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.

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 musicluckily 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 travelled 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 comradeship, 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

the warning, went back with them to the retired little house in a garden where he was then passing his quiet days, and throwing himself down on a sofa let the magician work his mighty spell upon him. Schopenhauer was a revelation, intimate, astonishing, personal, as if he had written for Nietzsche alone. "An energetic, gloomy genius," assuredly; and we may well believe that "every line which cried aloud of renunciation and self-denial" spoke to the tormented spirit; that "here, as in a lookingglass," or a prose-version of "Faust." he saw "the world, life, and his own mind in terrible majesty,"-"the sunlike glance of art; sickness and healing; banishment and refuge; Heaven and Hell." He began to despise, to chasten himself; his diary abounded in sharp satire on his own weakness; he was nervous and ill, yet deprived himself of sleep, sitting up until two in the morning to rise again at six. How would all this have ended? It is his own question, and he answers, "Who can tell to what height of folly I should have ventured, had not vanity and the pressure of regular studies wrought in a contrary direction?"

He was not greatly in love with "regular studies." The famous professors, he judged, were by no means extraordinary men, but rather "Helots" of learning, Gibeonites who made a deal too much clamor about the wood they were condemned to hew and the water they were drawing for a temple which, to their dim vision, was out of sight. He describes Wilhelm Dindorf as a "powerful-looking man, with features like parchment, old-fashioned, and formal in his manners;" with keen, cautious eyes; a pessimist in principle, yet full of the "mercantile egoism" which led him to sell his critical conjectures in the dearest market. and drive hard bargains (be this a venial offence!) with English and German publishers. Nietzsche distrusted him, and would enter into no dealings with the man whose services to others he thought were little better than huntings on his own account. Tisch

endorf, his yet more renowned rival, who had examined and judged two hundred Greek manuscripts dating from before the ninth century,-an achievement without parallel,-was "a small, rather bent figure, with fresh rosy cheeks and curly black hair," a study in character, much more complex than Dindorf, "cunning and diplomatic, fanatical, frivolous, ever SO sharpsighted in his own department, painfully exact in publication, vain beyond all bounds, greedy of gain, defensor fidei, a courtier, and a speculator in the book-market." Verily, as Nietzsche observes, "a versatile soul." He inspired students with his own passion for palæography, though pursuing no system; and his lectures, again remarks the satirist, might have been dubbed "Tischendorf's Life and Experience." Nietzsche, however, followed them with steady enthusiasm. His Theognis had won the applause of Ritschl and Dindorf; he wrote on the "sources of Suidas" and the "catalogues of Aristotle," and was led by a happy chance to the question of the materials employed by Diogenes Laertius in his "Lives of the Philosophers." All this sound and careful work may be taken as evidence that Nietzsche was no more threatened with insanity than another Leipzig student. His larger views, derived from Schopenhauer and now moulding themselves in the aphoristic forms of Emerson, whom he thought a master of prose, though they troubled his imagination, did not throw him off his balance. So much is clear from letters and documents of this time. A change, indeed, was approaching; the first signal of which sent him, in 1867, to Naumburg in the uniform of a military conscript.

Nietzsche was a tall fellow, well set up, of the same height as Goethe, with dark, earnest eyes, which German erudition had dimmed before their time. As learned men will do, he wore spectacles of a less powerful kind than befitted him; yet he had been exempted from service until the regulation was altered; and with glasses No. 8, the student of Suidas discovered

-they, the sprightliest race under heaven, need of anguish and the burden of sorrow beneath which man sinks down into the deeps and is seen no more? Surely, here opens before us, he said, the problem which Schopenhauer has revealed to our modern consciousness,-the value of existence and the meaning of Pessimism. So it appeared to Nietzsche then; but sixteen years afterwards, in this very preface, he could say that it was the primary question of science itself upon which he had lighted.

For an English reader, probably the speediest way into this fine suggestive essay, would be through Walter Pater's meditations on "Dionysus, the spiritual form of fire and dew," on the "Bacchanals" of Euripides, the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and the romantic elements-so he terms them -in Hellenic religion. But Nietzsche takes a grander sweep. Whether his conclusions will bear the weight which he has laid upon them, is a question for critics,-yet, assuredly, not for critics of the low and grovelling kind which crawls with the serpent on its belly and bites the dust of learning. It is highly significant that his great monumental work, "Thus Spake Zarathustra," was in Nietzsche's plans but a prelude to one still greater, the title of which should be "Dionysus, a Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence." And while many have suspected that in his frequent prologues,-all so lively and graceful,— -no less than during the process of manipulation by which he re-wrought his volumes, this author was fond of antedating views and putting forward a consistency never attained by him, certain it is that in "The Birth of Tragedy" we may discern "that unbodied figure of the thought, which gave it surmised shape." Nay, nor quite unbodied; there is much expressive delineation, if also the confusing influence of "premature, too green and sallow growths of life," which hindered the language of its clearness.

Nietzsche had, in this first attempt, copied the Romantic school,-Heine,

Wagner, and his prophet Schopenhauer. He revelled in imagery, and spoke as to the initiated, furnishing a curious contrast to that light and rapid movement which was afterwards to give his thoughts wings and to lift them into cloudless ether. His grasp of the whole Greek literature is masterly. But even more remarkable is the insight which leads him to deal with it as a symbol and expression of that complex world which we know as the life of the Greeks. He sees them in the presence of primeval nature, struggling with the huge and terrible powers they were bound to tame if they would not perish. Profoundly observant of the recurring cycles in their civilization, he goes beyond Pater and the folk-lore which is content to deduce the Eleusinian mysteries from corn and wine. He sees in them a philosophy encompassing all the mythologies-Titans and Olympians; Dionysus the ecstatic deity, and the Dorian Apollo, lord of measure; he opposes to them Socrates the cool reasoner, the man of theory, with his crowd of disciples fed upon abstractions, but fatal to the unconscious Hellenic spirit, which had dreamt its noblest dreams, ay, and realized them in bronze and marble, in music and speech, in polity and action, before the age of Plato, destined as this too surely was, to run down in decadence and bring forth Callimachus and the Alexandrians. It is a fruitful, farreaching theme. We may boldly pronounce that it filled the mind and fired the imagination of this deep thinker, until its vastness proved too much for him. Neither, as we are compelled to maintain, did he resolve his problem aright; the fault, however, lay in those who taught him,-in Kant, in Schopenhauer, in the German philosophy which has set out from a suicidal unreason rather than from fact and Aristotle. Let us honor the man whose eyes are open to so large a prospect, though he cannot draw the map of its pathways correctly, or guide us in our travelling over it. The scope and meaning of Greek tragedy, which