“Goethe’s saying, ‘Faithful to one aim, even on a crooked road,’ suits him well.” Such was the founder of the German Empire, and such the methods by which he founded it. II.--NIETZSCHE It is in no way surprising to find defenders of the calamitous prophet of Hohenzollernism active to prove that he meant this fine thing, and that, and did not mean blood and domination. The truth is that only too many English writers allowed themselves to be tarred with the Nietzschean brush. They made him a cult, a boom, a pinnacle of superior vision. Now that the Moloch, whose high priests were beyond all others Nietzsche and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, is exacting his awful tribute, the worshippers, once so self-confident, begin to fear a little for their own reputations. For the issue of this war is to kill Prussianism, not only in Germany, but in the whole life and philosophy of Europe. The universal watchword is: “Never again!” The vogue of the Supermaniacs is, perhaps, best explained by the curious lack of seriousness in dealing with ideas which is characteristic of the English mind in its worst periods. Great journals flatter the Harnacks and the Euckens and the rest in their attempt to deny all authenticity to the “scraps of paper” on which Christian belief is founded, and wonder, in the next column, why people are not going to church. Professor Cramb--who, by the way, is painfully German in his “anti-German” book--touches upon this inexplicable unreality of English thought. He suggests that it has counted for much in producing in Germany that professorial contempt which one finds, especially, in a writer like Treitschke. When your Prussian says: “Fill me a bath of blood!” he means blood. When your English critic reads it, he says, too often: “What a vivid image!” Of the “deep damnation” which lies at the heart of the Nietzschean philosophy no doubt is admissible. It is idle to say that he contradicted himself at twenty turns, and that especially he hated the professors and raked them with the shrapnel of his irony. It is the way of supermen to hate other supermen. It is the badge of the tribe. Of all his writings Germany took and absorbed just as much as fitted in with her mood of domination and Empire. Hauptmann--another of the flattered renegades--told us the other day that if you open the knapsack of a German soldier you will probably find in it a copy of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_. Nietzsche was angry with the professors only because they preferred obscure, and he preferred lucid brutality. Not since Lucifer was so much light used to dark ends. Not since Diana was great in Ephesus were such beautiful images cast or carven in the service of a false worship. He made German dance, as before him, only Heine had done. “I have the idea,” he wrote, “that with _Zarathustra_ I have brought the German language to its point of perfection.”