* * * * * January 5th. Two days ago I was reading Menschen und Werke, by Georg Brandes. I was glancing over an essay on Friedrich Nietzsche, and I came upon some things that made my heart throb:-- “This man [Nietzsche's ideal] takes willingly upon himself the sorrow of speaking the truth. His chief thought is this: A happy life is an impossibility; the highest that man can attain is a heroic life, a life in which, amid the greatest difficulties, something is striven for which, in one way or other, proves for the good of all. To what is truly human only the true men can lift us, those who seem to have come into being through a leap of nature, the thinkers and discoverers, the artists and producers, and those who achieve more through their being than their doing; the noble, the good in a great sense, those in whom the genius of the good works. These men are the goal of history. Nietzsche formulates the sentence 'Humanity shall labor continually at this, to beget solitary great men--and this and nothing else is its task.'-- “Here Nietzsche has reached the final answer to his question 'What is Culture?' For upon this rest the fundamental principles of Culture, and the duties which it imposes. It lays upon me the duty to place myself actively in relation to the great human ideals. Its chief thought is this: To every one who will look for it and partake of it, it sets the task; to labor in himself and outside of himself at the begetting of the thinker and the artist, the truth-loving and the beauty-loving man, the pure and good personality--and therewith at the fulfilment of nature.... “In our day a so-called Culture institution signifies only too often an arrangement by which the cultured, moving in closed ranks, force to one side all those solitary and contrary ones whose striving is directed to higher things. Also among the learned there is so far lacking, as a rule, all sense for the genius that is coming into being, and every feeling for the work of the contemporary and struggling soul. Therefore, in spite of the irresistible and restless advance in all technical and specialized fields, the conditions for the originating of the great are so little improved that the opposition to the highly gifted has rather increased than diminished. “From the government the superior individuals can not expect much. It helps them rarely when it takes them into its service, very certainly it will help them only when it gives them full independence. Only true Culture can prevent their early becoming weary or exhausted, and protect them from the exasperating battle with Culture-philistinism.” * * * * * Those words made my blood tingle, they made me tremble. Alone, miserable, helpless--here was a voice at last, a friend! I dropped the book and I went to the library, and I was back with “Also sprach Zarathustra” in an hour. * * * * *