"refined egoism," "Epicureanism." People said, "We have been too poor and modest hitherto, let us become rich and self-conscious, and then we also [i.e., as well as the French] shall have a culture!"—to which Nietzsche could only reply that this kind of a culture would be the opposite of what he believed in.[1] Art was misconceived, though this tendency he admitted to be general in modern society: "modern art is luxury," the appanage of the wealthy class, their relief from fatigue or ennui. He comments on the unscrupulousness of those who take art and artists into their pay; for just as they "by the shrewdest and most hard-hearted use of their power have known how to make the weaker, the people, even more subservient, lower, less like the people of old (unvolksthümlicher), and to create the modern type of "worker," so they have laid hands on the greatest and purest things which the people have created out of their deepest need and in which they have tenderly expressed their soul in true and unique artist fashion, namely, their myths, their songs, their dances, their idioms of speech, in order to distil out of it all a sensuous remedy for the exhaustion and tedium of their existence."[2] Indeed few socialists, and, I might add, few old-time aristocrats, could speak more disrespectfully than he of the industrial and commercial powers that now rule the world—the money powers included, who use the state itself for selfish purposes, and on occasion oppose war and even favor the masses against monarchs, since the masses incline to peace, and peace is better for them to ply their trade in![3] This does not mean that he fails to recognize the legitimate place of industry and trade and finance in the world, however large the scale on which they may be conducted; he has no notion of returning to an archaic simplicity of life after the manner of Tolstoy. "Every society must have its bowels," he remarks in homely fashion;[4] and he would doubtless have agreed that the larger the society, the wider its range of need, the ampler the bowels might well be. The inversion of the true order of things which he finds today
