It was all the braver, therefore, on Nietzsche's part to assail such a mighty enemy, and to attack him exactly on the spot where attack was most needed, if victory were to be won. Nietzsche clearly recognised that the canons of criticism had until now only been directed against the outer works of that stalwart fortress--at dogmatic, at supernatural, at ecclesiastical Christianity, and that no one had yet dared to aim right at the very heart of the creed-- its morality, which, while the shamfighters were at work outside, was being enormously strengthened and consolidated from within. This morality, however, Nietzsche recognised as intimately connected with modern democracy--and behind the rosebush of democracy with its flowery speeches and its fraternity- and liberty-blossoms, Nietzsche clearly saw the dragon of anarchy and dissolution lurking. It was the mortal fear of annihilation and ruin which gave Nietzsche the daring to fulminate against our religion with such imperishable Dithyrambics. He was the first to mean the phrase, "_écrasez l'infâme!_" which in Voltaire's mouth was only an epigrammatic exclamation. For Nietzsche's great forerunner on the Continent, Wolfgang Goethe, who was also just as well aware how it would all end, was much too prudent a man to lay his innermost heart bare to his enemies, he--the grand old hypocrite of Weimar--gauged the power of the contrary current correctly, and wisely left the open combat against Christianity and democracy to his great colleague--to that man of tragic wit, to Heinrich Heine. And there were others on the Continent--very few to be sure, and no politician or man of science or woman among them--others who saw the drift of modern ideas: all of them poets. For poets are prophets: their sensitive organisation feels the fall of the glass first, while their pluck and their pride, their duty and their desire to face the storm drive them into the very thick of it. The German poet Hebbel, the French novelist Stendhal, were amongst them. A new Matthew Arnold --the object of my wish for this country--would perhaps like to include another poet, the Frenchman Alfred de Vigny, in whose journal are to be found those awe-inspiring words against democracy: "Alas! it is thou, Democracy, that art the desert! it is thou who hast shrouded and bleached everything beneath thy monticles of sand! Thy tedious flatness has covered everything and levelled all! For ever and ever the valley and the hill supplant each other; and only from time to time a man of courage is seen: he rises like a sand-whirl, makes his ten paces towards the sun, and then falls like powder to the ground. And then nothing more is seen save the eternal plain of endless sand."