[11] "Morgenröte," § 6.
[12] "Morgenröte," § 7.
[13] "Morgenröte," § 205.
[14] "Morgenröte," § 201.
[XIV]
NIETZSCHE VS. WAGNER
Nietzsche believed in heroes and, in his youth, was a hero worshipper. First Arthur Schopenhauer's bespectacled visage stared from his shrine and after that the place of sacredness and honor was held by Richard Wagner. When the Wagner of the philosopher's dreams turned into a Wagner of very prosaic flesh and blood, there came a time of doubt and stress and suffering for poor Nietzsche. But he had courage as well as loyalty, and in the end he dashed his idol to pieces and crunched the bits underfoot. Faith, doubt, anguish, disillusion—it is not a rare sequence in this pitiless and weary old world.
Those sapient critics who hold that Nietzsche discredited his own philosophy by constantly writing against himself, find their chief ammunition in his attitude toward the composer of "Tristan und Isolde" In the decade from 1869 to 1878 the philosopher was the king of German Wagnerians. In the decade from 1879 to 1889, he was the most bitter, the most violent, the most resourceful and the most effective of Wagner's enemies. On their face these things seem to indicate a complete change of front and a careful examination bears out the thought. But the same careful examination reveals another fact: that the change of front was made, not by Nietzsche, but by Wagner.