In Also sprach Zarathustra he consciously or unconsciously vied with Goethe in Faust; with Wagner’s Ring, with Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, with Ibsen’s Brand, with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, with Senancour’s Oberman, with Browning’s Paracelsus. It is the history of his soul, as Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s—there are some curious parallelisms between these two subjective epics. It is intimate, yet hints at universality; it contains some of Amiel’s introspection and some of Baudelaire’s morbidity; half mad, yet exhorting, comforting; Hamlet and John Bunyan. Nietzsche then is a critical mode of viewing the universe, rather than creator of a formal philosophy. He has set his imprint on all European culture, from the dream novels of that Italian of the Renaissance, the new Cellini, Gabriele d’Annunzio, to the Pole Przybyszewski, who has transformed Nietzsche into a very Typhoon of emotion. The musician Heinrich Pudor has imitated the master in his attacks on modern music; while Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard Dehmel—all young Germany, young France, has patterned after the great Immoralist, as he chose to call himself. Among the composers affected by him we find Richard Strauss, not attempting to set the philosophy of Nietzsche to music—as many wrongfully suppose—but arranging, as in a huge phantasmagoria, the emotions excited by the close study of Thus spake Zarathustra. And a many-colored piece of music it is, full of frowning mountains, fragrant meads, and barren, ugly, waste places. Nietzsche met the fate of all rebels from Lucifer to Byron—neglect and obloquy. With something of Heraclitus, of Democritus, of Bruno Giordano, of Luther in him, there was allied a sensitivity almost Chopin’s. The combination is a poor one for practical purposes; so the brain died before the body,—humanity cannot transcend itself. Notwithstanding all his contradictions, limitations, cloudland rhapsodies, aversion from the banal, despite his futile flights into the Inane, his word-weaving, his impossible premisses and mad conclusions, the thunder-march of his ideas, the brilliancy and polish of his style—the greatest German prose since Schopenhauer’s—have insured Nietzsche immortality; as immortality goes among world thinkers: fifty years of quotation and then—the biographical dictionaries. Friedrich Nietzsche is, as Havelock Ellis declares, “a great aboriginal force”; perhaps, with Max Stirner, the greatest in the last half of the nineteenth century. And that same Stirner is the true stock from which Nietzsche sprang—Stirner who dared to say, “_My truth is the truth._”