the
section dealing with the early works just mentioned, we find the following
passage--"In the second of the two essays [Wagner in Bayreuth] with a
profound certainty of instinct, I already characterised the elementary
factor in Wagner's nature as a theatrical talent which, in all his means
and aspirations, draws its final conclusions." And as early as 1874,
Nietzsche wrote in his diary--"Wagner is a born actor. Just as Goethe was
an abortive painter, and Schiller an abortive orator, so Wagner was an
abortive theatrical genius. His attitude to music is that of the actor;
for he knows how to sing and speak, as it were out of different souls and
from absolutely different worlds (_Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_)."

There is, however, no need to multiply examples, seeing, as I have said,
that in the translations of Halevy's and Lichtenberger's books the reader
will find all the independent evidence he could possibly desire,
disproving the popular, and even the learned belief that, in the two
pamphlets before us we have a complete, apparently unaccountable, and
therefore "demented" _volte-face_ on Nietzsche's part. Nevertheless, for
fear lest some doubt should still linger in certain minds concerning this
point, and with the view of adding interest to these essays, the Editor
considered it advisable, in the Second Edition, to add a number of
extracts from Nietzsche's diary of the year 1878 (ten years before "The
Case of Wagner," and "Nietzsche _contra_ Wagner" were written) in order to
show to what extent those learned critics who complain of Nietzsche's
"morbid and uncontrollable recantations and revulsions of feeling," have
overlooked even the plain facts of the case when forming their
all-too-hasty conclusions. These extracts will be found at the end of
"Nietzsche _contra_ Wagner." While reading them, however, it should not be
forgotten that they were never intended for publication by Nietzsche
himself--a fact which accounts for their unpolished and sketchy form--and
that they were first published in vol. xi. of the first German Library
Edition (pp. 99-129) only when he was a helpless invalid, in 1897. Since
then, in 1901 and 1906 respectively, they have been reprinted, once in the
large German Library Edition (vol. xi. pp. 181-202), and once in the
German Pocket Edition, as an appendix to "Human-All-too-Human," Part II.

An altogether special interest now attaches to these pamphlets; for, in
the first place we are at