In poetry, the contributory forces were still more subtly mingled, and the Nietzschean spirit, which blows where it listeth, often touched men wholly alien from Nietzsche in cast of genius and sometimes stoutly hostile to him.  Several of the most illustrious were not Germans at all.  Among the younger men who resist, while they betray, his spell, is the most considerable lyric poet of the present generation in Germany.  Richard Dehmel’s vehement inspiration from the outset provoked comparison with Nietzsche, which he warmly resented.

He began, in fact, as a disciple of Verlaine, and we may detect in the unrestraint of his early erotics the example of the French poet’s fureur d’aimer.  But Dehmel’s more strongly-built nature, and perhaps the downright vigour of the German language, broke through the tenuities of la nuance.  It was not the subtle artistry of the Symbolists, but the ethical and intellectual force of the German character, which finally drew into a less anarchic channel the vehement energy of Dehmel.  Nietzsche had imagined an ethic of superhuman will ’beyond good and evil’.  The poet, replied Dehmel, had indeed to know the passion which transcends good and evil, but he had to know no less the good and evil themselves of the world in and by which common men live.  And if he can cry with the egoism of lawless passion, in the Erloesungen, ’I will fathom all pleasure to the deepest depths of thirst, ...  Resign not pleasure, it waters power’,—­he can add, in the true spirit of Goethe and of the higher mind of Germany, ’Yet since it also makes slack, turn it into the stuff of duty!’

If Nietzsche provoked into antagonism the sounder elements in Dehmel, he was largely responsible for destroying such sanity as the amazing genius of Gabriele D’Annunzio had ever possessed.  In D’Annunzio the sensuality of a Sybarite and the eroticism of a Faun go along with a Roman tenacity and hardness of nerve.  The author of novels which, with all their luxurious splendour, can only be called hothouses of morbid sentiment, has become the apostle of Italian imperialism, and more than any other single man provoked Italy to throw herself into the great adventure of the War.  Unapproached in popularity by any other Italian man of letters, D’Annunzio discovered Nietzsche, and hailed him—­a great concession—­as an equal.  When Nietzsche died, in 1900, D’Annunzio indicted a lofty memorial ode to the Titanic Barbarian who set up once more the serene gods of Hellas over the vast portals of the Future.  Nietzsche indeed let loose all the Titan, and all consequently that was least Hellenic, in the fertile genius of the Italian; his wonderful instinct for beauty, his inexhaustible resources of style are employed in creating orgies of superhuman valour, lust, and cruelty like some of his later dramas, and hymns intoxicated with the passion for Power, like the splendid Ode in which the City of the Seven Hills is prophetically seen once more