was influenced by the doctrine of
Evolution, and that in a not unhopeful form, the hope for an advance in
the race at least, if not in the individuals now living. And it shows
too how mistaken those are who see in him nothing but a preacher of
brutal egotism. If he had been only that, he would never have won the
influence he possessed and possesses. Yet there is important truth in
the cursory popular judgement. If his teaching has its heroic side, a
side that has enabled him to give succour to many when other and sweeter
gospels are spurned as flattering unctions, he has also a most ruthless
element. And this partly because of his very sincerity. Accept the
doctrine that men and women perish like candles blown out in the night,
accept it really and fully, with intellect, imagination, and feeling,
and then see how much light-heartedness can be got out of life, if we
still allow ourselves to pity men. Nietzsche had intellect, imagination,
and feeling, and he saw plainly enough that, while even in such a
universe there could be a grim happiness for the lives of heroes, there
could be nothing but infinite sadness for the countless failures who
have never been either happy or heroic. There was no immortality; these
wretched beings would never have another chance. If joy was to be kept
(and Nietzsche was avid for joy), if the universe was to be accepted
(and Nietzsche desired above all to say Yes! to the universe), then he
must root out pity from his heart as an unmanly weakness. In this way
was sharpened the ruthlessness and savage arrogance latent in the man, a
ruthlessness and an arrogance that have done so much harm both to his
country and the world.

In fairness, we must add that Nietzsche could not succeed in his own
attempt; the struggle tore him to pieces and he died in madness.

But it is above all instructive to contrast him here with several of
his contemporaries and successors. Browning in England, Walt Whitman in
America, facing the same problems of joy and struggle, of life and
death, of the few great and the many commonplace, of Man himself and the
Nature that seems at once his mother and his enemy, refused to give up
the hope of a solution, nay, they were sure they had found a solution,
and for them it was bound up with the hope of immortality. They go even
beyond the earlier men in their insistence on the double ideal of
Paganism and Christianity, but they have an insistence of their own on
the belief in une