THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

FRIEDRIGH NIETZSCHE 309
overspread with a symphony, a form growing out of the Lied. But the
alien appeal of the opera drew Wagner irresistibly in the other direc-
tion." 31 Nietzsche could not go in that direction; he detested the dramatic
and the operatic. "I should be insane to stay here," he wrote. "I await
with terror each of these long musical evenings ... I can bear no
more." 32
And so he fled, without a word to Wagner and in the midst of Wagner's
supreme triumph, while all the world worshipped; fled, "tired with
disgust of all that is feminism and undisciplined rhapsody in that roman-
ticism, that idealistic lying, that softening of the human conscience,
which had conquered here one of the bravest souls." 33 And then, in far-
away Sorrento, whom should he encounter but Wagner himself, resting
from his victory, and full of a new opera he was writing Parsifal. It was
to be an exaltation of Christianity, pity, and fleshless love, and a world
redeemed by a "pure fool," "the fool in Christ." Nietzsche turned away
without a word, and never spoke to Wagner thereafter. "It is impossible
for me to recognize greatness which is not united with candor and sincerity
towards one's self. The moment I make a discovery of this sort, a
man's achievements count for absolutely nothing with me." 34 He pre-
ferred Siegfried the rebel to Parsifal the saint, and could not forgive
Wagner for coming to see in Christianity a moral value and beauty far
outweighing its theological defects. In The Case of Wagner he lays about
him with neurotic fury:
Wagner flatters every nihilistic Buddhistic instinct, and disguises it in
music; he flatters every kind of Christianity and every religious form and ex-
pression of decadence. . . . Richard Wagner, ... a decrepit and des-
perate romantic, collapsed suddenly before the Holy Cross. Was there no
German then with eyes to see, with pity in his conscience to bewail, this hor-
rible spectacle? Am I then the only one he caused to suffer? . . . And yet I
was one of the most corrupt Wagnerians. . . . Well, I am the child of this
age, just like Wagner, i. e*, a decadent; but I am conscious of it; I defended
myself against it85
Nietzsche was more "Apollonian" than he supposed: a lover of the
subtle and delicate and refined, not of wild Dionysian vigor, nor of the
tenderness of wine and song and love, "Your brother, with his air of
delicate distinction, is a most uncomfortable fellow/' said Wagner to
Frau Forster-Nietzsche; ". . . sometimes he is quite embarrassed at my
Jokes and then I crack them more madly than ever." 86 There was so
*The Wagner-Nietzsche Correspondence, p. 579,
w ln Hatevy, p. 191.
^Correspondence, p. 310.
"Ibid,, p. 95.
*a W., pp. 46, 37, 9, a; cf. Faguet, p. ai.
"Quoted in Ellis, Affirmations, London, 2898; p ay*