arrange, besides the humdrum, but necessary,
work of feeding and housing and caring for the throng. Of course he did
not do all the work, but the responsibility was his.

In this rush of work, Nietzsche was dropped out of sight--there was no
time now for long conferences on the Over-Soul and Music of the Future.

Nietzsche was snubbed. He went off to his garret and wrote a scathing
criticism on the work of Richard Wagner. This divine music was not for
the intellectual few at all--it was getting popular and it was getting
bad. Wagner was insincere--commercial--a charlatan.

Nietzsche was no longer interested in Wagner--he was interested only in
Nietzsche.

Literary men do not quarrel more than other men--it only seems as if
they did. This is because your writer uses his kazoo in getting even
with his supposed enemy--he flings the rhetorical stinkpot with
precision, and his grievances come into a prominence all out of keeping
with their importance.

In Eighteen Hundred Eighty-eight, Nietzsche issued his little book, "The
Fall of Wagner."

After a person has greatly praised another, and wishes to say something
particularly unkind about him, one horn of the dilemma must be taken. If
you admit you were wrong in the first conclusion, you lay yourself open
to the suspicion that you are also wrong in the second--that you are one
who makes snap judgments. The safer way then is to cling close to the
presumption of your own infallibility, without, of course, actually
stating it, and claim that your idol has changed, backslidden--fallen.
This then lends an aura of virtue to your action, as it shows a
wholesome desire on your part not to associate with the base person,
and also an altruistic wish to warn the world so it shall not be undone
by him.

Of all the bitter, unkind and malicious things ever uttered against
Wagner, none contains more free alkali than the booklet by Nietzsche.

Nietzsche, not being satisfied with an attack on Wagner's art, also made
a few flings at his pedigree, and declared that the Master's real name
was not Wagner: this was his mother's name, he being a natural son of
Ludwig Geyer, the poet--the Jew. What this has to do with Tannhauser,
Tristan and Isolde, the Ring, Lohengrin, and Parsifal, Nietzsche does
not explain. In any event, the information about Wagner's birth comes
with very bad grace from an avowed enemy, who practically admits that he
got the facts, in confidence, from Wagner himself. N