making too much of Bismarck, becoming too patriotic?[1] And did they really think alike, he and Wagner, as to the culture to be? Was Wagner aiming at a renovated humanity, or was his art rather a way of escaping from reality, an end in itself? He puts down propositions like these as if to look at, consider them: Wagner's art is something like a flight from this world—it denies, does not transfigure the world. Directly it does not work morally, and indirectly it has a quietistic effect. Wagner only wants to get a place for his art in the world. The kind of culture that would be introduced would resemble that of a monastery—its disciples would be a sect, without part in the world around them. There would come a sort of Christianity over again—was not this art a sort of pale dying Christianity, with plenty of magical gleams and enchantments, but little clear sunlight? Can a man actually be made better by this art and by Schopenhauer's philosophy?[2] Perhaps Nietzsche was hardly aware in all this how far he was changing—moving away from the view that reality was essentially unalterable and simply to be made endurable by art. A couple of years after the Bayreuth opening, he said, "Wagnerians do not wish to change anything in themselves, live in disgust with what is stale, conventional, brutal. Art is to lift them as by magic above it all for the time being. Weakness of will"[3]—but he has a presentiment to this effect now. He is also uneasy about Wagner's religious tendencies. He had thought him atheist, like himself and Schopenhauer,[4] had said, "Wagner is a modern man and is not able to encourage himself by believing in God. He does not cherish the idea that he is in the hands of a good Being, but he believes in himself."[5] But now he has to own that Wagner's art is in principle the old religion over again, "idealized Christianity of the Catholic sort."[6] He had been trying to put a favorable interpretation on the reactionary elements in him—the place given to the marvelous, to mediæval Chris-,
