For the most part yes, with occasional openings to let in new blood. But nothing can so contaminate and weaken an aristocracy as marrying rich vulgarians, after the habit of the English aristocracy; it was such intermarriage that ruined the greatest governing body the world has ever seen-the aristocratic Roman senate. There is no "accident of birth"; every birth is the verdict of nature upon a marriage; and the perfect man comes only after generations of selection and preparation; "a man's ancestors have paid the price of what he is."

Does this offend too much our long democratic ears? But "those races that cannot bear this philosophy are doomed; and those that regard it as the greatest blessing are destined to be the masters of the world." Only such an aristocracy can have the vision and the courage to make Europe a nation, to end this bovine nationalism, this petty Vaterlanderei. Let us be "good Europeans," as Napoleon was, and Goethe, and Beethoven, and Schopenhauer, and Stendhal, and Heine. Too long we have been fragments, shattered pieces of what might be a whole. How can a great culture grow in this air of patriotic prejudice and narrowing provincialism? The time for petty politics is past; the compulsion to great politics has When will the new race appear, and the new leaders? When will Europe be born?

come.

Have ye not heard anything of my children? Speak to me of my garden, my Happy Isles, my new beautiful race. For their sake I am rich, for their sake I became poor. What have I not surrendered? What would I not surrender that I might have one thing: those children, that living plantation, those life-trees of my highest will and my highest hope? 1

1 W. P., ii, 353, 362-4, 371, 422; B. G. E., 239; T. O. S., ii, 39; Z., 413.

IX. CRITICISM

It is a beautiful poem; and perhaps it is a poem rather than a philosophy. We know that there are absurdities here, and that the man went too far in an attempt to convince and correct himself; but we can see him suffering at every line, and we must love him even where we question him. There is a time when we tire of sentimentality and delusion, and relish the sting of doubt and denial; and then Nietzsche comes to us as a tonic, like open spaces and fresh winds after a long ceremony in a crowded church. "He who knows how to breathe in the air of my writings is conscious that it is the air of the heights, that it is bracing. A man must be built for it; otherwise the chances are that it will kill him." 1 Let none mistake this acid for infant's milk.

And then what style! "People will say, some day, that Heine and I were the greatest artists, by far, that ever wrote in German, and that we left the best any mere German could do an incalculable distance behind us. 99 2 And it is almost so.2 "My style dances," he says; every sentence is a lance; the language is supple, vigorous, nervous, the style of a fencer, too quick and brilliant for the normal eye. But on rereading him we perceive that something of this brilliance is due to exaggeration, to an interesting but at last neurotic egotism, to an over-facile inversion of every accepted notion, the ridicule of every virtue, the praise of every vice; he takes, we discover, a sophomore's delight in shocking; we conclude that it is easy to be interesting when one has no prejudices in favor of morality. These dogmatic assertions, these unmodified generalizations, these prophetic repetitions, these contradictions of others not more than of himself-reveal a mind that has lost its balance, and hovers on the edge of madness. At last this brilliance tires us out and exhausts our nerves, like whips upon the flesh, or loud emphasis in

1 E. H., 2.

2 E. H., 39. Nietzsche thought himself a Pole.

conversation. There is a sort of Teutonic bluster in this violence of speech; 1 none of that restraint which is the first principle of art; none of that balance, harmony, and controversial urbanity, which Nietzsche so admired in the French. Nevertheless is it a powerful style; we are overwhelmed with the passion and iteration of it; Nietzsche does not prove, he announces and reveals; he wins us with his imagination rather than with his logic; he offers us not a philosophy merely, nor yet only a poem, but a new faith, a new hope, a new religion.

His thought, as much as his style, reveals him as a son of the Romantic movement. "What," he asks, “does a philosopher firstly and lastly require of himself? To overcome his age in himself, to become 'timeless." " But this was a counsel of perfection which he more honored in the breach than in the observance; he was baptized with the spirit of his age, and by total immersion. He did not realize how Kant's subjectivism-"the world is my idea," as Schopenhauer honestly put it had led to Fichte's "absolute ego," and this to Stirner's unbalanced individualism, and this to the unmoralism of the superman.2 The superman is not merely Schopenhauer's "genius," and Carlyle's "hero," and Wagner's Siegfried; he looks suspiciously like Schiller's Karl Moor and Goethe's Götz; Nietzsche took more than the word Uebermensch from the young Goethe whose later Olympian calm he scorned so enviously. His letters are full of romantic sentiment and tenderness; "I suffer" recurs in them almost as frequently as "I die" in Heine. He calls himself "a mystic and almost mænadic soul," and speaks of The Birth of Tragedy as "the confession of a romanticist.” 4 "I am afraid," he writes to Brandes, "that I am too much of a musician not to be a romanticist." 5 "An author must become

