There is room now for love. The smirching caresses of fashion are bestowed elsewhere.
Years ago a swarm of noisy wasps hovered about the gentle paralytic of Weimar, and when a ray of light made their wings gleam they said that they had been turned to gold, that the world had been turned upside down, that man had stolen the keys of the earthly paradise, and that heaven had come down to hell. In those years no gentleman could linger in such company. Cowardly homicides might abide there, or nabobs smitten with meningitis, or nouvellistes without ideas—not men with hungering souls to nourish and to save. But now the chaffering crowd has been dispersed. The wasps have winged their way to new scenes of dissolution; and around him now there is that silence, that calm, that Mediterranean serenity which he himself breathed in the blue bays of Liguria. The last codicil of his will has been opened: Ecce Homo. He stands before us crowned with the thorns of the adoration that does not understand, buffeted by indifference, stabbed by doubt. His life lies open before us. We may be his friends, may press his hand, may offer him in death that fellowship in perilous pilgrimage that he never knew in life.
Think what you will of the philosophy of Nietzsche. I leave it freely to your caprice. His doctrine is one of those poetic, tragic doctrines which answer to the temper, the life, the spirit of
