IBSEN, EMERSON AND NIETZSCHE 151 



This demand is the demand of the Christian system, and, to quote 

 Nietzsche again from the same volume: 



It was the Jews, who, with the most frightfully consistent logic, dared to 

 subvert the aristocratic equation of values ( good = noble = powerful == beauti- 

 ful =happy = beloved of God), and who, with the teeth of the profoundest 

 hatred (the hatred of impotency), clung to their own valuation: "the wretched 

 alone are the good; the poor, the impotent, the lowely alone are the good; only 

 the sufTerers, the needy, the sick, the ugly, are pious; only they are godly; but 

 ye, ye, the proud and potent, ye are for aye and evermore the wicked, the cruel, 

 the lustful, the insatiable, the godless; ye will also be, to all eternity, the 

 unblessed, the cursed and the damned. 



This is what Nietzsche calls the slave revolt in morality, and with the 

 present triumph of the Christian system that here had its source he sees 

 a transformation of the values of the terms good and bad that has been 

 more or less destructive of the fine ideals of the human race. Evil has 

 gained the upper hand. He says again : 



The two antithetical values, "good and bad," "good and evil," have 

 fought a terrible battle, a battle lasting thousands of years. . . . The symbol 

 of this struggle, in letters which remained unreadable above the entire his- 

 tory of man until now, is called " Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome." 

 So far no greater event has occurred than this struggle, this question, this 

 deadly inimical antithesis. Rome felt in the Jew something like the embodi- 

 ment of anti-naturalness, its anti-podal monster, as it were; in Rome the Jew 

 was looked upon as " convicted of hatred against all mankind " ; and rightly so, 

 in 80 far as we have a right to connect the welfare and future of mankind with 

 the imconditional dominance of aristocratic values, Roman values. . . . The 

 Romans, we know, were the strong and the noble, so that stronger and nobler 

 men had never existed on earth before, nay, had not even been dreamt of. . . . 

 The Jews, on the contrary, were that priestly class of people of resentment 

 par excellence, which was possessed of an unparalleled, popular ingenuity of 

 morals. 



It was as an intellectual aristocrat, a believer in aristocratic 

 values, that Nietzsche set forward in his development as an individual- 

 ist. He began his life work as a philologist, and Greek was his 

 especial philological interest. His studies in this field brought him 

 under the influence of Greek ideals of power and beauty, dionysiac 

 ideals of abandon, of unrestraint, of free joy, as opposed to the moral 

 conceptions involved in the worship of Apollo. This point of view 

 appears in his first philosophical book, " The Birth of Tragedy." 

 In its first form this title had the additional phrase, "out of the 

 Spirit of Greek Music," and this is significant as revealing his sense 

 of the greatest of the arts as having its origin in the vague and 

 wandering impulses of free feeling rather than in moralizing and re- 

 flective thought. Here was the origin of that sense of final values 

 upon which his philosophy is built. The thing of most worth in the 

 world is not the average man and his happiness, but the select man, 

 the man who answers Yea to all of life, the man who takes tribute of 



