German dance, as before him, only Heine had done.
"I have the idea," he wrote, "that with Zarathustra I have brought the German language to its point of perfection."
The boast is probably true. The devil was always a good stylist, and it is not inappropriate that when his gospel is at its worst, his prose should be at its best. We may charitably assume that those whom he led off the plain paths of life into his foul and blood-bathed jungles, were taken captive, not by his message, but by his music.
What then was his creed, or rather his vision? For he was the mystagogue of Prussianism, who chanted but never explained. As in the case of Bismarck, I propose to exclude as far as possible anything written ad hoc, or since the war. My first witness is Alfred Fouillée, the doyen of French philosophy, Whose Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme appeared in 1902 (the unfamiliarity of Fouillée's name is a biting satire on our leaders of thought)—
"If the Vandals had read a course in Hegelian metaphysics, they would have held the same language as Nietzsche."
The popular instinct which named the Prussians the Huns was thus long anticipated by the greatest Platonist in Europe.
To Nietzsche the whole motive behind life is a sort of metaphysical symbol which he calls the
