"Have you not noticed that most serious-minded and well-intentioned people in our day go about with a revised table of the virtues, saying 'truth' when they mean a certain group of optimistic delusions; saying 'courage' for readiness in accepting and energy in reiterating such delusions, and persistency in closing the eyes to all those facts of life which do not harmonise with them. "So far as my experience goes, the only people in our day who say and admit the truth to the best of their lights are the disciples of Schopenhauer--Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, Sudermann, Nietzsche. "No doubt you will regard this statement with my 'personal equation' looming large. I mean you will consider there is no more in it than that these are the teachers with whom I happen to agree. But I shall be surprised if you do not admit Nietzsche's honesty and the extraordinarily searching and luminous character of his thought." If Johnstone had been put through the mangle of the Honour School called "Greats," it might have left him superciliously deaf to Nietzsche. As it was, being without philosophic training, but deeply sensitive to any new, articulate and daring voice, as well as perfectly at home in German, he found in Nietzsche a liberating and refreshing power. And then his personal experiences disposed him to accept the main thesis of Nietzsche's philosophy that mankind, owing to the teachings of Christianity, had sacrificed the future of the race to over-much care for the weaker brethren. At the same time he kept his head, and signed no vow of submission to Nietzsche. The review of Tille's translation, well bears partial reprinting in this volume for its keen intelligence and also as a quite early sketch of the Nietzschian system in the English press. It was one of the first articles written by Johnstone for the _Manchester Guardian_, and makes us regret, unwisely no doubt, that his mind was to be absorbed more and more in music. Yet, in spite of that absorption, he was as deeply interested as ever in literature and the drama, when dealing with the most serious issues and problems of life. The purely technical and executive side of these arts appealed less to him, and so, to take one instance, he soon outgrew his early enthusiasm for Swinburne, wondered "whether he ever actually gets there," and was even too severe in revulsion. Intentional obscurity irritated him. Mallarmé and his school he would not attempt to understand. His suspicions indeed were well founded, for at the last Mallarmé in his lecture on "La Musique et les Lettres" had arrived at forecasting a new future for music when the sound and rhythm of words would replace the more clumsy and material tones of instruments.