I can fancy a strong, healthy, organically cultured young man, just beginning to feel his way into the realities that lie outside the American cornbelt, by chance taking a peep into one of Nietzsche's great books, and, fascinated and quickened by that marvelously contagious god, leaping to new heights of his own manhood. I should guess that in this instance the young man, who happens to be a lawyer, thirty-one years old, living at Davenport, Ia., was temporarily Christianized by bad luck, illness or something of the sort, and in this extremity, kicked by Nietzsche, experienced the feeling of personal adequacy to which Mr. Faust gives utterance. Recovering himself, he avowed his own godhood, even to the last ditch! And that is the triumphant Youth--the Nietzsche--of the thing. A day or two subsequent to the appearance of Mr. Ficke's book upon the market I had the pleasure of hearing it read, with well-nigh perfect sympathy and appreciation, by the foremost Nietzschean expositor in this country. Like other listeners I was amazed, charmed and aroused. Were these results referable to the play alone or in part to the reader, or to both? To what extent, I was compelled to ask, was the effect illusory or hypnotic? I had read some of Ficke's verse, which had given no intimation of anything in its author so heroically Nietzschean as _Mr. Faust_. I had consequently tabbed Ficke as probably a poetic possibility, provided he lived a dozen years in an involuntary hell, undergoing a new birth. Entertaining the doubts indicated by my questions, I read _Mr. Faust_ to myself, trying it in my fashion by the trees, the stars and the lake. Subjected to this test the play did not have the ring and lift which I had heard and felt when it was read--perhaps I should say given an added vitality--by a Nietzschean philosopher. It now impressed me as an extraordinary _tour de force_, reaching in some of its passages a species of accidental trans-Nietzscheanism.