cus, yet certainly of Chopin. He is the latest, and by no means the least significant, of those spirits that, like the too often quoted Mephistopheles, "say no" to an entire civilization. His one veto, his Nie pozwalam, or "I decline to agree," uttered with explosive rhetoric, and flowing out into ten thousand aphorisms, has made him the hero as well as the prophet of free-thinkers. To him, the Church seems an effete superstition, the State mere tyranny, metaphysics the ghost of religion sitting upon its grave, morality a bugbear, law the enemy of life, and everything permissible so long as men please themselves.

This Great Charter, drawn in outline more than half a century ago by Max Stirner,-whom Dr. Nordau brushes aside as a "crazy Hegelian," --finds in Nietzsche such a wealth of light and color-it is proclaimed with so sweeping an eloquence, and, we must add, with such "damnable iteration"-that none can marvel if the anarchists of all nations flock to his standard. What, in comparison with his laughing, singing, and dancing strophes are the pale arguments of a Max Stirner, the rants and furies of Bakunin, the geographical lectures and moral-revolutionary pleadings of Prince Kropotkin, or the halting deductions of Mr. Herbert Spencer? And in the deep gloom which hangs over Nietzsche, in his wanderings of the mind and the feet through so many high and wild landscapes, in the pathos of contrast suggested by his early and his latter years, in his present condition of insanity without hope, while his books are sumptuously edited, carefully translated, and studled from New York to St. Petersburg, all the elements of tragedy are mingled.

Those who suffer persecution for a creed will naturally be drawn to preach it; and the family of the Polish fugitive, once established on a peaceful soil, dedicated themselves to the service of the Lutheran Church. Friedrich, the grandfather of our anarchist, born at Bibra in 1756, was

pastor of Wollmirstadt in Thuringia, Doctor of Divinity, and superintendent at Eilenburg. He published sermons, vindicated the Second Epistle of Peter against Grotius, offered a "Rational View of Religion, Education, Loyalty, and Benevolence" to those whom the "present excitement in the world of theology" seemed likely to trouble; and, dying at the age of seventy, left behind him the reputation of a worthy and learned parson. He was twice married, and had ten children. His second wife, sister of Dr. Krause and widow of Superintendent Krüger, exercised no small influence over the household in which young Friedrich grew up at Naumburg on the Saale. Like all his kinsfolk, she was sincerely religious, but in the somewhat lighttempered fashion which dwelt more upon making the world happy than upon her neighbors' sinfulness. Two of her sons became clergymen, and Karl Ludwig, the father of that boy who was to bring his Lutheran ancestors so much fame and shame, not only distinguished himself in his university course at Halle, but while quite a young man was appointed as tutor of the Princesses of SachsenAltenburg, one of whom afterwards became Grand Duchess of Oldenburg, and a second Grand Duchess Constantine of Russia. In 1841, when Ludwig was not yet thirty, he had gained the friendship as well as the personal acquaintance of his sovereign, Frederick William IV., whose religious mysticism agreed in large measure with his own. The king gave him an excellent living at Röcken, a pleasant village, standing with its ivy-clad churchtower in a country of wood and water, not far from Lützen. There Friedrich was born, to his father's great joy, on the king's birthday, October 15, 1844. He received the pious monarch's name; and the event is recorded with trembling gratitude, in the pastor's baptismal register. What would have been that good man's feeling, had some unpitying genius shown him in vision the pages of "Zarathustra," which this child, whom he was dedi

cating with such solemn words, was destined one day to publish!

But he foresaw no evil and died when Friedrich was not five years old. Meeting with a bad accident, by falling down a flight of steps, he underwent an illness which lasted some eleven months and terminated in softening of the brain. It does not appear, from the minute details given of her family by Madame FörsterNietzsche, to whom we owe our knowledge, that there was any taint of unsoundness in the blood; neither would the copious early writings in prose and verse of Nietzsche himself, or his first published compositions, lead us to suspect in him congenital derangement of intellect. Young as he was, he felt deeply both his father's death and the change from Röcken, to which he was always attached,-from a country village, with its freedom and fresh air, to the rather melancholy streets of Naumburg. And in accordance with his grandmother's theory of education, he must attend the common school, and mix with the town-children, an ordeal which this highlysensitive, perhaps over-refined spirit could not endure.

