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118 a man. If your spirit is of other metal, if your temper is from another anvil, if you have sped through life on other tracks, you cannot understand, nor love, nor follow, the doctrine of Nietzsche. So be it. Different experiences call for different cosmic words and different moral banners. But if you will not respect his philosophy, if you will continue, like all the witless moths of all the continents, to regard it as a fricassee of paradoxes, fit for rude arrivistes, you must at least respect the soul of him who thought and wrote it.

I declare to you that I do not know of any modern life nobler, purer, sadder, lonelier, more hopeless than that of Friedrich Nietzsche. Being no hypocrite, I confess frankly that I owe the force of this conviction to the simple, clear, and searching biography of Nietzsche written recently by Daniel Halévy. Any man who can read this book and not be moved to the depths of his being, especially by the later chapters, is a groveling beast.

There stands revealed in these four hundred pages of calm, intelligent, French prose a Nietzsche whom we had glimpsed already from passages in his letters and from confessions sobbed out, but quickly denied and transcended, in his works—a pure, a saintly, a martyred Nietzsche. How different such a tribute from the utterances of the bloodthirsty monkeys who