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 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