It is weakness, admitted Goethe, not to possess the capacity for noble indignation; but Nietzsche was obsessed by his indignations. His voice, that golden poet's voice, becomes too often shrill, cracked, and falsetto. Voltaire has remarked that the first man who compared a woman to a rose was a poet, the second a fool. In his attitude toward Woman, Nietzsche was neither fool nor poet; but he never called her a rose. Nor was he a cynic; he saw too clearly for that, and he had suffered. Suffering, however, should have been a bond with women. Despite his cruel utterances he enjoyed several ideal friendships with cultivated women. "There is no happy life for woman--the advantage that the world offers her is her choice in self-sacrifice," wrote Mr. Howells. Gossip has whispered that he was hopelessly in love with Cosima Wagner. A charming theme for a psychological novel. So was Von Bülow, once--until he married her; so, Anton Rubinstein. Both abused Wagner's music; Von Bülow after he became an advocate of Brahms; Rubinstein always. Nietzsche, just before 1876, experienced the pangs of a Wagnerian reactionary. A pretty commentary this upon masculine mental superiority if one woman (even such a remarkable creature as Cosima) could upset the stanchest convictions of these three men. And convictions, asserted Nietzsche, are prisons. He contrived to escape from many intellectual prisons. Cosima had proved the one inflexible jailer. Merciless to himself, he did not spare others. Of Altruism, with its fundamental contradictions, he wrote: A being capable of purely altruistic actions alone is more fabulous than the Phœnix. Never has a man done anything solely for others, and without any personal motive; how could the Ego act without Ego? ... Suppose a man wished to do and to will everything for others, nothing for himself, the latter would be impossible, for the very good reason that he must do very much for himself, in order to do anything at all for others. Moreover, it presupposes that the other is egoist enough constantly to accept these sacrifices made for him; so that the men of love and self-sacrifice have an interest in the continued existence of loveless egoists who are incapable of self-sacrifice. In order to subsist, the highest morality must positively enforce the existence of immorality.--(Menschliches, I, 137-8).