He had explained the recoil from Epicurus, which he found among the more gloomy philosophers, according to his Greek principles; it betokened a "triumphant fulness of life;" the "tragic perception" was returning, perhaps in Goethe, but surely in Wagner's Dionysian strain, the music of the future. That wonderful man combined in his works motion and emotion, the chorus with the heroic narrative, the legendary myth and the incentive to action which should shame the past. The years from 1870 lea up to Wagner's high noon, celebrated in tender yet incisive language by his latelyfound friend on that day of days when the theatre-we had almost said the temple at Bayreuth was founded. Listen to this exquisite praise:

There is a musician [wrote Nietzsche in 1876] who beyond any other has the secret of finding tones peculiar to suffering and tormented souls; nay, to dumb misery itself he lends a voice. None can equal him in the colors of a late autumn, the indescribably pathetic happiness of a last, an utterly last, and all too brief enjoyment; he knows a sound for those secret-haunted midnights of the soul when cause and

...

effect seem to have gone asunder, and at any moment some reality may spring out of nothing. . . . He draws his resources out of the drained goblet, where the bitterest drops have met at last with the sweetest.

His character loves large walls and audacious fresco; but his spirit -he knows not this-likes best to sit in the corner of ruined houses, and there hidden, paints his masterpieces, all short, often but a single measure. . . . I admire Wagner always when he sets himself to music.

And even after Nietzsche had renounced him, listen to this:

Apart from Wagner the magnetizer, the fresco-painter, there is still a Wagner that sets into his works little jewels, our great melancholy musician, abounding in flashes, delicacies, words of comfort in which no one had gone before him, the master of the tones belonging to a sad and comatose happiness. . . . His wealth of colors, of demi-tints, of the mysteries of vanishing light spoils us to such a degree that almost all other musicians seem too robust after him.

Panegyric larger than this who could imagine? Yet the praise bestowed so lavishly at Bayreuth was a leave-taking; and Nietzsche turned his back at once on his musician and his philosopher when he had beclouded them with incense. Open his volume which bears the significant name of "Joyful Science," and read there how in the years between 1876 and 1881 the disciple, passing through a long valley of desolation,-illness, solitude, and numberless griefs were weighing upon a dangerously unstable temper,-was carried away into a region that Schopenhauer would have assigned to lost souls. A change, afflicting and obscure, had come over him; infinite suspicion, the unrest of a spirit walking through dry places, and a seemingly wide expansion of mind,—all which, until the final catastrophe, were qualities which marked him off from his fellows,-do but betray the rift within the lute. Nietzsche's style had gained; but his thoughts became incoherent. He never afterwards wrote a connected book, or attempted in his compositions a logical order. From boyhood delighting in the sun, he would now live,

so far as possible, sub divo, under the open sky, and by preference in the lofty Swiss vales of the Engadine. At Sils Maria, from which many of his pages are dated, he pitched his nomad's tent during the years when, released from professorial duties, he could indulge without check the illusions that beset him. Alone and often suffering, he lost his self-control; the sense of proportion forsook him; life, unrestrained by practical obligations, grew to be a many-colored, capricious fantasy, a thing of rapid and inconstant lights, governed, if at all, by reminiscences of the philosophy in which he had put his trust, but really as vague in course and outline as any dream. Are, then, the meditations of a mind so disordered worth pursuing? But they find readers in the Old World and the New; adherents even are not wanting; and the questions of philosophical scope and method to which they lead us are, in fact, the supreme

questions of our time. Who can overlook them?

