burnt
incense or offered sacrifice before the altar of the strong man. The joy
in creation which, we saw, gives its romance to so much of the realism
of our time, now appears accentuated in the fiercer romance of conflict
and overthrow. Thanks largely to Nietzsche, this romance acquired the
status of an authoritative philosophy--even, in his own country, that of
an ethical orthodoxy.

The German people was doubtless less deeply and universally imbued with
this faith than our war-prejudice assumes. But phenomena such as the
enormous success of a cheap exposition of it, _Rembrandt als Erzieher_
(1890) by a fervent Bismarckian, and of the comic journal
_Simplicissimus_ (founded 1895) devoted to systematic ridicule of the
old-fashioned German virtues of tenderness and sympathy, indicated a
current of formidable power and compass, which was soon to master all
the other affluents of the national stream.

But older, and in part foreign, influences concurred to colour and
qualify, while they sustained, the Nietzschean influence,--the daemonic
power of Carlyle, the iron intensity and masterful reticence of Ibsen.
This was the case especially, as is well known, in the drama. Gerhardt
Hauptmann, who painted the tragedy of the self-emancipated superman,--as
Mr. Shaw about the same time showed us his self-achieved
apotheosis,--was no doubt the most commanding (as Mr. Shaw was the most
original) figure in the European drama of the early century.

In poetry, the contributory forces were still more subtly mingled, and
the Nietzschean spirit, which blows where it listeth, often touched men
wholly alien from Nietzsche in cast of genius and sometimes stoutly
hostile to him. Several of the most illustrious were not Germans at all.
Among the younger men who resist, while they betray, his spell, is the
most considerable lyric poet of the present generation in Germany.
Richard Dehmel's vehement inspiration from the outset provoked
comparison with Nietzsche, which he warmly resented.

He began, in fact, as a disciple of Verlaine, and we may detect in the
unrestraint of his early erotics the example of the French poet's
_fureur d'aimer_. But Dehmel's more strongly-built nature, and perhaps
the downright vigour of the German language, broke through the tenuities
of _la nuance_. It was not the subtle artistry of the Symbolists, but
the ethical and intellectual force of the German character, which
finally drew into a less anarchic channel the