ut above all, more brief. Read consecutively, they can leave no one in
any doubt, either concerning myself, or concerning Wagner: we are
antipodes. The reader will come to other conclusions, too, in his perusal
of these pages: for instance, that this is an essay for psychologists and
_not_ for Germans.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} I have my readers everywhere, in Vienna, St
Petersburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Paris, and New York--but _I have none_
in Europe's Flat-land--Germany.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} And I might even have something to say to
Italians whom I love just as much as I {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} _Quousque tandem, Crispi_ {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
Triple alliance: a people can only conclude a _mesalliance_ with the
"Empire."{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}

Friedrich Nietzsche.

Turin, _Christmas 1888_.

Wherein I Admire Wagner.

I believe that artists very often do not know what they are best able to
do. They are much too vain. Their minds are directed to something prouder
than merely to appear like little plants, which, with freshness, rareness,
and beauty, know how to sprout from their soil with real perfection. The
ultimate goodness of their own garden and vineyard is superciliously
under-estimated by them, and their love and their insight are not of the
same quality. Here is a musician who is a greater master than anyone else
in the discovering of tones, peculiar to suffering, oppressed, and
tormented souls, who can endow even dumb misery with speech. Nobody can
approach him in the colours of late autumn, in the indescribably touching
joy of a last, a very last, and all too short gladness; he knows of a
chord which expresses those secret and weird midnight hours of the soul,
when cause and effect seem to have fallen asunder, and at every moment
something may spring out of nonentity. He is happiest of all when creating
from out the nethermost depths of human happiness, and, so to speak, from
out man's empty bumper, in which the bitterest and most repulsive drops
have mingled with the sweetest for good or evil at last. He knows that
weary shuffling along of the soul which is no longer able either to spring
or to fly, nay, which is no longer able to walk, he has the modest glance
of concealed suffering, of understanding without comfort, of leave-taking
without word or sign; verily as the Orpheus of all secret misery he is
greater than anyone, and many a thing was introduced into art for the
first time by him, which hi