At first he made no friends, and was too earnest for his years. The boys called him "little clergyman;" they took home stories of his extraordinary acquaintance with the Bible, and how he recited hymns that made them cry. Later on, his comrades made a hero of Friedrich; his sister worshipped him; and her recollections of his skill in amusements at home, his fantasies and fairy tales, his enthusiasm for the Russians during the Crimean War, his Homeric studies which infected all around, and his anxiety to understand as well as practise the religious principles taught him, furnish us with a child's biography, not very deep or philosophical, but pleasing and true. It is the old German home, with some added polish and an almost artistic clearness of feature, that charms by its combination of the picturesque and the natural. These two were pattern children, bred in the atmosphere of

Lutheran piety, spending their holidays with a clerical grandfather in his country-living of Pobles, or with a clerical uncle at Nirmsdorf, and sheltered from the world by aunts and other feminine kindred, who might sometimes read the newspapers but were zealous for converting heathen. They heard of Berlin, and studied the shop windows in Leipzig; but they "feared no evil, for they knew no sin." When the grandmother passed away, they moved into a smaller house, which had its old-fashioned garden to delight these oldfashioned little people; and Fritz, enamoured of music and verse-making, spent many hours in the arbor composing stanzas, some of which betray remarkable perfection of form, and a truth of emotion that is exceedingly rare in boys of twelve or thirteen. The fragments of autobiography which have been preserved from the same period are still more striking. Not only does the lad write with judgment and sense when to write at all would have been an uncommon merit, he looks before and after, knits up his literary enterprises into а whole, and displays a gift of introspection such as Goethe himself might have envied at that premature age.

So promising a student was not likely to be overlooked; and in 1858 the rector of the Land-School at Pforta gave Fritz a scholarship in that famous institution. The history of Pforta would be worth telling, had we space to describe its vicissitudes. Certain monks of the Order of St. Bernard, Cistercians, driven out by the heathen Slavs in the twelfth century, had taken refuge with Udo, Bishop of Naumburg, and founded their new monastery at Pforta in 1136, "Cœnobium Stæ Mariæ de Porta." By and by the Reformation came; and in 1543 Maurice Duke of Saxony, putting out the old monks, made of it a public school. The lines of this change were quaintly descriped by Duke Maurice himself as early as 1540. "To the devout life," says his instruction, "shall the lads be brought up; and in the art

of speaking, in discipline, and in virtue shall they be instructed six years long;" in consideration of all which, "they shall be provided with masters and servants, teachers, living, and other necessaries, gratis. If the school accept them, for six years shall they be entertained and taught, I say gratis, yet so that they appear apt to study." Fritz Nietzsche was, if ever a lad of his age, "apt to study," and he went to Pforta, "willing, with reluctant mind." For he was shy, solitary, and a prey to home sickness.

music

Pforta had kept its walls, ten or twelve feet high, and was a vast enclosure of meadows watered by the Saale, and of buildings still severe and monastic in their grey old age. The discipline was strict, chapels frequent, and studies austere. There were two hundred students, including twenty externs. Fritz spent his six years in learning the classics, for which he felt a lifelong enthusiasm; but he could make no way with mathematics, and his one other passion was luckily or unluckily for the European public which has read his criticisms on Wagner with admiration, wrath, and perplexity. The passion for reserve and reverie. grew in solitude; he lived on his weekly visit home; and he breathed out in verse that deep depression no anodyne for which was anywhere accessible to him. With school-friends he founded the society "Germania," which, short-lived enough, gave him scope for the attempts in music and literature that he was ever making. Sometimes, thinking where he should travel during his holidays, he fell into strange dreams and trayelled in his sleep; and once, thus roaming, as he thought, under comfortless vivid sunshine, there struck upon his ear a cry from the neighboring asylum, which he records in a melancholy yet defiant tone. He did not foresee the future.

