intillates between. Even, therefore, in the sort of "wickedness" he
evokes, Nietzsche remains Christ-ridden and Christ-mastered. The
matter is made still more certain when one steals up silently, so to
speak, behind the passages where he speaks of Napoleon.

If a reader has the remotest psychological clairvoyance, he will be
aware of a certain strain and tug, a certain mental jerk and contortion,
whenever Napoleon is introduced.

Yes, he could engrave that fatal "N" over his mantlepiece at
Weimar--to do so was the last solace of his wounded brain. But he
was never really at ease with the great Emperor. Never did he--in
pure, direct, classic recognition--greet him as "the Demonic Master
of Destiny," with the Goethean salutation! Had Goethe and
Napoleon, in their notorious encounter, wherein they recognized one
another as "Men," been interrupted by the entrance of Nietzsche, do
you suppose they would not have both stiffened and recoiled,
recognizing their natural Enemy, the Cross-bearer, the Christ-obsessed
one, _"Il Santo"?_

The difference between the two types can best be felt by recalling
the way in which Napoleon and Goethe treated the Christ-Legend,
compared with Nietzsche's desperate wrestling.

Napoleon uses "Religion" calmly and deliberately for his High
Policy and Worldly Statecraft.

Goethe uses "Religion" calmly and deliberately for his aesthetic
culture and his mystic symbolism. Neither of them are, for one
moment, touched by it themselves.

They are born Pagans; and when this noble, tortured soul flings
himself at their feet in feverish worship, one feels that, out of their
Homeric Hades, they look wonderingly, _unintelligently,_ at him.

One of the most laughable things in the world is the attempt some
simple critics make to turn Nietzsche into an ordinary "Honest
Infidel," a kind of poetic Bradlaugh-Ingersoll, offering to humanity
the profound discovery that there is no God, and that when we die,
we die! The absurdity is made complete when this naive, revivified
"Pagan" is made to assure us--us, "the average sensual men"--that
the path of wisdom lies, not in resisting, but in yielding to
_temptation;_ not in spiritual wrestling to "transform" ourselves, but
in the brute courage "to be ourselves," and "live out our type"!

The good folk who play with such a childish illusion would do well
to scan over again their "pagan" hero's branding and flaying of the
philosopher Strauss. Strauss was precisely