Wagner paper (1875-1876) we are faced by a somewhat different problem.
Most readers who will have heard of Nietzsche's subsequent
denunciation of Wagner's music will probably stand aghast before this
panegyric of him; those who, like Professor Saintsbury, will fail to
discover the internal evidence in this essay which points so
infallibly to Nietzsche's real but still subconscious opinion of his
hero, may even be content to regard his later attitude as the result
of a complete volte-face, and at any rate a flat contradiction of the
one revealed in this paper. Let us, however, examine the internal
evidence we speak of, and let us also discuss the purpose and spirit
of the essay.

We have said that Nietzsche was a man with a very fixed and powerful
ideal, and we have heard what this ideal was. Can we picture him,
then,--a young and enthusiastic scholar with a cultured love of music,
and particularly of Wagner's music, eagerly scanning all his circle,
the whole city and country in which he lived--yea, even the whole
continent on which he lived--for something or some one that would set
his doubts at rest concerning the feasibility of his ideal? Can we now
picture this young man coming face to face with probably one of the
greatest geniuses of his age--with a man whose very presence must have
been electric, whose every word or movement must have imparted some
power to his surroundings--with Richard Wagner?

If we can conceive of what the mere attention, even, of a man like
Wagner must have meant to Nietzsche in his twenties, if we can form
any idea of the intoxicating effect produced upon him when this
attention developed into friendship, we almost refuse to believe that
Nietzsche could have been critical at all at first. In Wagner, as was
but natural, he soon began to see the ideal, or at least the means to