His school-days began to weary him; never could this intractable though modest-seeming temper submit to routine; and he hated the traditions as much as the advantages of the Ger

man scholar's life, long before he came to read Schopenhauer's diatribes against the University system. Neither was he impetuous in friendship, though attached and serviceable; he disliked the sentimental style; soon drew back from societies in which his quite un-German love of pure air and his refined courtesy met with no satisfaction; and was evidently thinking for himself, despite the almost military discipline under which he lived at Pforta. In many ways, now and later, we are reminded of an unhappy English genius and New-Pagan, John Addington Symonds, whom Nietzsche not a little resembled. Both were outwardly diffident, at heart self-sustained and intractable; in either the capacity for mental suffering, heightened by illness and introspection, gave a keen sense of what pleasure there might be in life, were health its normal condition; each luxuriated in music yet was an imbecile in mathematics; and both combined an intense love of the Greek and Roman literature with the modern feeling for landscape, especially for the pictured shores of the Riviera, and high Alpine regions like the Engadine in which they found a home. Both, finally, turning from metaphysics as delusion, and convinced that religion, above all in its Christian dogmatic form, was the ruin of art and the chief hindrance to man's advancement, devised in its stead an Epicurean stoicism, or rule of pleasure founded upon the mystery of pain, with the mortality of the soul to put a sting into it, and death as the great deliverance. We may now follow up the record of Nietzsche's youth and manhood, taking this clue to guide

us.

From Pforta, where he had acquitted himself honorably, the scholar he was already entitled to that name passed at twenty, in 1864, to the University of Bonn. His last piece of school-work had been an essay upon Theognis of Megara, in which the old Greek moralist and tyrant was held up to admiration above the heads of the vile democracy, or regiment of

slaves-for such to this haughty and disdainful mind did the civic constitution appear to be, whether in Athens or in Paris, and by instinct he had already chosen his side, the unpopular, anti-Liberal, and Napoleonic. The "strong lonely man," were he Peisistratus, Julius Cæsar, or Cæsar Borgia, had become his pattern of greatness; but years must elapse ere he could preach, to a generation intoxicated with "progress," the doctrine he was now bringing into light from ancient deeps of history in which, ever since Aristotle, it had lain forgotten. In discussing Theognis, however, Nietzsche did not aim at a theory of politics; seldom was he troubled with politics in the common use of the term; his ideal was perfection to be achieved by himself, first as freedom of intellect, and then as an untrammelled selfdirecting life. He walked alone, and regarded no man. Yet this proud solitary could feel enthusiasm for his teachers, believing in them with passionate devotion, and offering them the incense of a rhetoric that flamed up in words most eloquent.

When he found himself at Bonn, learned in books, ignorant of the world as it lives and moves outside books, he was still boyish enough to take the German undergraduate seriously. He joined the "Franconia," fought his duel, contracted, as he says, "debts and rheumatism," and made an effort to combine his studies in philology with copious draughts of beer. In vain, however; yet a little while and he puts the whole "Burschenschaft" from him as vulgar and Philistine. Nietzsche was not made to drink, smoke, or waste his substance in riotous living. He attempted even to reform the Franconians,-an essay which was repulsed with astonishment by these swaggering philosophers. And so he drew back into solitude again. It must not be imagined from this hasty sketch that the youth whose daintiness of word and conduct we have insisted upon was that affliction to mankind known as a "superior person,"-Fritz had a natural

fund of humor, and could laugh at his own conceits,-nor did he fail in cområdeship, although the Kneipe was not his Paradise. That which was wanting to him at a critical moment was the authority of a teacher to whom he could look up. For now he had begun to vex himself with the problems of the New Testament and the Christian origins, supposing, as he said afterwards, that history-with the aid of the science of language-could give a direct answer to questions of religion. During his first term, he was down for the lectures in divinity,-his interests as well as his associations seemed to fit him for the office and work of a clergyman, to which from boyhood he was drawn. But another spirit came upon him at Bonn. So far from desiring to be a pastor, he ceased, in fact, to be a Christian. His evangelical training could make no stand against Bible criticism, as it was practised by the eminent men around him. And the familiar, painful experience followed,-distress at home when his changed views were realized, a void in his own heart, the loneliness of life intensified, the past melting as into legendary mist, the future a blank. His two years at Bonn were, perhaps, the least comfortable he ever spent; but they marked the turning-point at which, forsaking the path his ancestors had travelled, Nietzsche joined that throng of bewildered and disorderly pilgrims who have substituted inquiry for belief and become seekers after the unknown.

Leipzig, which was his next halting place, attracted him by the fame of its professors, Curtius, Dindorf, Ritschl, and Tischendorf, all of whom helped him to attain that minuteness of knowledge, if hardly the breadth of view, which he deemed requisite to a student of mankind. But his true master at Leipzig was none of these; it was the dead Schopenhauer, in whom, until a certain memorable day, he had not read one line. Finding the volumes at an old bookseller's, some demon, as he tells us, whispered to him, "Take them home;" he obeyed