dies to self, he scarcely lives any longer as a separate person, his suffering is but part of the universal suffering—Nietzsche remarks that there are moments in our experience when we hardly understand the word "I."[1] It is a part of the higher purpose of tragedy to awaken this sense of a superpersonal being. It is a sense which the contemplation of death and change (things inwrought with individual existence) does not disturb; and Nietzsche is bold enough to imagine that as an individual touched by the tragic spirit unlearns the fearful anxiety about death and change which besets most of us, so the ideal height for mankind, when it comes to die, as die it must, will be to have so grown together into unity that it can as a whole face its dissolution with equal elevation and composure.[2] It is a thought hard to grasp.
I have said that to Nietzsche the ideal was born from within, a free projection of the soul. So vital is this element of freedom to him that he at one time makes a remark which may offend us. It is in connection with an interpretation of Wagner and is really a statement of Wagner's view, but from the way he makes it, we may be sure that it represents his own. After saying that it is no final arrangements for the future, no utopia, which Wagner contemplates, that even the superhuman goodness and justice which are to operate there will be after no unchangeable pattern, and that possibly the future race will in some ways seem more evil than the present one, he adds (in substance): for whatever else the life may be, it will be open and free, passion will be counted better than stoicism [stoic apathy] and hypocrisy, honor even in evil courses better than losing oneself in the morality of tradition—for, though the free man may be good as well as evil, the unfree man is a dishonor to nature and without part either in heavenly or in earthly consolation, and whoever will be free must make himself so, freedom falling into no man's lap as a gift.[3] He may also offend us in what he says of Siegfried, for he speaks admiringly of the Selbstigkeit of this hero. Now Siegfried is, as Mr. Shaw has pointed out, something of a revolutionist; he disre-
