brother set this red book on the piano; whenever I went into the drawing-room, the red thing stared me in the face; it exasperated me, as a red rag to a bull. Perhaps I guessed that Nietzsche wanted it to say to me, ‘See here another man who can turn out something good!’ and one evening I broke out with a vengeance.” Wagner had a hearty laugh at the recollection. “What did my brother say?” I asked in alarm. “Nothing at all,” answered Wagner. “He simply blushed, and looked at me in astonishment and modest dignity. I would give a hundred thousand marks to have such splendid manners as this Nietzsche, always distinguished, always well bred; it’s an immense advantage in the world.” That story of Wagner’s came back to my mind at this time (spring of 1875). “Fritz,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me that tale about Brahms’s Triumphlied? Wagner related the whole thing to me himself.” Fritz looked straight before him and held his tongue. At last he said, beneath his breath, “Lisbeth, then Wagner was _not_ great.” Another time Wagner interfered with a walking tour that Nietzsche had planned to take with the son of Felix Mendelssohn, a professor at Freiburg. The young philosopher winced, but gave in to the elder man’s request. His commonplace book reveals his secret irritation. Here is a specimen of his early revolt from the banner of Bayreuth:— How infinitely purer is the soul of a Bach or a Beethoven in comparison with the soul of a Wagner. In the same sense as Goethe was a painter strayed from his true vocation, and Schiller an orator, Wagner is an actor _manqué_.... Who are the men who swell the ranks of his partisans? Singers who wish to appear more interesting by acting their parts as well as singing them to produce the maximum of effect with a minimum of voice; composers who hoodwink the public by a sort of glamour into a non-critical attitude; audiences who are bored by the old masters and find in Wagner a stimulant for their jaded nerves. Yet earlier he had written in such an eloquent strain as this:— Wagner is never more Wagner than when his difficulties increase tenfold, and he triumphs over them with all the legislative zeal of a victorious ruler, subduing rebellious elements, reducing them to simple rhythms, and imprinting the supreme power of his will on a vast multitude of contending emotions.... It can be said of him that he has endowed everything in nature with a language. He believed that nothing need be dumb. He cast his plummet into the mystery of sunrise, forest and mountain, mist and night shadows, and learned that all these cherished intense longing for a voice.