In speaking of the recreations of my life, I must express a word or two of gratitude for the one which has afforded me by far the greatest and heartiest refreshment. This was undoubtedly my intimate relationship with Richard Wagner. I pass over my other relationships with men quite lightly; but at no price would I have my life deprived of those days at Tribschen-days of confidence, of cheerfulness, of sublime flashes, and of profound moments. I know not what Wagner may have been for others; but no cloud ever obscured our sky. And this brings me back again to France-I have no quarrel with Wagnerites, and hoc genus omne, who think to honor Wagner by believing him to be like themselves; for such people I have only a contemptuous curl of my lip. With my nature, so alien to everything Teutonic that the mere presence of a German retards my digestion, my first contact with Wagner was also the first moment in my life in which I breathed freely: I felt him, I honored him, as a foreigner, as the antithesis of and incarnate protest against all "German virtues." We who as children breathed the marshy atmosphere of the fifties, are necessarily pessimists with regard to the idea "German"; we can be nothing else but revolutionaries-we can give our assent to no state of affairs in which a hypocrite is at the top. It is a matter of indifference to me whether this hypocrite acts in different colors to-day, whether he dresses in scarlet or dons the uniform of a hussar.' Very good, then! Wagner, too, was a revolutionary-he Red from the Germans. The artist has no home in Europe except in Paris; that subtlety of all the five senses which is the condition of Wagner's art, that sensitivity to the nuance, to psychological morbiditythese are to be found only in Paris. Nowhere else is there this passion for problems of form, this seriousness about the mise-en-sc@ne, which is the Parisian seriousness par excellence. In Germany one can have no notion of the tremendous ambition that lives in the soul of a Parisian artist. The German is good-natured. IVagner was by no means good-natured. . . . But I have already said enough on the subject of Wagner's attachments (see Be, yond Good and Evil, Aphorism 2 69), and about those to whom he is most closely related. He is one of the late French ronianticists, that high-soaring and heaven-aspiring band of artists, like Delacroix and Berlioz, who are essentially sick and incurable, pure fanatics of expression, virtuosos through and through. . . Who was the first intelligent follower of Wagner? Charles Baudelaire, the same man who was the first to understand Delacroix-that typical decadent, in whom a whole generation of artists has recognized itself; he was perhaps the last of them too. . . . What is it that I have never forgiven Wagner? The fact that he condescended to the Germans-that he became a German Imperialist. . . . IN'herever Germany spreads, she corrupts culture.