1 Figgis, 230, 56.

2 Cf. Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy.

3 E. g., cf. Halévy, 231.

4 B. T., 6, xxv.

5 Quoted by Huneker, Egoists, 251.

silent when his work begins to speak"; 1 but Nietzsche never conceals himself, and rushes into the first person on every page. His exaltation of instinct against thought, of the individual against society, of the "Dionysian” against the "Apollonian" (i. e., the romantic against the classic type), betrays his time as definitely as the dates of his birth and his death. He was, for the philosophy of his age, what Wagner was for its music,-the culmination of the Romantic movement, the high tide of the Romantic stream; he liberated and exalted the "will" and the "genius" of Schopenhauer from all social restraint, as Wagner liberated and exalted the passion that had torn at its classic bonds in the Sonata Pathetique and the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. He was the last great scion of the lineage of Rousseau.

Let us go back now on the road we have traveled with Nietzsche, and tell him, however ineffectually, some of the objections with which we were so often tempted to interrupt him. He was wise enough to see for himself, in his later years, how much absurdity had contributed to the originality of The Birth of Tragedy.2 Scholars like Wilamowitz-Moellendorff laughed the book out of the philologic court. The attempt to deduce Wagner from Eschylus was the self-immolation of a young devotee before a despotic god. Who would have thought that the Reformation was "Dionysian"-i. e., wild, unmoral, vinous, Bacchanalian; and that the Renaissance was quite the opposite of these, quiet, restrained, moderate, "Apollonian"? Who would have suspected that "Socratism was the culture of the opera"? 3 The attack on Socrates was the disdain of a Wagnerian for logical thought; the admiration for Dionysus was a sedentary man's idolatry of action (hence also the apotheosis of Napoleon), and a bashful bachelor's secret envy of masculine bibulousness and sexuality.

Perhaps Nietzsche was right in considering the pre

1 Quoted by Faguet, 9.

2 Cf. B. T., pp. 1 and 4 of the Introduction. 3 B. T., 142.

Socratic age as the halcyon days of Greece; no doubt the Peloponnesian War undermined the economic and political basis of Periclean culture. But it was a little absurd to see in Socrates only a disintegrating criticism (as if Nietzsche's own function was not chiefly this) and not also a work of salvage for a society ruined less by philosophy than by war and corruption and immorality. Only a professor of paradox could rank the obscure and dogmatic fragments of Heraclitus above the mellowed wisdom and the developed art of Plato. Nietzsche denounces Plato, as he denounces all his creditorsno man is a hero to his debtor; but what is Nietzsche's philosophy but the ethics of Thrasymachus and Callicles, and the politics of Plato's Socrates?-With all his philology, Nietzsche never quite penetrated to the spirit of the Greeks; never learned the lesson that moderation and self-knowledge (as taught by the Delphic inscriptions and the greater philosophers) must bank, without extinguishing, the fires of passion and desire;1 that Apollo must limit Dionysus. Some have described Nietzsche as a pagan; but he was not that: neither Greek pagan like Pericles nor German pagan like Goethe; he lacked the balance and restraint that made these men strong. “I shall give back to men the serenity which is the condition of all culture," he writes,2 but alas, how can one give what one has not?

Of all Nietzsche's books, Zarathustra is safest from criticism, partly because it is obscure, and partly because its inexpugnable merits dwarf all fault-finding. The idea of eternal recurrence, though common to the "Apollonian" Spencer as well as to the "Dionysian" Nietzsche, strikes one as unhealthy fancy, a weird last-minute effort to recover the belief in immortality. Every critic has seen the contradiction between the bold preachment of egoism (Zarathustra “proclaims the Ego whole and holy, and selfishness blessed"-an unmistakable echo of Stirner) and the appeal to altruism and 1 Cf. Santayana, 141.

2 In Halévy, 192.