Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/163

Friedrich Nietzsche genius. No wonder that deification of reality becomes the dominant motif in his philosophy. But again that onesided aristocratic strain perverts his ethics. To drain the intoxicating cup at the feast of life, such is the divine privilege not of the common run of mortals but only of the elect. They must not let this or that petty and artificial convention, nor yet this or that moral command or prohibition, restrain them from the exercise of that higher sense of living, but must fully abandon themselves to its joys. "Since man came into existence he hath had too little joy. That alone, my brethren, is our original sin." The "much- too-many" are doomed to inanity by their lack of appetite at the banquet of life:

Such folk sit down unto dinner and bring nothing with them, not even a good hunger. And now they backbite: "All is vanity!"

But to eat well and drink well, O my brethren, is, verily, no vain art ! Break, break the tables of those who are never joyful!

The Will to Live holds man's one chance of this-worldly bliss, and supersedes any care for the remote felicities of any problematic future state. Yet the Nietzschean cult of life is not to be