Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirred to generosity, ... in scorn For miserable aims that end with self would have been as silly as was the optimism of Leibnitz to Schopenhauer. This Nietzsche was a terrible fellow, a very Berserker in his mad rage against existing institutions. He used a battering ram of rare dialectic skill, and crash go the religious, social, and artistic fabrics reared ages since! But when the brilliant smoke of his style clears away, we still see standing the same venerable institutions. This tornadic philosopher does damage only to the outlying structures. He lets in light on some dark and dank places. He is a tonic for malaria, musical and religious; and there is value even in his own fantastic Transvaluation of all Values. I fancy that if Friedrich Nietzsche had been a man of physical resources, he would have been a soldier hero. The late Anton Seidl once told me that he knew the unlucky man when he was a Wagnerian. He was slight of stature, evidently of delicate health, but in his eyes burned the restless fire of genius. If that same energy could have been transmuted into action, he might have been a sane, healthy man to-day. In all this he was not unlike Stendhal, of whom Jules Lemaître wrote:— “A grand man of action, paralyzed little by little by his incomparable analysis.” Nietzsche burned his brain away by a too strenuous analysis of life. I can recommend to all Wagnerites Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner. It is bound to take the edge off their uncritical worship. But read it after the first study, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. It will also demonstrate that Wagner is great, and Wagnerism dangerous. Nietzsche saw with clear eyes the peril that threatens music because of the Wagnerian principles. We must never lose sight of the fact that with Wagner the drama almost always takes precedence. His deviation from his own theory was his artistic salvation. But there lies the danger in him for young composers. He is a man of the theatre. His music, divested of all the metaphysical verbiage heaped upon it by Wagner and Wagnerian critics, is music of the footlights. A great formalist he is; but it is Wagner’s form, not the form for orchestral writers. It is all well enough to say that the symphony has had its day; but its structure, despite numberless modifications, will survive as long as absolute music itself. And music pure and simple, for itself, undefiled by costumes, scenery, limelights, and vocal virtuosi, is the noblest music of all. Nietzsche writes of Germany as “being arbitrarily stupefied by itself for nearly a thousand years.”