pelled by love."[1] "The Ring of the Nibelungen" is "the most moral music" that he knows—he refers above all to the transfiguration of love there portrayed, clouds, storms, and even the sublime in nature being beneath it.[2] He compares Wagner (whose cause he is pleading in the uncertain days before Bayreuth) to Sieglinde who lives "for love's sake."[3] It is love which purifies us after despair, love by which we make the eternal suffering of the world our own, love in which the artist and we all create, or do anything that is truly great; through love alone we learn not only to see truly and scorn ourselves, but to look out beyond ourselves and seek with all our power for a higher self which is still somewhere hidden.[4]
Morality reaches its culmination in the saint. Nietzsche praises Schopenhauer for making the saint the final judge of existence.[5] The thought is the same when he describes in turn the Rousseau ideal of man, the Goethe ideal, and the Schopenhauer ideal, and calls the last superior. The Schopenhauer type negates whatever can be negated to the end of reaching the truly real. He may in the process put an end to his earthly happiness, may have to be hostile even to men he loves and to institutions that gave him birth, he dare spare neither men nor things, although he suffers from the injury he inflicts; he may be misunderstood and long pass as an ally of powers he despises, may have to be counted unjust, though all his striving is for justice—but he will say to himself, and find consolation in saying (they are Schopenhauer's words), "A happy life is impossible; the highest thing which man can reach, is an heroic course of life. Such he leads who, in any manner and situation, fights against enormous odds for what is in some way of universal benefit and in the end conquers, though he is ill or not at all rewarded."[6] This may not be the ordinary idea of the saint, but it is what Nietzsche means when he uses the term: it is really the hero-saint whom he has in mind. Such an one
