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82 have my Italy as well as you.… It is called Tribschen [the name of Wagner's villa]: and I am already at home in it. Dearest friend, what I there learn and see, hear and understand, is indescribable. Believe me, Schopenhauer and Goethe, Æschylus and Pindar still live." The happiness of these years was never forgotten by Nietzsche; after he broke with Wagner, and when he was criticising and dissecting him in perhaps unmerciful fashion, the memory of them haunted him. "How often," he writes to Peter Gast in 1880, "I dream of him and ever in the manner of our old confidential relations. Never was an evil word spoken between us, not even in my dreams, but very many cheering and glad ones, and with no one perhaps have I so often laughed. It is past now—and what matters it that in many points I am in the right against him! As if that lost sympathy could be wiped out of my memory!" And, though Nietzsche was the reverential admirer and disciple, he gave as well as received. The music in the third act of "Siegfried" is said to be partly owing to his influence—his sister telling us that Wagner often assured her that his coming to know Nietzsche had inspired him to this music, for he [Nietzsche] had given him back his faith in the German youth and in the future. Moreover, Wagner took over from him the conceptions of "Dionysiac" and "Apollinic" as principles of art. His appreciation of Nietzsche was strong and warm. "After my wife," he wrote him at this time, "you are the one prize which life has brought me"; and again, "Before God I declare that I believe you to be the one person who knows what I want to do."

The relationship with Wagner and the issues involved were so great in Nietzsche's eyes, undefined that he more or less reshaped his scholar's life accordingly. He had been lecturing on Greek life and philosophy, and was preparing an extensive work on the subject, undefined and now he took some of the material and made a little book of it by itself, which he dedicated to Wagner. His ultimate aim in the book was to show that, as the tragic view and tragic art had marked the great epoch of the Greeks, a similar view