dear
the art of the Fatherland, has disappeared. In its place is smartness,
flippancy, cynicism, unbelief, and the critical faculty developed to the
pathological point. I thought of Schubert, and sighed in the presence of
all this wit and savage humor. Bayreuth is full of _doctrinaires_. They
eagerly dispute Wagner's meanings, and my venerable notions of the
_Ring_ were not only sneered at, but, to be quite frank with you,
dissipated into thin, metaphysical smoke.

In 1869 I fancied Reinecke a decent composer, Schopenhauer remarkable,
if somewhat bitter in his philosophic attitude towards life. Reinecke is
now a mere ghost of a ghost, a respectable memory of Leipsic, whilst
Schopenhauer has been brutally elbowed out of his niche by his former
follower, Nietzsche. In every _cafe_, in every summer-garden I sought I
found groups of young men talking heatedly about Nietzsche, and the
Over-Man, the _Uebermensch_, to be quite German. I had, in the innocence
of my Wissahickon soul, supposed Schopenhauer Wagner's favorite
philosopher. Mustering up my best German, somewhat worn from disuse, I
gave speech to my views, after the manner of a garrulous old man who
hates to be put on the shelf before he is quite disabled.

_Ach!_ but I caught it, _ach!_ but I was pulverized and left speechless
by these devotees of the Hammer-philosopher, Nietzsche. I was told that
Wagner was a fairly good musician, although no inventor of themes. He
had evolved no new melodies, but his knowledge of harmony, above all,
his _constructive_ power, were his best recommendations. As for his
abilities as a dramatic poet, absurd! His metaphysics were green with
age, his theories as to the syntheses of the arts silly and
impracticable, while his Schopenhauerism, pessimism, and the rest sheer
dead weights that were slowly but none the less surely strangling his
music. When I asked how this change of heart came about, how all that I
had supposed that went to the making of the Bayreuth theories was
exploded moonshine, I was curtly reminded of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche again, always this confounded Nietzsche, who, mad as a hatter
at Naumburg, yet contrives to hypnotize the younger generation with his
crazy doctrines of force, of the great Blond Barbarian, of the Will to
Destroy--infinitely more vicious than the Will to Live--and the inherent
immorality of Wagner's music. I came to Bayreuth to criticize; I go away
praying, praying for the mental salvation of his new