Suspicion, which in conduct may be a fault, says Nietzsche, is in philosophy a virtue, and its name-how well we know it?-is criticism. The old man of Königsberg has taught us to suspect, not one truth or another, but every truth; to cross-examine and denounce, without the least regard to sentiment or interest. Nevertheless, Kant, who proclaimed theologians bankrupt, had an interest of his own, a highly respectable one as became so unblemished a character; it was the moral law, the eternal "Thou shalt" which he set up over gods and men. Schopenhauer, too, an artist, if ever there was one, had a moral interest; he preached sympathy with suffering, or, as it has since been christened by an ugly Italian hybrid, with "altruism," the duty of loving, and not hurting, every creature that is liable to pain. Thus, amid the wreck of systems and religions, the absolute law of morality stands on high; good and bad are realities, whatever becomes of "Pure Reason" and first principles in the old dogmatic kingdom, now thought by Kant and his followers to be an "idol of the theatre." But suppose, says Nietzsche, that Kant were illogical and Schopenhauer a Christian malgré lui? Have we better grounds for accepting as a fixed and final value the term "good" than our ancestors had when they bowed down before the term "true"? If the whole scheme of knowledge must be transferred from the sign absolute to the sign relative (from plus to minus, we call it), why should morality plead exemption? All that we see, hear, feel, or judge, has fallen under the laws of perspective; the centre is the individual man, this I, this complex being of aims and appetites, mortal but wholly self-regarding, which is all that physiology leaves when it has used its sharpest instruments. What is my law, therefore, in the struggle from which I can escape only by falling into the abyss? Ought I not to aim at surviving? at assimilating from my neighbor who is, in fact,

my

enemy? at subduing whatever world there may be to my own heightened sense of existence? Let this be denominated the "Will to Power," and we shall have made an end of the "categorical imperative," as well as of the gospel of sympathy.

An intelligible doctrine, it must be admitted, not so much insane as immoral, and long since at home in the world. Not on this score will Nietzsche be charged with an unsound mind. For twenty years, perhaps even longer, the intuition of life as an ascending or descending process had filled his mental vision; when illness came, it made health and all that health includes yet more desirable. Construe this passion now in the light of Darwin, and ask whether old morality, allowing neither of exception nor compromise, stern with its unchangeable decrees,—Si fractus illabatur orbis, -will favor the individual, who cannot look for recompense, or deem that he shall be made perfect, in a Heaven beyond the veil. There is no veil, returns Nietzsche; the only world we know is that immense chaos-for he will not so much as term it a systemof activities, instincts, processes, conflicting with one another, to which we can assign no beginning or end, no purpose, final cause, or Sabbath of rest. The mind itself which pedants worship is but a device to preserve the organism; there can be no such thing as disinterested knowledge or art, let Schopenhauer rave as he will about Platonic ideals; and, by parity of reasoning, unselfish ethics would be as impossible as to the individual who practised them they must be unprofitable. Yet, we may argue,-sympathy is a motive. "I grant you," replies the "immoralist" in his famous tract "Beyond Good and Evil," "sympathy does exist, and I will tell you what it means; it is the slave-morality, the system of the herd, on which modern democracy is founded."

Let us pause awhile to take breath. These tremendous invectives against all that Christians hold sacred, cannot be read without an uneasy feeling that

they do, perhaps, give form and impetus to what Mr. Thomas Hardy describes as "the lines of tacit opinion," upon which many shape their lives, though comparatively few would defend them, even when the doors were shut. Morality is law, and law is a limit; how might mankind fulfil its destiny, were limits abolished? And what is its destiny? Here Nietzsche reveals the purpose which he has had in view all along. Mankind, he would say, has one supreme task,-not a moral duty, but a physiological necessity, to produce the "overman." Does not Emerson talk of the "oversoul"? Now, the “overman" is the next high apparition of greatness, in will, mind, and body, who shall be to us what we at our best are to the ape and the tiger. He will frame his conduct upon a law by no means resembling the pact of equality, now dear to Constitutionmongers.

And if we would behold him in a parable, we must read, with astonishment and pain, yet, says its author, with reverence, "Thus Spake' Zarathustra."

Before we turn to that extraordinary prose-poem, a word on the style adopted by its author will be requisite. Nietzsche says of himself that like his first master, Schopenhauer, he was an accident, or lusus naturæ, among the Germans. And truly so. Though we should demur to his sweeping dictum, that "on our side of the Rhine, clearness is an objection and logic a disproof," no one will ascribe, even to Goethe or Lessing, a genius for epigram. The very syllables of German are heavy with an unknowable content, perhaps the "thing in itself," which Kant was always feeling under him but could never divest of its "hulls." "The line, too, labors, and the words move slow,"-how slow, they shall testify who have given their days and nights to Jean Paul! German prose literature is a succession of ploughed fields after steady rain, a clay that sticks to one's boots, a boundless expanse of ideas in their primitive and chaotic stage, where the mind welters and discrimination

