It is clear that although Nietzsche chaunts a pæan in admiration of "the magnificent blonde brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory,"[11] and although he is constantly found, as it were, humming this refrain, he had no intention of taking the Prussian as his ideal type--still less of personifying Prussia itself as a super-state engaged in a contest for supremacy with a herd of inferior nations. He does not trouble himself in the least about nations, but only about individual men. Yet, like others who have had the gift of memorable speech, he might {122} well marvel, were he still alive, at the purposes to which his words have been turned by orators and journalists, desirous to grind an edge on their own blunt axes. General von Bernhardi[12] may be taken as a type of the sincere but unoriginal writer who turns all texts to the support of his own sermon. He is an honest, literal fellow. In spite of all his ecstatic flights of rhetoric he is never at all in the clouds--never any farther from the earth's surface than hopping distance. Notwithstanding, he quietly appropriates any Nietzschean aphorisms the sound and shape of which appear to suit his purpose, and uses them to drive home his very simple and concrete proposition that it is the duty of Germany to conquer the world. One imagines from his writings that Bernhardi has no quarrel with Christianity, no wish whatsoever to overturn our accepted notions of morality. He is merely a soldier with a fixed idea, and he is very much in earnest. His literary methods remind one somewhat of the starlings in spring-time, perched on the backs of sheep and cattle, picking off the loose hairs to line their nests. This is the highly practical and soldierly use to which he puts philosophers, poets, and men of letters generally--laying them under contribution to garnish his discourse. [Sidenote: INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY]