liberty.

That is the only thing worth lifting up your voice, or pen, or sword
for. The men who live in history are the men who have made freedom's
fight--there is no other. These men fought for us, and some of them died
for us--Socrates, Jesus, Savonarola, John Brown, Lincoln--saviors
all--they died that we might live.

Instead of dying for us, Wagner lived for us, but he had to run away in
order to do it. There, in exile--in Switzerland--he wrote many of his
most sublime scores, and these he did not hear played till long years
after, for although the man could compose, he could not execute. The
music was in his brain and he could not get it out at his
finger-tips--for him the piano was mute. So now and again Franz Liszt
would come and play for him the scores he had never heard, and tears of
joy would flow down his fine face; then he would stand on his head, walk
on his hands and shout for pure gladness.

All this, I will admit, was not very dignified.

Ostracism, exile, hatred, and stupid misunderstanding did not suppress
Wagner. In his work he is often severe, stern, tragic, but the man
himself bubbled with good-cheer. He made foolish puns, and routed the
serious ones of earth by turning their arguments into airy jests. If in
those early days he had been caught and carried in the death-tumbrel to
the Place of the Skull, he would have remarked with Mercutio, "This is a
grave subject."

Finally, public opinion relaxed, and Wagner found his way back to
Germany. He settled at the town of Bayreuth, and very slowly it dawned
upon the thinking few that at Bayreuth there lived a Man.

Among the very first who made this discovery was one Friedrich
Nietzsche, an idealist, a dreamer, a thinker, and a revolutionary.
Nietzsche was an honest man of marked intellect, whose nerves were worn
to the quick by the pretense of the times--the mad race for place and
power--the hypocrisy and phariseeism that he saw sitting in high places.
He longed to live a life of genuineness--to be, not to seem. And so he
had wandered here and there, footsore, weary, searching for peace,
scourged forever by the world's displeasure.

The trouble was, of course, that Nietzsche didn't have anything the
world wanted. In the time of the Crusaders, the tired children would ask
at night-time, when the tents were pitched, "Is this Jerusalem?"

And the only answer was: "Jerusalem is not yet! Jerusalem is not yet!"

In Wagner, Nietzsche felt that at last