Thus the condition of physical jubilation to which imminent madness brought him let him escape neither presentiment nor anguish. He wished to reassemble for the last time the memories and impressions which life had left to him, and to compose a work which should be bizarre, triumphant, and desperate. Look at the titles of the chapters: "Why I am so prudent.--Why I am so wise.--Why I have written such good books.--Why I am a fatality.--Glory and eternity...." He calls his last work: _Ecce Homo._ What does he mean? Is he Antichrist or another Christ? He is both together. Like Christ, he has sacrificed himself. Christ is man and God: He has conquered the temptations to which He made Himself accessible. Nietzsche is man and Superman: he has known every feeble desire, every cowardly thought, and has cast them from him. None before him was so tender or so hard; no reality has alarmed him. He has taken upon himself not the sins of men, but all their passions in their greatest force. "Jesus on the Cross," he writes, "is an anathema upon life; Dionysos broken in bits is a _promise_ of life, of life indestructible and ever-renewed." The solitary Christian had his God: Nietzsche lives alone and without God. The sage of old had his friends: Nietzsche lives alone and without friends. He lives nevertheless, and can sing, in his cruel extremity, the Dionysian hymn. "I am not a saint," he writes, "but a satyr." And again, "I have written so many books, and such beautiful ones: how should I not be grateful to life?" No; Nietzsche was a saint, not a satyr, and a wounded saint who aspired to die. He said that he felt grateful to life; it was false, for his soul was quite embittered. He lied, but sometimes man has no other way to victory. When Arria, dying from the blow she had given herself, said to her husband as she passed him her weapon: _"Pœte, non dolet._.." she lied, and it was to her glory that she lied. And here, may we not pass on Nietzsche himself the judgment that he had passed upon her? "Her holy falsehood," he wrote in 1879, "obscures all the truths that have ever been said by the dying." Nietzsche had not triumphed. _Ecce Homo:_ he was broken but would not avow it. A poet, he wished that his cry of agony should be a song; a last lyrical transport uplifted his soul and gave him the force to lie. Thou sinkst to eve! Thine eye already Gleams half-bruised; Drops from thy dew, Like tears outstrewn, Stream; the purple of thy love Goes silent over the milky sea, Thy ultimate, tardy blessedness.... All around, only the waves and their mirth. What once was hard Has foundered in a blue oblivion-- My boat lies idle now. Tempest and travel--how unlearnt Hope and desire are drowned, The soul and the sea he sleek. _Seventh_ solitude Never felt I Closer to me the sweet serenity, Warmer the rays of the sun. --Shines not even the ice of my summit?