self-sacrifice in the preparation and service of the superman. But who, reading this philosophy, will classify himself as servant, and not as superman?

As for the ethical system of Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, it is stimulating exaggeration. We acknowledge the need of asking men to be braver, and harder on themselves, almost all ethical philosophies have asked that; but there is no urgent necessity for asking people to be crueler and "more evil" 1-surely this is a work of supererogation? And there is no great call to complain that morality is a weapon used by the weak to limit the strong; the strong are not too deeply impressed by it, and make rather clever use of it in turn: most moral codes are imposed from above rather than from below; and the crowd praises and blames by prestige imitation. It is well, too, that humility should be occasionally maltreated; "we have had deprecation and ducking long enough," as the good gray poet said; but one does not observe any superabundance of this quality in modern character. Nietzsche here fell short of that historical sense which he lauded as so necessary to philosophy; or he would have seen the doctrine of meekness and humbleness of heart as a necessary antidote to the violent and warlike virtues of the barbarians who nearly destroyed, in the first millennium of the Christian era, that very culture to which Nietzsche always returns for nourishment and refuge. Surely this wild emphasis on power and movement is the echo of a feverish and chaotic age? This supposedly universal "will to power” hardly expresses the quiescence of the Hindu, the calm of the Chinese, or the satisfied routine of the medieval peasant. Power is the idol of some of us; but most of us long rather for security and peace.

In general, as every reader will have perceived, Nietzsche fails to recognize the place and value of the social instincts; he thinks the egoistic and individualistic impulses need re

1 Cf. Nordau, Degeneration, 451, for a rather hectic attack on Nietzsche as an imaginative sadist.

inforcement by philosophy! One must wonder where were Nietzsche's eyes when all Europe was forgetting, in a slough of selfish wars, those cultural habits and acquisitions which he admired so much, and which depend so precariously on coöperation and social amenity and self-restraint. The essential function of Christianity has been to moderate, by the inculcation of an extreme ideal of gentleness, the natural barbarity of men; and any thinker who fears that men have been corrupted out of egoism into an excess of Christian virtue needs only to look about him to be comforted and reassured.

Made solitary by illness and nervousness, and forced into war against the sluggishness and mediocrity of men, Nietzsche was led to suppose that all the great virtues are the virtues of men who stand alone. He reacted from Schopenhauer's submergence of the individual in the species to an unbalanced liberation of the individual from social control. Foiled in his search for love, he turned upon woman with a bitterness unworthy of a philosopher, and unnatural in a man; missing parentage and losing friendship, he never knew that the finest moments of life come through mutuality and comradeship, rather than from domination and war. He did not live long enough, or widely enough, to mature his half-truths into wisdom. Perhaps if he had lived longer he would have turned his strident chaos into a harmonious philosophy. Truer of him than of the Jesus to whom he applied them, were his own words: "He died too early; he himself would have revoked his doctrine had he reached" a riper age; "noble enough to revoke he was!" 1 But death had other plans.

Perhaps in politics his vision is sounder than in morals. Aristocracy is the ideal government; who shall deny it? "O ye kind heavens! there is in every nation ... a fittest, a wisest, bravest, best; whom could we find and make king over us, all were in truth well. . . . By what art discover him? Will the heavens in their pity teach us no art? For our need 1 Z., 99--100.

of him is great!" 1 But who are the best? Do the best appear only in certain families, and must we therefore have hereditary aristocracy? But we had it; and it led to cliquepursuits, class-irresponsibility, and and stagnation. Perhaps aristocracies have been saved, as often as destroyed, by intermarriage with the middle classes; how else has the English aristocracy maintained itself? And perhaps inbreeding degenerates? Obviously there are many sides to these complex problems, at which Nietzsche has flung so lustily his Yeas and Nays.2 Hereditary aristocracies do not like worldunification; they tend to a narrowly nationalistic policy, however cosmopolitan they may be in conduct; if they abandoned nationalism they would lose a main source of their powerthe manipulation of foreign relations. And perhaps a worldstate would not be so beneficial to culture as Nietzsche thinks; large masses move slowly; and Germany probably did more for culture when she was merely "a geographical expression," with independent courts rivalling one another in the patronage of art, than in her days of unity and empire and expansion; it was not an emperor who cherished Goethe and rescued Wagner.

