decline, of a moral
"going to the dogs". The "Menagerie of tame cattle," the worthlessness of
the hero in this book, revolted Niebuhr, who finally bursts out in a
plaint which _Biterolf_(8) might well have sung: "nothing so easily makes
a painful impression as _when a great mind despoils itself of its wings
and strives for virtuosity in something greatly inferior, while it
renounces more lofty aims_." But the most indignant of all was the
cultured woman--all smaller courts in Germany, every kind of "Puritanism"
made the sign of the cross at the sight of Goethe, at the thought of the
"unclean spirit" in Goethe.--This history was what Wagner set to music. He
_saves_ Goethe, that goes without saying; but he does so in such a clever
way that he also takes the side of the cultured woman. Goethe gets saved:
a prayer saves him, a cultured woman _draws him out of the mire_.

--As to what Goethe would have thought of Wagner?--Goethe once set himself
the question, "what danger hangs over all romanticists--the fate of
romanticists?"--His answer was: "To choke over the rumination of moral and
religious absurdities." In short: _Parsifal_.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} The philosopher writes
thereto an epilogue: _Holiness_--the only remaining higher value still seen
by the mob or by woman, the horizon of the ideal for all those who are
naturally short-sighted. To philosophers, however, this horizon, like
every other, is a mere misunderstanding, a sort of slamming of the door in
the face of the real beginning of their world,--their danger, their ideal,
their desideratum.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} In more polite language: _La philosophie ne suffit pas
au grand nombre. Il lui faut la saintete.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}_

4.

I shall once more relate the history of the "Ring". This is its proper
place. It is also the history of a salvation except that in this case it
is Wagner himself who is saved--Half his lifetime Wagner believed in the
_Revolution_ as only a Frenchman could have believed in it. He sought it
in the runic inscriptions of myths, he thought he had found a typical
revolutionary in Siegfried.--"Whence arises all the evil in this world?"
Wagner asked himself. From "old contracts": he replied, as all
revolutionary ideologists have done. In plain English: from customs, laws,
morals, institutions, from all those things upon which the ancient world
and ancient society rests. "How can one get rid of the evil in this world?
How can o