Did he merely wish to affirm his independence? or did he wish to correct Wagner? It may be that he conceived the fantastic dream of influencing his master, purifying him, lifting him up to the height of the devotion which he inspired. He took a score of Brahms, whom he admired, and whom Wagner pursued with a jealousy that was comic at times, slipped it in his trunk, and, early in the first evening, put it well in view on the piano. It was bound in the most beautiful red. Wagner perceived it, and, without doubt, understood; he had the sense to say nothing. Next day, however, Nietzsche repeated the manœuvre. Then the great man exploded; he screamed, raged, and foamed; then dashed off, banging the doors behind him. He met Nietzsche's sister, who had come with her brother, and, suddenly laughing at himself, gaily related the anecdote.
"Your brother had again thrust that red score on the piano, and the first thing I see on entering the room is it! Then I fell into a fury, like a bull before a red rag. Nietzsche, as I knew well, wanted me to understand that that man, too, had composed beautiful music. I exploded—what is called exploding!"
And Wagner laughed noisily. The bewildered Fräulein Nietzsche sent for her brother.
"Friedrich, what have you done? What has happened?"
"Ah! Lisbeth. Wagner has not been great...." Wagner had laughed; he was appeased. That same evening, he made friends again with the enfant terrible. But Nietzsche, as he shook hands with the master, allowed himself no illusion: the gulf between them was deeper, the definitive separation more menacing.
He left Bayreuth. His health, tolerable in the month of August, was bad in September; well or ill, he worked, correcting the proofs of his Schopenhauer, which he published in October.
"You will know enough from my book," he wrote to Fräulein von Meysenbug, "of the ordeals of my year, ordeals in reality more cruel and more serious even, than you will be able to guess in reading me. Still, in summa, all's well, my life is bereft of sunshine, but I advance, and that is assuredly a great happiness, to advance in one's duty.... At the moment, I want to make myself clear as regards the system of antagonistic forces on which our 'modern world' rests. Happily I have neither political nor social ambitions. No danger menaces me, no considerations hinder me, nor am I inclined or forced to compromise. In short, I have a free field, and I will know one day in what degree our contemporaries, proud as they are of their liberty of thought, tolerate free thoughts.... What will be my ardour when at last I shall have thrown off all that mixes in me of negation and refractoriness! And yet, I dare to hope that in about five years this magnificent aim will be ready to be achieved."
It was a hope well charged with shadows. Friedrich Nietzsche, greedy to possess, longing to act, had to look forward to five years of waiting, of arid work, of criticism. "Thirty years," he put down in a note-book. "Life becomes a difficult affair. I see no motive to be gay; but there ought always to be a motive to be gay."