pain, inflicted or endured, as the chief curse of humanity. Their moral law may be summed up in the one commandment "Be kind." The high races of the world painted on their escutcheon a very unlike commandment, "Be noble." And yet, says Nietzsche in a curiously sublime, half-mad outburst, it was by taking the revenge of charity, by forgiving and loving, that this horde of slaves overcame, and Judæa led Rome in triumph. The Cross and the Redeemer,-in hoc signo, he concludes, it is matter of history that "the underworld of suffering" mounted above pagan civilization and vanquished Apollo.

These are not new conceptions, though flung out with a passion of hatred which, even among anti-Christians, is almost without parallel. Nietzsche gives in abstract form,-he was hardly capable of breathing into the hollow phantom the breath of life, -but, on the whole, he gives precisely the same view of religion which Heine has tricked out in the pantheistic splendors of his book "Ueber Deutschland." It is the revolt of flesh against spirit, impulse an argument to deny free-will, and good and bad confounded or blended in one, like the red and purple of the solar spectrum,-the extremes are but a resolution of light which is in fact the same. Spirit is a negation, according to both these evangelists, of "sense and seeming," the immortal soul, the world to come, a transcendent Deity, sin, judgment, and conscience, are terms in a fanciful doctrine like alchemy or stargazing. Men have long been ill of this disease; high time it is that they should recover. The words "decadence" and "evolution" had not been invented when Heine wrote. Beyond question, had he known them, he would have identified the whole Christian era with decadence, and given glory and honor to the modern revolt from its dogma as the next stage in evolution. Nor does it signify much whether, in ascribing to Israel the religion of pity as to its fountain-head, Nietzsche has overlooked Gautama

and his disciples; since no one will seriously contend that Buddhism exercised a direct, or even a recognizable influence, on the revolutions of the first Christian century.

How shall we bring these shafts of light to a focus? Might we not say, in the spirit of a profound suggestion hazarded by Kant, that man, so long as the visible world delights and intoxicates him, will never dream of the invisible? and that disappointment, anguish, the "sorrows of death," alone will drive him to consider the "great Perhaps," the note of interrogation which points beyond things seen to things in the dark? And when once this clue has been laid hold on, the reflective will seek in pain, and not in enjoyment, the key to life's mystery, which, if present happiness cannot resolve it, present trouble need not increase but rather lighten? Hereupon, a second world is dimly felt,suspected, let us say, beyond the "seeming," and, though the terms in which we express our forebodings must be negative, that which they grope after is the strongest of all affirmations; it is the Everlasting Yea; and the flesh with its instincts, furies, and excesses, will be henceforth merely a shadow of it.

If this be denied, we are thrown back upon the visible "cosmic process" and the philosophy of fact. Positivism-to call it by its unlovely namehas conquered. Nietzsche lauds and magnifies Auguste Comte as a constructive mind the like of which neither Germany nor England can show among men of science. With Comte he accepts "phenomena" as the sum total of our knowledge, adding, in a spirit which would have delighted Hume, that, of course, phenomena themselves are but phenomenally conceived by us, and we must not prate of the "ego" any more than the "substance," or of will as a faculty, or "soul" as aught except a group of sensations. Reality is action and reaction; moreover, by infinite training from times pre-historic, the human animal has come to interpret his world

upon a highly-complex, artificial scheme, made up-like language for instance of the most varied materials, and moulding experience in a thousand ways capriciously. Knowledge is an art, not a science; the famous metaphysicians have left us their autobiographies, in the shape of systems, and cunningly passed them off as though disinterested and impersonal; but they are lyric poems, nevertheless, and whoso should take them for transcripts of reality would not be wise.

Nietzsche will give the world his own lyric poem. It is "Zarathustra," to which we have come at length over these mountain-paths. On a day, as he went wandering through the woods about the Lake of Silvaplana, in the Engadine,-he marks it as in August, 1881,-and in the neighborhood of an immense pyramidal boulder not far from Surlei, "the first flash" of its sovereign idea, "Eternal Recurrence," darted into his mind. Ever after, the thought returned with growing brilliancy. When he wrote "Joyful Science," a hundred tokens were laid up in it of "the approach of something incomparable;" that volume glittered at its close "with the diamond-set beauty of we first words of Zarathustra," and "in the delightful silent bay" of Rapallo, two years subsequently, the opening chapters were conceived. An "almost intolerable expansion of feeling" accompanied these mighty inspirations. At Rome, Nice, or Mentone, various parts found their fitting language. But the work, though running to nearly five hundred pages, remains a fragment. Ere it was published in its present form, Nietzsche's mind gave way, not, as his friends thought possible, to be restored by such care and kindness as at other times had brought him round. His

last compositions belong to the winter of 1888; early in the next year mental disease overtook him once more. He was confined in an asylum; and by and by transferred to Naumburg, where, since 1890, he has been living, without hope of recovery, under his friends' guardianship.

