And sometimes one feels, walking some country road, with the smell of upturned sods and heavy leaf-mould in one's nostrils, that even Lucifer himself is not as deep or strong or wise as is patient furrowed earth and her blundering children. A rough earth-hint, a Rabelaisian ditty, a gross amazing jest, a chuckle of deep Satyric humour;--and the monstrous "thickness" of Life, its friendly aplomb and nonchalance, its grotesque irreverence, its shy shrewd common-sense, its tough fibres, and portentous indifference to "distinction"; tumbles us over in the mud--for all our "aloofness"--and roars over us, like a romping bull-calf! The antidote to Nietzsche is not to be found in the company of the Saints. He was too much of a Saint himself for that. It is to be found in the company of Shakespearean clodhoppers, and Rabelaisian topers, and Cervantian serving-wenches. In fact, it is to be found, as with the antidotes for other noble excesses, in burying your face in rough moist earth; and grubbing for pig-nuts under the beech-trees. A summer's day in the woods with Audrey will put "Fatality" into its place and remove "the Recurrence of all things" to a very modest remoteness. And this is not a relinquishing of the secret of life. This is not a giving up of the supreme quest. It is an opening of another door; a letting in of a different air; a reversion to a more primitive level of the mystery. The way to reduce the tyranny of this proud spirit to its proper proportion is not to talk about "Love" or "Morality" or "Orthodoxy," or "the strength of the vulgar herd"--it is simply to call up in one's mind the motley procession of gross, simple, quaint, _bulbous,_ irrepressible objects--human and otherwise--whose mere existence makes it as impossible for Nietzsche to deal with the _massiveness_ of Life, as it is impossible for anyone else to deal with it. No, we shall not free ourselves from his intellectual predominance by taking refuge with the Saints. We shall not do this because he himself was essentially a Saint. A Saint and a Martyr! Is it for me now to prove that? It is realized, I suppose, what the history of his spiritual contest actually was? It was a deliberate self-inflicted Crucifixion of the Christ in him, as an offering to the Apollo in him. Nietzsche was--that cannot be denied--an Intellectual Sadist; and his Intellectual Sadism took the form--as it can (he has himself taught us so) take many curious forms--of deliberately outraging his own most sensitive nerves. This is really what broke his reason, in the end. By a process of spiritual vivisection--the suffering of which one dare not conceive--he took his natural "sanctity," and carved it, as a dish fit for the gods, until it assumed an Apollonian shape. We must visualize Nietzsche not only as the Philosopher with the Hammer; but as the Philosopher with the Chisel.