It is a common delusion that the great periods of culture have been ages of hereditary aristocracy: on the contrary, the efflorescent periods of Pericles and the Medici and Elizabeth and the Romantic age were nourished with the wealth of a rising bourgeoisie; and the creative work in literature and art was done not by aristocratic families but by the offspring of the middle class;-by such men as Socrates, who was the son of a midwife, and Voltaire, who was the son of an attorney, and Shakespeare, who was the son of a butcher. It is ages of movement and change that stimulate cultural creation; ages in which a new and vigorous class is rising to

1 Carlyle, Past and Present, New York, 1901.

2 "In my youth," says Nietzsche somewhere, "I flung at the world with Yea and Nay; now in my old age I do penance for it."

power and pride. And so in politics: it would be suicidal to exclude from statesmanship such genius as lacked aristocratic pedigree; the better formula, surely, is a "career open to talent" wherever born; and genius has a way of getting born in the most outlandish places. Let us be ruled by all the best. An aristocracy is good only if it is a fluent body of men whose patent to power lies not in birth but in ability,— an aristocracy continually selected and nourished out of a democracy of open and equal opportunity to all.

After these deductions (if they must be made), what remains? Enough to make the critic uncomfortable. Nietzsche has been refuted by every aspirant to respectability; and yet he stands as a milestone in modern thought, and a mountain-peak in German prose. No doubt he was guilty of a little exaggeration when he predicted that the future would divide the past into "Before Nietzsche" and "After Nietzsche"; but he did succeed in effecting a wholesome critical review of institutions and opinions that for centuries had been taken for granted. It remains that he opened a new vista into Greek drama and philosophy; that he showed at the outset the seeds of romantic decadence in the music of Wagner; that he analyzed our human nature with a subtlety as sharp as a surgeon's knife, and perhaps as salutary; that he laid bare some hidden roots of morality as no other modern thinker had done;1 that he introduced a value hitherto practically unknown in the realms of ethics-namely, aristocracy"; 2 that he compelled an honest taking of thought about the ethical implications of Darwinism; that he wrote the greatest prose poem in the literature of his century; and (this above all) that he conceived of man as something that man must surpass. He spoke with bitterness, but with invaluable sincerity; and his thought went through the clouds and cobwebs of the

1 Though of course the essentials of Nietzsche's ethic are to be found in Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld, and even in the Vautrin of Balzac's Pere Goriot.

2 Simmel.

modern mind like cleansing lightning and a rushing wind. The air of European philosophy is clearer and fresher now because Nietzsche wrote. 1

X. FINALE

"I love him who willeth the creation of something beyond himself, and then perisheth," said Zarathustra.2

Undoubtedly Nietzsche's intensity of thought consumed him prematurely. His battle against his time unbalanced his mind; “it has always been found a terrible thing to war with the moral system of one's age; it will have its revenge from within and from without." 3 Towards the end Nietzsche's work grew in bitterness; he attacked persons as well as ideas,-Wagner, Christ, etc. Christ, etc. "Growth in wisdom," he wrote, "may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness": 4 but he could not convince his pen. Even his laughter became neurotic as his mind broke down; nothing could better reveal the poison that was corroding him than the reflection: "Perhaps I know best why man is the only animal that laughs: he alone suffers so excruciatingly that he was compelled to invent laughter.” 5 Disease and increasing blindness were the physiological side of his breakdown. He began to give way to paranoic delusions of grandeur and persecution; he sent one of his books to Taine with a note assuring the great critic that it was the most marvelous book ever written; and he filled his last book, Ecce Homo, with such mad self-praise as we have seen. Ecce homo!-alas, we behold the man here only too well!

7

1 The extensive influence of Nietzsche on contemporary literature will need no pointing out to those who are familiar with the writings of Artzibashef, Strindberg, Przybyszewski, Hauptmann, Dehmel, Hamsun, and d'Annunzio.

2 Z., 86.

3 Ellis, 39.

4 Quoted by Ellis, 80.

W. P., i, 24.

6 Cf. the essay on Nietzsche in Gould's Biographical Clinic.

7 Figgis, 43.

8 E. H., 20; cf. Nordau, 465.