Nietzsche was highly applauded by the bourgeois of Basle, who had come in great numbers to hear the young master whose genius had been announced. His success pleased him, but his thoughts went otherwhere, towards another marvellous, azure, and distant land--Triebschen. On the 4th of June he received a note: "Come and sleep a couple of nights under our roof," wrote Wagner. "We want to know what you are made of. Little joy I have so far from my German compatriots. Come and save the abiding _faith_ which I still cling to, in what I call, with Goethe and some others, German liberty." Nietzsche was able to spare these two days and henceforward was a familiar of the master's. He wrote to his friends: "Wagner realises all our desires: a rich, great, and magnificent spirit; an energetic character, an enchanting man, worthy of all love, ardent for all knowledge. ... But I must stop; I am chanting a pæan.... "I beg you," he says further, "not to believe a word of what is written about Wagner by the journalists and the musicographers. No one in the world knows him, no one can judge him, since the whole world builds on foundations which are not his, and is lost in his atmosphere. Wagner is dominated by an idealism so absolute, a humanity so moving and so profound, that I feel in his presence as if I were in contact with divinity...." * * * * * Richard Wagner had written, at the request of Louis II., King of Bavaria, a short treatise on social metaphysics. This singular work, which had been conceived to fascinate a young and romantic prince, was carefully withheld from publicity, and lent only to intimates. Wagner gave it to Nietzsche, and few things surely that the latter ever read went home more deeply. As traces of the impression he received from it are to be discovered in his work down to the very end, it will be worth our while to give some idea of its nature. Wagner starts by explaining an old error of his: in 1848 he had been a Socialist. Not that he had ever welcomed the ideal of a levelling of men; his mind, avid of beauty and order, in other words, of superiorities, could not have welcomed a notion of the kind. But he hoped that a humanity liberated from the baser servitudes would rise with less effort to an understanding of art. In this he was mistaken, as he now understood. "My friends, despite their fine courage," he wrote, "were vanquished; the emptiness of their effort proved to me that they were the victims of a basic error and that they had asked from the world what the world could not give them."