most searching questions to philosophies old and new, can never be truly perceived except we take into account the point of sight whereat Nietzsche has placed us.

von

This "mystic monad soul," whose utterances challenged an attention they did not for some years win, was original rather in temperament than in theory, and most of all in manner. Transplanted from the still Lutheran air and climate, to which Pietism gave a warm touch, behold it shivering in the Nova Zembla where life was turned to ice under Kant's dreary disenchantments. Reason, made suddenly aware of its own impotence, so Nietzsche felt, would drive thoughtful men towards the wilderness in which, for example, Heinrich Kleist had done himself to death. How could they learn resignation? Where find hope? Did any power exist more primitive than Reason, deeper down in the world's foundations, and, so to speak, aboriginal, beyond the predicates which, according to the shadowy teaching of Königsberg, man had laid upon the unknown and thereby taken the mirage for an authentic vision? Yes, beyond Reason there was Life,—the Will, as Schopenhauer affirmed, an ever-recurring instinct or effort towards existence, which, like some ocean pouring out on all sides countless torrents and cataracts, rushed into the millions upon millions of individuals, and swept forward with them into the future. Not, indeed, as Shelley sings, "One spirit's plastic stress" compels these successions to take forms so lovely or so terrible; "spirit," like "reason," which implies design, or at least system, is man's device, and the primal instinct remains forever blind.-instinct signifies blindness. Yet we seem to observe an art in the world, tragic enough, since it must go down to Hades with ourselves whom it has enthralled and comforted. When we know this secret,-the burden of all music, painting, speech, and song which bring us rest-we have no more

the denial of life familiar to ascetics Eastern and Western; "the wheel of Ixion stands still," and evil is overcome. Such was the doctrine borrowed from mystics by the recluse of Frankfort to heal the despair which Kant's "Critique" had brought forth. by a more profound and yet poetical resignation! It is the merit of Nietzsche to have turned these sombre lights on the men of Hellas, over whose bright heaven the shadows might seem to pass like translucent clouds. Music meant SO much to them; and all the soothing, elevating arts sprang out of it. To modern loungers at the play and the opera, what is tragedy save a sensation, or a stimulant which they take for its bitterness, and which, intellectually, is no more than a pastime? The Greek tragedy was infinitely more.did we term it even, in Goethe's wellworn phrase, the "Religion of Sorrow," its Prometheus and Ajax, its Antigone and Cassandra, its Epidus upon whom all the griefs of the world had come, might bear us out. Was it not, however, from first to last, the service of Dionysus, beginning with those ecstatic dithyrambs in which the music overpowered the human syllables, and ending-for that was, truly, the end of it all-with Euripides, the too domestic, argumentative, sentiment-mongering poet, and his unavailing recantation in the "Bacchanals"?

What, then, was Dionysus? A power excelling the vine-spirit and far more ancient,-he was the "Will to live," that outrush of energy which, in creatures so impressionable as the Greeks, was at once motion and emotion,-frenzied music, surrender to impulse, ecstasy, as we have named it. The original tragedy is the chorus. When the god appears, drama begins: and, as the interchange of choral worship develops into narrative, Apollo, with his measured iambics and art of reason, charms the wild rage until it is purified and brought under law. When reason degenerates into reasoning, and the myth and the chorus be

come a stage decoration for sophists to argue and wrangle in front of it, Dionysus vanishes away; it is an age of decline, and life sinks down to literature, make-believe, commonplace. Instead of heroic resignation, enter upon the stage commercial optimism, bourgeois virtue, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, Epicurus or Bentham, and science as saving truth,-"the Truth," in spite of all the Humes, Kants, and Berkeleys that ever proved its hollowness.

Such was the counterblast to modern civilization wherewith Nietzsche began his career. With no uncertain sound he pleaded for life against abstractions; for the philosophical necessity of suffering against doctrines which would abolish pain and bring in a republic of all the pleasures; for acknowledgment of facts against the pedantry of professors; and for a largeness of life that could not exist without perils encountered and tragedy in the sequence. He spoke, it is true, of resignation; but in his innermost soul he did not mean it. He was far from resigned. Had he been so, he would have kept silence in public, gone on with his "Democritus," and let the world wag. Instead of leading the vita umbratilis which befitted resignation, and was quite easy to him now at Basle, he put forward his "Unseasonable Reflections" on Strauss, Schopenhauer, and Wagner, on the abuse of history, and the delusions which went by the name of German culture. We find in these earlier essays a resemblance of substance no less than of form to Carlyle,-not the Carlyle who wrote Carlylese, and whose "pessimism was an undigested dinner," as Nietzsche says, but the pensive troubled soul at Craigenputtock, whose thinking aloud is so persuasive and his modesty unfeigned. Nietzsche had the shy ways of genius when he began; his tone was impersonal, not arrogant, and there is an air of apology in his humor. But his arrows draw blood. He cannot endure that a "Philistine of culture," such as David Strauss, "an impotent fanatic," 612

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as Lichtenberg would say, shall announce a new religion and talk big concerning "our faith." Still less can he feel delighted with the German insensibility to all fair forms of speech and behavior. They have grown blind in the presence of those Greeks and Romans whom they amend remorselessly, he has an eye upon Dindorf,while from the French they borrow just enough to make themselves a laughing-stock in their ill-fitting attire. Must he not praise Schopenhauer all the more that such a one could lead his independent life, and restore the genuine idea of philosophy (it is not book-learning but practice founded on insight), amid a people so stupidly dilettante and given over to hearsay,wretched mimics of every style because they have none of their own? With them learning has eaten out the substance of life; the Germans have no feelings except in the abstract; they are scholastics, chamber-philosophers, not cultivated but dictionaries of culture. When will they perceive that a healthy human life means forgetfulness of the too-insistent, the infinite past? That culture is a universal method, a tone running through conduct as well as through language, and that the only test of genius, about which they write volumes, is creation? They cram their young men with histories, philosophies, criticisms, until at twenty-five the unhappy mortals exclaim, as Faust did, that they see they can know nothing; alles ist erlebt, selection has become impossible, and the university, which was to train them for life, turns out mercantile professors, journalists without principles, and Philistines acquainted with every literature, but sceptical of all that the "every-day man" cannot grind into profit or amusement.

It is a bitter spirit that utters these home truths. Yet not altogether despairing. Nietzsche said afterwards in his satirical way, "It will be remembered among my friends at least, that I rushed upon this modern world with some errors and over-estimates. but, in any case, as a hopeful person."

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 O 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 system— of 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