litics or religion might
be if anything so stupendous as a religious or political idea, or a
general idea of any sort, were to occur to him. He is tolerable as a
child; but he never becomes a man, and might be left out of his own
biography altogether but for his usefulness as a stage confidant, a
Horatio or "Charles his friend" what they call on the stage a feeder.

Now you cannot say this of the works of the artist-philosophers.
You cannot say it, for instance, of The Pilgrim's Progress. Put your
Shakespearian hero and coward, Henry V and Pistol or Parolles, beside
Mr Valiant and Mr Fearing, and you have a sudden revelation of the abyss
that lies between the fashionable author who could see nothing in the
world but personal aims and the tragedy of their disappointment or the
comedy of their incongruity, and the field preacher who achieved virtue
and courage by identifying himself with the purpose of the world as
he understood it. The contrast is enormous: Bunyan's coward stirs your
blood more than Shakespear's hero, who actually leaves you cold and
secretly hostile. You suddenly see that Shakespear, with all his flashes
and divinations, never understood virtue and courage, never conceived
how any man who was not a fool could, like Bunyan's hero, look back
from the brink of the river of death over the strife and labor of his
pilgrimage, and say "yet do I not repent me"; or, with the panache of
a millionaire, bequeath "my sword to him that shall succeed me in my
pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it." This
is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by
yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you
are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a
feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that
the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only
real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for
purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere
misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth;
and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work
to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so
willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and
the like.

It may seem a long step from Bunyan to Nietzsche; but the difference
between their conclusions is purely formal. Bunyan's percep