"We are still on our knees before power--according to the old custom of slaves--and yet, when the degree of _venerability_ shall have to be fixed, only the degree of _rationality in power_ will be decisive; we have to investigate to what extent power has indeed been overcome by something higher of which it is now the tool and instrument. But as yet there is an absolute lack of eyes for such investigations; nay, in most cases the appraisement of genius is even considered a crime. And thus perhaps the most beautiful of all spectacles still takes place in the dark and, after bursting into bloom, soon fades into perpetual night--I mean the spectacle of that power which a man of genius employs, not in his works, but in the development of himself, regarded as a work, that is, in the task of self-mastery, in the purification of his imagination, in his deliberate choice and ordering of the course of his tasks and inspirations. And yet the great man is still invisible in the greatest thing which claims worship, invisible like a distant star; his triumph over power continues to be without eyes, hence also without song and poets. As yet the order of greatness has not been settled for the sum total of human history...." Alas, for victory over force, one must possess some exterior force, reason or faith. Nietzsche, denying to the one or to the other all their rights, has disarmed himself for the combat. * * * * * At the beginning of March a violent earthquake terrified the cosmopolitan _flaneurs_ of Nice. Friedrich Nietzsche admired these movements of nature which reminded man of his nothingness. Two years earlier the catastrophe of Krakatoa, which destroyed two thousand human beings in Java, had filled him with enthusiasm. "It's grand," he said to Lanzky, whom he had asked to read the telegrams to him; "two thousand human beings annihilated at a stroke! It's magnificent. This is how humanity should come to its end--how one day it will end." And he hoped that a tidal wave would at least do away with Nice and its peoples. "But," observed Lanzky, "we should be done away with ourselves." "What matter!" answered Nietzsche. His almost realised desire amused him. He did not advance his departure by a single day. "Hitherto," he wrote on March 7th, "among these thousands of people in a condition of folly, I have lived with a sentiment of irony and cold curiosity. But one cannot answer for oneself; perhaps to-morrow I shall be as unreasonable as any one. Here there is an _imprévu_ which has its charm."