vehement energy of Dehmel.
Nietzsche had imagined an ethic of superhuman will 'beyond good and
evil'. The poet, replied Dehmel, had indeed to know the passion which
transcends good and evil, but he had to know no less the good and evil
themselves of the world in and by which common men live. And if he can
cry with the egoism of lawless passion, in the _Erloesungen_, 'I will
fathom all pleasure to the deepest depths of thirst, ... Resign not
pleasure, it waters power',--he can add, in the true spirit of Goethe
and of the higher mind of Germany, 'Yet since it also makes slack, turn
it into the stuff of duty!'

If Nietzsche provoked into antagonism the sounder elements in Dehmel, he
was largely responsible for destroying such sanity as the amazing genius
of Gabriele D'Annunzio had ever possessed. In D'Annunzio the sensuality
of a Sybarite and the eroticism of a Faun go along with a Roman
tenacity and hardness of nerve. The author of novels which, with all
their luxurious splendour, can only be called hothouses of morbid
sentiment, has become the apostle of Italian imperialism, and more than
any other single man provoked Italy to throw herself into the great
adventure of the War. Unapproached in popularity by any other Italian
man of letters, D'Annunzio discovered Nietzsche, and hailed him--a great
concession--as an equal. When Nietzsche died, in 1900, D'Annunzio
indicted a lofty memorial ode to the Titanic Barbarian who set up once
more the serene gods of Hellas over the vast portals of the Future.
Nietzsche indeed let loose all the Titan, and all consequently that was
least Hellenic, in the fertile genius of the Italian; his wonderful
instinct for beauty, his inexhaustible resources of style are employed
in creating orgies of superhuman valour, lust, and cruelty like some of
his later dramas, and hymns intoxicated with the passion for Power, like
the splendid Ode in which the City of the Seven Hills is prophetically
seen once more the mistress of the world, loosing the knot of all the
problems of humanity. His poetic autobiography, the first _Laude_
(1901)--counterpart of Wordsworth's _Prelude_ and its very
antipodes--culminates in a prayer 900 lines long to Hermes, god of the
energy which precipitates itself on life and makes it pregnant with
invention and discovery, of the iron will 'which chews care as a laurel
leaf'--the god of the Superman. And so he discovers the muse of the
Superman, the Muse of Energy, a tenth Mus