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Such is the sad but necessary prologue to a criticism of the work which may on good grounds be termed the Bible of Positivism. Sooner or later, the philosophy that passes by as inconceivable every "other-world," metaphysical, religious, or scientific, cept the world of sense, was destined to find its poet. Signs were not lacking, also, that whoever should strike these fresh chords, would prefer some prose-rhythm to the verse-making which has grown to be a toy or amusement with the world at large. Poetry, giving itself out as such, is the private joy of a comparatively small circle; the modern poets, it has been said, sing to one another, and men do not stay to hear these nightingales. On the other hand, preachers with a mission,-let us name, though not appraising them, Walt Whitman, Felix Dahn, and Edward Carpenter,-do find an audience, perchance not fit, certainly not few, to whom their rhapsodies bring conviction and a sense of the new birth. It is worth while remarking that all these builders of the lofty rhyme are anarchists, ego-worshippers, rebels to law and order, despising tradition, and invent on realizing ideals which dethrone duty and deify passion. But if others, like Karl Gutzkow and Wilhelm Jordan, have traced a pathway along which the author of "Zarathustra" walks obediently, yet he, most of all among Germans, possessed that "immense rhetorical power and rhapsodic gift," '-as Professor Tille describes it in the preface to his finelywrought translation,-which can take up esoteric or obscure ideas and cast them into life and literature.

These four books are the antithesis to Dante's "Divine Comedy;" they paint, with rapid and often contradictory strokes, the "Human Comedy:" but not as in Balzac, crowded with figures, rich in chances and fatalities, a market-place seen through Dutchartist eyes, and infinite in miniature. Nietzsche had neither plastic imagination, nor the sense of contrast which inspires and diversifies the best narrative. He could not throw himself into

minds of a pattern opposed to his own; and we shall look in vain for that holding of the balance even whereby the epic genius of Walter Scott is so admirably shown. One story, and only one, could Nietzsche tell; his travels, griefs, experiences, hopes; and how enemies had met him in the way. His rhapsody is a monologue, an endless confession with a single hero, in whose light all the rest are thin-voiced shadows; they have no blood in them. But we are forgetting the story itself. Let us endeavor to sketch some of its main features.

The name, Zarathustra, is, of course, Persian; but, except in the curious article of Eternal Recurrence, the opinions held by this Zoroaster have nothing in common with his very ancient namesake. He is, rather, the Mohammed of Darwinism, looking forward to the possible next or higher Man; if we think of him as a pilgrim from this world-modern Europe and all it believes in-to the world to come, we must bear in mind that such a world will come on earth, and not in heaven; it is the golden age of the secular philosophy, and begins with the death of old ideals. Nietzsche puts into his prophet's mouth a cruder language; we will spare ourselves the pain of quoting it. Enough that the religious period is to pass away, and a new generation arise that knows not Deity. For the journey from our decaying century a guide is needed, and Zarathustra is the man. He has read the Old Testament with envy and despair of its inimitable power, its large music, its persuasiveness; and, so far as modern speech can reproduce aught of its stern majesty, the wanderer will attempt it. In a continuous parable, with imagery woven throughout, the talk runs on, three or four times rising to heights of emotion which are called the songs of Zarathustra; but except in the "Drunken Song," where he breaks off not to resume his teaching again, there is no rhyming. Philosophy and fiction, the serious and the comic, satire, prophecy, criticism, love, friendship, hatred, and laughter, with an

overweening sense of the part that he is playing, make the sum and substance of the teacher's discourse. He often contradicts himself, as we have hinted, to reconcile necessary evolution with the "free spirit," perfection with utilitarian methods, and a superfluity of power with the struggle for existence, is more than Nietzsche could accomplish, though not more than he was willing to undertake. The currents of thought which he was painting with so random a brush, have run into whirlpools, and we can sometimes learn of them only by the clouds of foam that they cast up.

