The spectator who is very much beneath the beauty of the ruler-artist's masterpieces feels his ignominious position at a glance. He realizes the impassable gulf that is for ever fixed between himself and that! And this sudden revelation tells him his level. Such a man, after he has contemplated the ruler-artist's work, may rush headlong to the nearest river and drown himself. His despair may be so great when he realizes the impossibility of ever reaching the heights he has been contemplating, that he may immolate himself on the spot. Only thus can the world be purged of the many-too-many. "Unto many life is a failure," says Zarathustra, "a poisonous worm eating through into their heart. These ought to see to it that they succeed better in dying. "Many-too-many live.... Would that preachers of swift death might arise! They would be the proper storms to shake the trees of life."[74] In the presence of beauty, alone, can one know one's true rank, and this explains why the Japanese declare that "until a man has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty,"[75] for "great art is that before which we long to die."[76] But, to those who see but the smallest chance of approaching it, beauty is an exhortation, a stimulus, a bugle-call. It may drive them to means for pruning themselves of ugliness; it may urge them to inner harmony, to a suppression of intestinal discord. "Beauty alone should preach penitence,"[77] says Zarathustra. And in this sentence you have the only utilitarian view of beauty that has any aristocratic value, besides that which maintains that beauty lures to Life, and to the body. Hence, beauty need not impel all men to the river. There are some who, after contemplating it, will feel just near enough to it not to despair altogether of attaining to its level, and this thought will lend them both hope and courage. The ruler-artist, therefore, in order that his subject-beauty may have some meaning, must be the synthesis of the past and the future of a people. Up to his waist in their spirit, he must mould or paint them the apotheosis of their type. Only thus can he hope to prevail with his subject--Man. The German philosopher, Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, was one of the first to recognize this power of the ruler-artist, and the necessity of his being intimately associated with a particular people, although above them; and in his little book, _System der Æsthetik_, he makes some very illuminating remarks on this matter.[78]