rations were compatible with each other and nowise beyond
attainment. Almost from the first there were men of the modern world who
did challenge this. Byron and Schopenhauer are significant figures, both
born in the same year, only eighteen years later than the great Three of
1770, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven. Byron is full of moody
questionings, Schopenhauer of much more than questionings. Against the
dauntless optimism of Hegel, he flatly denies that the universe is good,
or happiness possible for man. On the contrary, at the heart of it and
of him there lies an infinite unrest, never to be quieted until man
himself gives up the Will to Live and sinks back into the Unconscious
from which he came.

Now after Schopenhauer came Nietzsche, and though Nietzsche's influence
may have been exaggerated, yet undeniably it has been of immense
importance both for Germany and Europe. He is typical of the change that
begins to appear about the middle of the century. Reacting from the
optimism of the idealists (which seemed to him both smug and false),
Nietzsche welcomed Schopenhauer's more Spartan view with a kind of
fierce delight. But his criticism of Schopenhauer was fierce too, and he
gave a strangely different turn to such parts of the doctrine as he did
accept. To Schopenhauer, since it was folly to hope for real happiness
in this life or any other, the wise course would be to kill outright, so
far as possible, the Will to Live itself. To Nietzsche the wise course
was to assert life, to claim it more and more abundantly, to face this
tragic show with a courage so high that it could be gay, a courage that
could do without happiness, and yet that turned aside from none of
life's joys simply because they were fleeting, that was more than
content to 'live dangerously', picking flowers, as it were, clear-eyed,
on the edge of the precipice. And this not merely in the temper of 'Let
us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' For him the motto would have
run, 'Let us be up and doing, for to-morrow we die', sustained by the
belief that the heroic struggle now would lead inevitably to the
production of a nobler type of man, a man who would be something more
than man--the Super-man, to give him the name that every reader knows,
if he knows nothing else about Nietzsche.

Even this short statement shows how Nietzsche shared the admiration for
life and power characteristic of what I have called the Modern
Renascence, and how deeply he