self

is beyond man's feeble power. But this, certainly not too sane, philosopher, who could not write a book, was, to repeat his well-warranted praise, Master of the Sentences—if only they were not too many! As a boy, he read Sallust and felt the epigram rising to his lips; later on, with ardor and delight he threw himself into the arms of Montaigne-the incomparable Frenchman in whom life overflows and genius rules like a spirit; then he knocked eagerly at every door behind which sat the Pascals, the La Bruyères, the La Rouchefoucaulds, elaborating their golden tapestries; and, with a judgment that commends his own work, he preferred the weight of Thucydides even to the grace of Plato; while in Horace the high relief of single expressions, the cameo-like perfection and delicacy of certain "Odes," seemed to him the finest achievement to which language had ever attained. He was now far from the Romantic School; by conviction he had become a classic, enamoured of the French seventeenth century. "If we convalescents need an art," he is speaking of music, but had in view the music of words no less than of scales and instruments,-"it is another art, an ironical, easy, fugitive, divinely untrammelled, divinely artificial art which, like a pure flame, blazes forth in an unclouded heaven." This was that "delicate tongue for all good things" which recovery from the Romantic sickness gave him, “a second and more dangerous innocence in pleasure,-more childlike, and a hundred times more refined, than one had ever been before." Dionysus lends ecstasy, but Apollo rhythm; and these make the artist. Shall not appearances learn to display their beauty and hide what is hateful, since appearances are all that the mind can call its own?

The pursuit of "Truth in the abstract" being therefore abandoned, naught remains except "my truth," the world as it lies within my horizon; let me deal with it as a landscapepainter, and, if I have the gift, unroll

before me a sky transparent as glass, with pure lines of light, and snows untrodden upon the mountain ranges, above which the stars shall rise, and midnight at length keep watch for me. Books shall feed life, not quench the fire, and a godlike sleep sink all the past I do not love into oblivion. It is the poet's dream. And Lucretius, who "denied divinely the Divine," might have dreamt it in his day, for it holds of Epicurus and the garden. Yet, if we will give ear to Nietzsche, that Greek to whom the gods were but tranquil forms of crystal, not regarding men, was himself a decadent,Epicurus was the "evening red" which comes at sundown, he says in a happy metaphor. Nietzsche, resolved to be free as air, supremely selfish, with an arrogance bordering on mania,-perhaps a form taken by madness,-and in his own thought equal to Napoleon or any other monstrous self-worshipper, had the choice eternally presented to all such; he must conquer the world or retire from it. But on crowds and assemblies he could make as little impression as Goethe, whose one attempt at public speaking silenced him forever. The alternative was solitude, lonely wandering or long moods of convalescence,-a hermit-life, almost in poverty, without ties domestic, wife or children, or more than the chance disciple to whom, when his eyes failed, he might dictate sharp and bitter sayings, that came and went like flashes of lightning. He remembered how Cæsar, the famous epileptic, overcame his disease by infinite marches, bareheaded under the sun; and, dreading fresh attacks of a not unlike description, Nietzsche took staff in hand, travelled up and down Italy, was now at Sorrento and again at Venice,-he loved the Piazza of St. Mark on a bright forenoon, as favorable to his incessant musing,-went often to the lake of Sils, "six thousand feet above the sea-level, and oh, how high above the thought of man!" he exclaims; then would be found at Nice or Santa Margherita, everywhere a ghost, sometimes hurrying as on a momentous

errand to the world at large, often like the melancholy Jacques, lying prone by still waters, or fingering his tablets and hastily dashing upon them words far more vivid, so he would say, than were conceivable within closed walls.

