ish and morphia wherewith to deaden
their inner discords. These discords are everywhere apparent nowadays.
Wagner is therefore a common need, a common benefactor. As such he is
bound to be worshipped and adored in spite of all egotistical and
theatrical autobiographies.

Albeit, signs are not wanting--at least among his Anglo-Saxon worshippers
who stand even more in need of romanticism than their continental
brethren,--which show that, in order to uphold Wagner, people are now
beginning to draw distinctions between the man and the artist. They
dismiss the man as "human-all-too-human," but they still maintain that
there are divine qualities in his music. However distasteful the task of
disillusioning these psychological tyros may be, they should be informed
that no such division of a man into two parts is permissible, save in
Christianity (the body and the soul), but that outside purely religious
spheres it is utterly unwarrantable. There can be no such strange divorce
between a bloom and the plant on which it blows, and has a black woman
ever been known to give birth to a white child?

Wagner, as Nietzsche tells us on p. 19, "was something complete, he was a
typical _decadent_ in whom every sign of 'free will' was lacking, in whom
every feature was necessary." Wagner, allow me to add, was a typical
representative of the nineteenth century, which was the century of
contradictory values, of opposed instincts, and of every kind of inner
disharmony. The genuine, the classical artists of that period, such men as
Heine, Goethe, Stendhal, and Gobineau, overcame their inner strife, and
each succeeded in making a harmonious whole out of himself--not indeed
without a severe struggle; for everyone of them suffered from being the
child of his age, _i.e._, a decadent. The only difference between them and
the romanticists lies in the fact that they (the former) were conscious of
what was wrong with them, and possessed the will and the strength to
overcome their illness; whereas the romanticists chose the easier
alternative--namely, that of shutting their eyes on themselves.

"I am just as much a child of my age as Wagner--_i.e._, I am a _decadent_,"
says Nietzsche. "The only difference is that I recognised the fact, that I
struggled against it"(6)

What Wagner did was characteristic of all romanticists and contemporary
artists: he drowned and overshouted his inner discord by means of
exuberant pathos and wild exaltation. Far be it