“Nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been more wickedly misused. Recently a third has been introduced, with which alone every refined and bold activity of intellect can be wiped out—music, our sluggish, ever more sluggish, German music. How much moody heaviness, lameness, humidity, and dressing-gown mood, how much beer is in German intelligence!” You may readily understand that this Nietzsche is a Slav. He is agile of temperament, his mind is a supple one; he loves the keen rapier thrusts, the glancing thrust of the Celt. He hates Germany. Was he a German? He is wholly Slavic at times, and yet what a contradictory man and how naïve his egotism! More feminine altogether than masculine was this febrile, capricious mind, and a hater of the Teuton, a race that is at once both fat and nervous. Nietzsche is _par excellence_ the thinker for the artistic. If Wagner was a painter, or a symphonist _manqué_, then Nietzsche was an artist _manqué_. His prose, swift, weighty, concentrated and brilliant, attracts readers who dislike his doctrines. One must read what he says in his Roving Expeditions of an Inopportune Philosopher. “Seneca, or the toreador of virtue.” “Rousseau, or return to nature _in impuris naturalibus_.” “Schiller, or the moral Trumpeter of Säckingen.” “Dante, or the hyena poetising in tombs.” “Kant, or _cant_, as an intelligent character.” “Victor Hugo, or Pharos, in a sea of absurdity.” “Michelet, or enthusiasm which strips off the coat.” “Carlyle, or pessimism as an undigested dinner.” “John Stuart Mill, or offensive transparency.” “The Goncourts, or the two Ajaxes struggling with Homer; music by Offenbach.” Nietzsche preached of the beauty and pride of the body. Of pride we cannot have too much. It is the salt of personality. Golden-mouthed Plato, in De Republica, makes outcry against the dullard who thinks shame of his body. The human body is truly a tabernacle, and woe to him that defileth it, says the wise man. He once made a proposal to found a monastery for freethinkers. What an abbot he would have been! Did Nietzsche not declare, in the words of the Apostle Matthew (xvi. 26), slightly altered:— “For what is a man profited if he shall gain his own soul and lose the whole world?”