Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/97

Rh the mood out of which they were projected; a corresponding scientific statement might be made, but it would be totally different.

With these deeper views of music, with his poetic, myth-making gift (a far greater, more helpful thing to the mass of mankind than the analytic scientific faculty), with his broad human sympathies and his sense of the tragic nature of the world, Wagner was the man, Nietzsche thought, to prepare the general mind emotionally, as Kant and Schopenhauer had intellectually, for the culture to be; if Schopenhauer was par éminence its philosopher, Wagner was to be its artist. Broad impersonal ties of this kind lay at the basis of the enthusiastic attachment which he formed for Wagner—the great musician met a profound need of the time, filled out his ideal. But personal relations were also formed—and the friendship between the two men, while it lasted, was something rare and beautiful. As before stated, he often spent week-ends with Wagner in his villa at the foot of Mt. Pilatus, overlooking Lake Lucerne-with Wagner and his wife Cosima, for whom he had an almost equally reverent affection. At this time the master was working on "Siegfried," and plans were also making for the event which loomed so large in their common expectations—Bayreuth. Nietzsche afterwards said that he was perhaps the first to love Wagner and Schopenhauer with a single enthusiasm —and in writing to a friend at the time he described these days (between 1869-72) as his "practical course in the Schopenhauerian philosophy." He felt that he was in the presence of a genius such as Schopenhauer had portrayed. "No one knows him," he writes, "or can judge of him, because all the world stands on a different basis and is not at home in his atmosphere. There is such an absolute ideality about him, such a deep and affecting humanity, such sublime seriousness that I feel in his presence as if I were near something divine." Again, "I