The Panacea of Knowledge 135from Klings or's garden and discovered himself in the process of match-
ing wits with the magician. In the summer of 1877, Nietzsche entered
the following resolute words in his diary: "I wish to declare explicidy to
the readers of my earlier works that I have relinquished the metaphysi-
cal and artistic views that essentially dominated those works: they are
agreeable, but untenable" (8,463).
One decisive idea and one decisive experience had brought Nietzsche
to the brink of relinquishing his "metaphysical and artistic views."
Let us begin with the decisive experience that propelled his departure
from artistic metaphysics. Nietzsche made note of this disillusioning
experience during the first days of the Bayreuth Festival in the summer
of 1876 and wrote in his diary two years later: "My portrait of Wagner
went beyond him. I had depicted an ideal monster, who was, however,
quite possibly capable of inflaming artists. The real Wagner, the real
Bayreuth struck me as the mediocre final print of an engraving on infe-
rior paper. My need to see real people and their motives was exceedingly
stimulated by this humiliating experience" (8,495). Was Nietzsche now
casting aside "the entire sonority of the world" to condescend to the
'lower levels of knowledge," as he had called them in his characteriza-
tion of Thaïes, and had he opted for the "wormlike probings and creep-
ings" in writing Human, All Too Humani We will see. In any case, he
registered his experience in Bayreuth in 1876 as an incident that awak-
ened him from a dream. But his disappointment had not come
overnight. Let us examine the various stages of his complex relationship
with Wagner.
Nietzsche's deep bond with Wagner was most apparent while he was
working on The Birth of Tragedy and immediately after the book was pub-
lished. On January 28, 1872, he wrote to Rohde: "I have formed an
alliance with Wagner. You cannot imagine how close we are now and
how fully our plans mesh" (B 3,279). Just as he had two years earlier, in
the euphoric phase of their initial encounters, Nietzsche pursued the
plan of offering his services to the Bayreuth Festival as a freelance
writer. He wanted to travel around giving lectures, heading sponsorship