beginning to ascribe to the art of music and to art in general, in
their influence upon the world; and all the while Nietzsche's one
thought and one aim was to help the cause and further the prospects of
the man who he earnestly believed was destined to be the salvation of
European culture.

Every great ideal coined in his own brain he imagined to be the ideal
of his hero; all his sublimest hopes for society were presented
gratis, in his writings, to Wagner, as though products of the latter's
own mind; and just as the prophet of old never possessed the requisite
assurance to suppose that his noblest ideas were his own, but
attributed them to some higher and supernatural power, whom he thereby
learnt to worship for its fancied nobility of sentiment, so Nietzsche,
still doubting his own powers, created a fetich out of nis most
distinguished friend, and was ultimately wounded and well-nigh wrecked
with disappointment when he found that the Wagner of the
Gotterdammerung and Parsifal was not the Wagner of his own mind.

While writing Ecce Homo, he was so well aware of the extent to which
he had gone in idealising his friend, that he even felt able to say:
"Wagner in Bayreuth is a vision of my own future.... Now that I can
look back upon this work, I would not like to deny that, at bottom, it
speaks only of myself" (p. 74). And on another page of the same book
we read: "... What I heard, as a young man, in Wagnerian music, had
absolutely nothing to do with Wagner: when I described Dionysian
music, I only described what I had heard, and I thus translated and
transfigured all that I bore in my own soul into the spirit of the new
art. The strongest proof of this is my essay, Wagner in Bayreuth: in
all decidedly psychological passages of this book the reader may
simply read my name, or the name 'Zarathustra,' wherever the text