The writings of Nietzsche will make the impression of a youthful immaturity upon any half-way serious reader. There is a hankering after originality which of necessity leads to aberrations and a sovereign contempt for the merits of the past. The world seems endangered, and yet any one who would seriously try to live up to Nietzsche's ideal must naturally sober down after a while, and we may apply to him what Mephistopheles says of the baccalaureus: "Yet even from him we're not in special peril He will, ere long, to other thoughts incline. The must may foam absurdly in the barrel. Nathless, it turns at last to wine." _Tr. by Bayard Taylor._ Nietzsche did not live long enough to experience a period of matured thought. He died before the fermentation of his mind had come to its normal close, and so his life will remain forever a great torso, without intrinsic worth, but suggestive and appealing only to the immature, including the "herd animal" who would like to be an overman. The very immaturity of Nietzsche's view becomes attractive to immature minds. He wrote while his thoughts were still in a state of fermentation, and he died before the wine of his soul was clarified. Nietzsche is an almost tragic figure that will live in art as a brooding thinker, a representative of the dissatisfied, a man of an insatiable love of life, with wild and unsteady looks, proud in his indomitable self-assertion, but broken in body and spirit. Such he was in his last disease when his mind was wrapt in the eternal night of dementia, the oppressive consciousness of which made him exclaim in lucid moments the pitiable complaint. "_Mutter, ich bin dumm_" As such he is represented in Klein's statue,[10] which in its pathetic posture is a psychological masterpiece. [Illustration: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE--THE LATEST PORTRAIT, AFTER AN OIL PAINTING BY C. STOEVING.] Nietzsche's works are poetic effusions more than philosophical expositions and yet we would hesitate to call him a poet. His poems are not poetical in the usual sense. They lack poetry and yet they appeal not only to his admirers, but also to his critics and enemies. Most of them are artificial yet they are so characteristic that they are interesting specimens of a peculiar kind of taste. They strike us as ingenious, because they reflect his eccentricities. In a poem entitled "Ecce Homo"[11] he characterizes himself: "Yea, I know from whence I came! Never satiate, like the flame Glow I and consume me too Into light turns what I find, Cinders do I leave behind, Flame am I, 'tis surely true." [1] E.g.: "Bitte nie! Lass dies Gewimmer! Nimm, ich bitte dich, nimm immer!" [2] Compare _Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche's_ by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. [3] Leben, pp. 90-97.