quarrel in the
press, and the whole importance of the real issue was buried beneath the
human, all-too-human interpretations which were heaped upon it.

Nietzsche was a musician of no mean attainments. For a long while, in his
youth, his superiors had been doubtful whether he should not be educated
for a musical career, so great were his gifts in this art; and if his
mother had not been offered a six-years' scholarship for her son at the
famous school of Pforta, Nietzsche, the scholar and philologist, would
probably have been an able composer. When he speaks about music,
therefore, he knows what he is talking about, and when he refers to
Wagner's music in particular, the simple fact of his long intimacy with
Wagner during the years at Tribschen, is a sufficient guarantee of his
deep knowledge of the subject. Now Nietzsche was one of the first to
recognise that the principles of art are inextricably bound up with the
laws of life, that an aesthetic dogma may therefore promote or depress all
vital force, and that a picture, a symphony, a poem or a statue, is just
as capable of being pessimistic, anarchic, Christian or revolutionary, as
a philosophy or a science is. To speak of a certain class of music as
being compatible with the decline of culture, therefore, was to Nietzsche
a perfectly warrantable association of ideas, and that is why, throughout
his philosophy, so much stress is laid upon aesthetic considerations.

But if in England and America Nietzsche's attack on Wagner's art may still
seem a little incomprehensible, let it be remembered that the Continent
has long known that Nietzsche was actually in the right. Every year
thousands are now added to the large party abroad who have ceased from
believing in the great musical revolutionary of the seventies; that he was
one with the French Romanticists and rebels has long since been
acknowledged a fact in select circles, both in France and Germany, and if
we still have Wagner with us in England, if we still consider Nietzsche as
a heretic, when he declares that "Wagner was a musician for unmusical
people," it is only because we are more removed than we imagine, from all
the great movements, intellectual and otherwise, which take place on the
Continent.

In Wagner's music, in his doctrine, in his whole concept of art, Nietzsche
saw the confirmation, the promotion--aye, even the encouragement, of that
decadence and degeneration which is now rampant in Europe; and it is