r first duty is to understand. And we can no longer
evade that duty. We cannot afford any longer to ignore or dismiss the
most powerful force in Continental literature, on the vain pretence
that the author was mad, as if the greatest French thinker of the
eighteenth century, Rousseau, and the greatest thinker of the
nineteenth century, Auguste Comte, had not fallen victims to the same
disease.

And, on the whole, Nietzsche is not difficult to understand, although
there has arisen a host of commentators to obscure his meaning,
although Nietzsche himself delights in expressing himself in the form
of cryptic and mystic aphorism, although he continuously contradicts
himself. But apart from those difficulties, his message is strikingly
simple and his personality is singularly transparent. And his message
and his personality are one. He is a convincing illustration of
Fichte's dictum, that any great system of philosophy is the outcome,
not of the intellect, but of a man's character. Nietzsche is not a
metaphysician like Hegel, whom he abhorred. He is not a
"logic-grinder," like Mill, whom he despised. He is a moralist, like
the French, whom he loved. His culture and learning were French even
more than German. He was steeped in Montaigne, to whom he has paid a
glowing tribute in "Schopenhauer as Educationalist." He was a careful
student of the great French classics of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. He read and annotated Guyau, with whom he had
many points in common. By a curious coincidence, a few years before
the advent of Nietzsche, a great French thinker had anticipated every
one of Nietzsche's doctrines, and had expressed them in one of the
most striking books of the French language. And by an even more
curious paradox, whilst every European critic devotes himself to-day
to the interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy, they systematically
ignore--as Nietzsche himself ignored--the masterpiece of the
Frenchman.

III.

Let us, then, first keep in mind that Nietzsche is not a metaphysician
or a logician, but he is pre-eminently a moralist. His one aim is to
revise our moral values and to establish new values in their place.
For Nietzsche does both. There are two poles to his thought. He is an
iconoclast, but he is also a hero-worshipper. He is a herald of
revolt, but he is also a constructive thinker. Even in his earliest
work, "Thoughts out of Season," whilst he destroys the two popular
idols of the day, the