Why is it, then, that those who vocationally and constantly worship in the sanctuary of art--the priests in this sanctuary--often so easily and singularly fail in the consecration which the worship of beauty is supposed to supply to the human personality? The lives of those whose calling it is to exhibit and exemplify the beautiful, why are they often so very ugly, so bereft of lovable emotions? The shortcomings of the artist, why do we count among these the pettiest and the basest known to man? To be specific, why do we speak almost proverbially of an artistic vanity, an artistic sensitiveness, an artistic envy or jealousy? If we answered, "Because the shadows of the 'human all too human' seem so dark in the golden light of the artistic calling," that would be true, but it would not be the whole truth. Does not the professional occupation of oneself with art involve a danger to character? To live constantly in the world of the emotions, to fable and fantasy and dream, in all this there is so easily something weak, not to say "effeminate" and sickly, and hence enervating. Of great spirits this is true often enough--how much more of the lesser who sophistically find warrant in the weakness of the great for the greatness of their weakness! For instance, they have heard of "inspiration"--something not under the control of the artist, something that must "come upon him," but only when the divine hour strikes, as it struck at the pentecostal "outpouring" of the "spirit" upon the early Christians. Hence no care for a thousand things--in both cases--for which other men must care! Hence a standard of life different from that by which other men live! To be outwardly different from others, to set oneself above others, that is to be artistic. Because some great artists are different from other people in moods and manners and morals, it is naïvely concluded that to emulate the latter is to be the former, and right merrily does the emulation go on. It must be a grief to a real artist, this culture of the eccentric head and the more eccentric heart. Therefore we need a man to free us from these eccentricities, a man to lift us above these caricatures because he has himself put them beneath his feet. This man is Friedrich Nietzsche. The sickness and the soundness of life, both these were in Nietzsche. In his demand for an artistic culture he put his finger upon the wound of present humanity. This demand was accepted, the meaning of the demand was lost sight of. This was the fatality--as if Nietzsche required a new artistic culture only, and not at the same time a new life culture! Beauty the form of life indeed, but strength, will, deed, the content--that was the brave burden of the prophet's message.