Here are tokens of a "noble mind o'erthrown." But how suggestive that this anarchist par excellence, a rebel to custom and precedent, should have fled by instinct from the German ways, hating the word of command given in Prussian, the professor's pride, the babble of newspapers, "the cloud and the drunkenness" of his folk, gens in servitutem nata, yet only to take refuge with the ascetic ideals which Europe has, in the name of enlightenment, discarded! Once, with some intimate reference, so it would appear, to his own dark genius, he speaks of the "witch's cup," as "mingled with pleasure and cruelty,"-a philtre that no man in his senses would drink, but praised by certain moderns. Did Nietzsche, in those too frequent dreams, taste of it? The question is so far important,-if, as we think, this man will have followers, -inasmuch as the "Will to Power" manifested throughout his writings, and the sacrifice of the multitude to some few sovereign spirits, might bring with it such a relapse into hard Paganism as we have remarked symptoms of lately. Passing judgment on the Socialist state, always detestable to him, Nietzsche reprobates it as reaction and the heir of ancient despots; rightly, perchance; but could there be reaction so complete as that which for Christ would substitute Tiberius? And nothing less than Imperial Rome, in its heyday of præterhuman sport, is the pattern of these fierce imaginings. We are not aware that Nietzsche had done a single unkind deed in his life; what we know of him indicates a rare sensibility to suffering; and the sermons against sympathy in which he is so exuberant, betray rather the too easily moved heart than a Roman tyrant's lack of feeling. But though it were a diseased mind that prompted his allegory of the "laughing lion," a

creature delighting to give pain, the doctrine may still be infectious; and ascetic self-denials will not take away the danger.

"Beyond Good and Evil" is a name which gives us pause. Translated, the meaning, it has been asserted, is Darwin made consistent with himself, or physiology the test of morals. Hitherto, the standard of human progress, and, as even scientific men were wont to tell us, its chief instrument, was moral good; witness the late Professor Huxley, where in his Romanes Lecture he affirms that

the practice of what we call goodness or virtue involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless selfassertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the indi vidual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence.

Now, returns Nietzsche, I do not deny that this is Christian doctrine, of course it is, and that is my quarrel with it but is it science? Is it evolution, whether as the "Will to Live," or the "Will to Power"? And in the democratic State, thus walled round about from natural selection, can the result be anything but a levelling down of all to mediocrity, the sacrifice of the noble to the ignoble, of strength to weakness, and of health to tending on the sick? Nature weeds out of her garden the feeble, kills the unhealthy, and cherishes the vigorous. But our sympathetic treatment, which we defend as moral, turns civilization to a lazar-house. That "artificial world within the cosmos,"-to borrow once more from Professor Huxley,-would it be possible to keep it long upon the ascending scale, if the least fit are the most likely to be "selected" by the instinct, or the commandment, of sympathy? "Eras are to be measured by their positive power," remarks

Nietzsche in another passage, "and we modern men, with our anxious selfmusing and brotherly love, our virtues of labor, unpretentiousness, fair play, and scientific spirit,-accumulating, economic, mechanical,-we represent a weak period." The Renaissance, "so profuse and fateful," was great because it was strong; but now, there is no "pathos of distance;" in Hamlet's phrase, "the age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe." This "delicate' humanity" and "considerate morality," this "tenderness and lateness," do but point towards "physiological ageing." Above all, the beggar has got into the saddle and rides. Would not Cæsar Borgia and his friends laugh themselves to death over the spectacle of the weak man unarmed who thinks all happiness comprised in peace, and dare not risk his life to advance his fortune? Borgia, it would seem, was the true evolutionist; an imitator of the cosmic process, though handling morals somewhat rudely. He had learned the value of men and events on that standard which, though not absolute, is the only one we can employ if we would pass up to the next stage. Sympathy is surrender, Christianity decadence. Thus concludes Nietzsche a hundred times over, in language the vehemence of which rises at last into shrieking. Decline or ascent, that is the question. Or, as Professor Clifford once cried out excitedly, "Christians have destroyed two civilizations; shall they be permitted to ruin a third?"

and

The situation, if grave, is piquant. We shall probably contend that between the too-aggressive self-regard of a Renaissance hero, and the too-sympathetic altruism of the Socialist, there is a mean of gold or iron, according to circumstances. But that men so advanced as the leaders of unbe lieving science should be charged with "Christian prejudice," nay, with the most virulent type thereof, is a marvel for which few will be prepared. How little do we know ourselves, if