When Zarathustra was thirty years old, thus the tale begins, he left his home, and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he rejoiced in his spirit and in his solitude, and for ten years grew not weary. At length his heart turned within him; one morning he rose up with dawn, stepped into the presence of the Sun, and thus spake unto him:

Thou great star, what would be thy happiness, were there not those for whom thou shinest? . . . Lo, I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that hath hived toc much honey; I need hands reaching out for it. I would fain grant and give until the wise among men once more enjoy their folly, and the poor their riches.

Thus Zarathustra's going down began, in a spirit, not of compassion, but of over-abundance; with paradoxes in plenty, and his gospel which he cried aloud in the market-place, "Behold, I teach you beyond-man." The idle people, collected to see a rope-dancer on the high rope, mocked and jeered; when their new prophet described to them the "last man," who "makes everything small," invents "happiness," works for entertainment, is equal to his neighbor, is clever and has read everything, and is neither rich nor poor, the folk interupt, "Give us that last man, Zarathustra." They cannot understand the saying, "What is great in man is that he is a transition and a destruction." and the herd" will agree

The "folk with "the

good and just" in hating one who tells them to despise virtue; in whatever sense he meant it, to them he has become a criminal, a law-breaker. And so Zarathustra, when his first preaching is done, looks for companions only and leaves the crowd. He will never, in truth, find them. We hear of his disciples, but do not so much as know their names. By an unexplained miracle, he has to attend him certain fabulous creatures, an eagle and a serpent borrowed from mythology. And he can always find an audience, which, however, mostly remains silent when he speaks. What, indeed, could they say? For argument is not vouchsafed them but assertion,-bold, picturesque, infallible in its own conceit, and ever stirring them up to free themselves from bondage. The bondage meant is contract, law, marriage, honesty, life itself when it has ceased to bring delight, or its loss may quicken the march of the new period. No wonder that many listen and some are persuaded by so large a doctrine. We cannot forbear applying to it Nietzsche's Own words, "Atheism, when it takes hold of a man, gives him a sort of innocence," the anarchist feeling is intoxication.

How shall we venture to touch upon matters so deep and dangerous as are indicated by chapters written against "the Preachers of Death," the "Despisers of the Body," against scholars, poets, and fortune-tellers; in favor of "Free Death," and, in a thousand unexpected ways, against the supernatural? We should prefer to praise such a clear and tender song as Zarathustra sings to "his dead," a reminiscence of Ossian, perfect in feeling and measure, "Yonder is the isle of graves, the silent; yonder also are the graves of my youth. Thither will I carry an evergreen wreath of life." These musical lines of prose carry with them a scent of woods, the keenness of mountain winds, and a sense of broad and placid sunshine. They are poetry of the Alps, improvised under an open sky. "For this is the truth," said Nietzsche, "I have departed from the house of

scholars, and the door I have shut violently behind me." In his travels to the "country of culture" he saw his once fellow-countrymen "with fifty mirrors about them, which flattered their play of colors;" they were written all over with signs of the past and painted over with new signs; and he that should take away their veils and garments and colors and gestures would just keep sufficient to scare the birds. Too true, and the explanation of his own state! With the raving of all times, with dreams and gossip, Nietzsche had been driven wild into the solitary woods; and the intense confusion bred this nightmare which has still its beautiful landscapes, far horizons, lights in a clouded heaven, and, amid parodies and paradox, seeds of truth which a less distracted age may foster.

The poem, as we have said, does not end; it breaks off. There is in it a certain wavering progress; and we catch now and again the sound of some great conflict in the words; when the sea sleeps, and Zarathustra stands alone among the cliffs, he whispers to himself, "Love is the danger of the loneliest one, love unto everything, if it only live." He is a "kind-hearted fool." His rage and scorn and praise of cruelty are, perhaps, but the symptoms of a deeply-wounded affection. The soul, too, must sing, or even dance, in that "song of great longings," which, at another time, Nietzsche would surely have condemned as Wagnerian tenderness and overmuch sympathy with sadness. In the last fragment, it is a cry of distress that sends him out on pilgrimage until he find who has uttered it; and when the flying or creeping shadows of the past come to him,-the kings, and the wizard, and the conscientious man of small science, and the ugliest man, and other hideous or forlorn creatures,-he receives them all into his cave, tending them, although with a speech that mocks them somewhat, until they seem to grow into the likeness of that Ideal One whom he has guessed at in his dreams. And thus he builds, per