e
craftsman, ever experimenting, ever coming closer to an ideal balancing
of lines and forces, and yet always failing to work out the final
harmony.

The late war, awakening all the primitive racial fury of the Western
nations, and therewith all their ancient enthusiasm for religious taboos
and sanctions, naturally focused attention upon Nietzsche, as upon the
most daring and provocative of recent amateur theologians. The Germans,
with their characteristic tendency to explain their every act in terms
as realistic and unpleasant as possible, appear to have mauled him in a
belated and unexpected embrace, to the horror, I daresay, of the Kaiser,
and perhaps to the even greater horror of Nietzsche's own ghost. The
folks of Anglo-Saxondom, with their equally characteristic tendency to
explain all their enterprises romantically, simultaneously set him up as
the Antichrist he no doubt secretly longed to be. The result was a great
deal of misrepresentation and misunderstanding of him. From the pulpits
of the allied countries, and particularly from those of England and the
United States, a horde of patriotic ecclesiastics denounced him in
extravagant terms as the author of all the horrors of the time, and in
the newspapers, until the Kaiser was elected sole bugaboo, he shared the
honors of that office with von Hindenburg, the Crown Prince, Capt.
Boy-Ed, von Bernstorff and von Tirpitz. Most of this denunciation, of
course, was frankly idiotic--the naive pishposh of suburban Methodists,
notoriety-seeking college professors, almost illiterate editorial
writers, and other such numskulls. In much of it, including not a few
official hymns of hate, Nietzsche was gravely discovered to be the
teacher of such spokesmen of the extremest sort of German nationalism
as von Bernhardi and von Treitschke--which was just as intelligent as
making George Bernard Shaw the mentor of Lloyd-George. In other solemn
pronunciamentoes he was credited with being philosophically responsible
for various imaginary crimes of the enemy--the wholesale slaughter or
mutilation of prisoners of war, the deliberate burning down of Red Cross
hospitals, the utilization of the corpses of the slain for soap-making.
I amused myself, in those gaudy days, by collecting newspaper clippings
to this general effect, and later on I shall probably publish a digest
of them, as a contribution to the study of war hysteria. The thing went
to unbelievable lengths. On the strength of th