t Nietzsche himself was by temperament too
spiritual, too cold, too aloof from the common instincts of humanity
to do more than hew out an opening through the gloomy thickets of
the ascetic forest. He was himself too entirely intellectual, too high
and icy and austere and imaginative ever to bring the actual feet of
the dancers, and the lutes and flutes of the wanton singers into the
sunlit path to which he pointed the way.

His cruel praise of the more predatory and rapacious among the
emancipated spirits gives, too, a somewhat harsh and sinister aspect
to the whole thing. The natural innocence of genuine pagan delight
draws back instinctively from the savage excesses of the
Nietzschean "blond beast." The poor fauns and dryads of the free
ancient world hesitate trembling and frightened on the very
threshold of their liberty when this great Zarathustra offers them a
choice between frozen Alpine peaks of heroic desolation and
bloodstained jungles frequented by Borgian tigers.

In his own heart Nietzsche was much more of a mediaeval saint than
a predatory "higher man," but the natural human instinct of any sane
and sun-loving pagan may well shrink back dismayed from any
contact with this savage "will to power," which, while destroying the
quiet cloistered gardens of monastic seclusion, hurls us into the path
of these new tyrants. The less rigorous "religious orders" of the faith
of Christendom would seem to offer to these poor dismayed
"revenants" from the ancient world a much quieter and happier
habitation than the mountain tops where blows the frozen wind of
"Eternal Recurrence," or the smouldering desert sands where stalk
the tawny lions of the "higher morality." The "Rule of Benedict"
would in this sense be a refuge for the timorous unbaptised, and the
"Weeds of Dominic" a protection for the gentle infidel.

After reading Remy de Gourmont, with his wise, friendly ironic
interest in every kind of human emotion, one is inclined to feel that,
after all, in the large and tolerant courts of some less zealous
traditional "order" there might be more pleasant air to breathe, more
peaceful sunshine, more fresh and dewy rose-gardens, than in a
world dominated by the Eagle and the Serpent of the Zarathustrian
Overman.

Remy de Gourmont would free us from the rule of dogmatist and
moralist, but he would free us from these without plunging us into a
yet sterner ascesis. The tone and temper advocated by him is one
eminently s