Page:Thus Spake Zarathustra - Alexander Tille - 1896.djvu/16



xii INTRODUCTION it rather approaches Brahmanism than Buddhism. In similar respects the Gospels may be said to have formed its model, not only in the way of telling the tale, but also in the tone and mode of transvaluing current ideas; in the division into small chapters and prose verses; in the way of forming sentences; and in phrases and words; and this although the general drift of thought, more especially the ethical teaching, goes in a direction so different.

In English literature there are two books to which, by its allegorical basis and wealth of moral wisdom, Nietzsche's work shows a strong similarity, viz., Piers the Ploughman and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Though separated by centuries, these two are, with comparatively slight modifications, traversed by the same stream of thought, which is well known to be the essence of the grand system of mediaeval theology and religion. The author of Piers the Ploughman was, in numerous respects, ahead of his time, while the plain man John Bunyan had scarcely shared the intellectual advancement of the century and a half preceding the date of his death. While the Tripitaka and the Gospels deal with historical personages, the Ploughman and the Pilgrim are not at all historical, although resembling Sakyamuni Buddha and the Christ of the Gospels in one respect: in each case, the biography presents its hero as a moral ideal. Yet the Ploughman and the Pilgrim are true in another sense: they represent after a sort ideal aspirations of two ages and show us more clearly than any learned treatise could do, what in these ages was regarded as highest and worthiest of human effort, by men who had turned away from life, and sought for satisfaction in their own consciousness.

In German literature, leaving out of account the old Gospel-Harmonies, which are not works of original fiction in the proper sense, the germs of much that is in Zarathustra may be traced