To be able to explain Nietzsche's rapid and overwhelming triumph, one would want the key to the secret of the psychological life of our time. He bewitched the age, though he seems opposed to all its instincts. The age is ultra-democratic; he won its favour as an aristocrat. The age is borne on a rising wave of religious reaction; he conquered with his pronounced irreligion. The age is struggling with social questions of the most difficult and far-reaching kind; he, the thinker of the age, left all these questions on one side as of secondary importance. He was an enemy of the humanitarianism of the present day and of its doctrine of happiness; he had a passion for proving how much that is base and mean may conceal itself beneath the guise of pity, love of one's neighbour and unselfishness; he assailed pessimism and scorned optimism; he attacked the ethics of the philosophers with the same violence as the thinkers of the eighteenth century had attacked the dogmas of the theologians. As he became an atheist from religion, so did he become an immoralist from morality. Nevertheless the Voltairians of the age could not claim him, since he was a mystic; and contemporary anarchists had to reject him as an enthusiast for rulers and castes. For all that, he must in some hidden way have been in accord with much that is fermenting in our time, otherwise it would not have adopted him as it has done. The fact of having known Nietzsche, or having been in any way connected with him, is enough at present to make an author famous--more famous, sometimes, than all his writings have made him. What Nietzsche, as a young man admired more than anything else in Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner was "the indomitable energy with which they maintained their self-reliance in the midst of the hue and cry raised against them by the whole cultured world." He made this self-reliance his own, and this was no doubt the first thing to make an impression. In the next place the artist in him won over those to whom the aphorisms of the thinker were obscure. With all his mental acuteness he was a pronounced lyricist. In the autumn of 1888 he wrote of Heine: "How he handled German! One day it will be said that Heine and I were without comparison the supreme artists of the German language." One who is not a German is but an imperfect judge of Nietzsche's treatment of language; but in our day all German connoisseurs are agreed in calling him the greatest stylist of German prose.