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 unending life as alone giving man elbow-room, so to speak, for working out his destiny.  Browning claims eternity as the due of every man, however mean; and if Whitman feels his foothold ’tenon’d and mortised in granite’, it is because he can ‘laugh at dissolution’ and knows ‘the amplitude of time’.

But in such insistence and such conviction they have not been followed, speaking broadly, by our leading writers since.  On the other hand, they have been so followed, again speaking broadly, in their loyalty to the twofold ideal.  Here and there, no doubt, as I have said, writers like Nietzsche, on the one hand, have tried to be satisfied with the splendid development of a Few, or, on the other hand, like Tolstoy, have flung back in a kind of despair to the old ideal of abnegation, of sheer brotherly love and nothing else, turning their backs on all splendours of art, knowledge, or delight, that do not directly minister to the one thing they hold needful.  But the earlier and wider ideal, the ideal of our Renascence, once envisaged by man, that has not been lost, and I believe never can be lost.  Its own greatness will keep the foremost men true to it.  Meredith is one of the men I mean.  He is full of pity, but he does not only pity men and women—­he wants them to grow, and to grow for themselves.  His whole attitude towards Woman shows this:  for the women’s movement is nothing more and nothing less, as Ibsen also felt, than one big stream of the general movement towards liberty and self-determination.  So far Meredith marches with Browning and Whitman.  But he will never commit himself about immortality.  It seems enough for him to take part in the struggle for a finer life, at once heroic and tender, not caring overmuch whether we reach it or no.  ’Spirit