And it is no considerable step from him to the poets who in this third
phase of our period have unequivocally exulted in power and burnt
incense or offered sacrifice before the altar of the strong man. The joy
in creation which, we saw, gives its romance to so much of the realism
of our time, now appears accentuated in the fiercer romance of conflict
and overthrow. Thanks largely to Nietzsche, this romance acquired the
status of an authoritative philosophy--even, in his own country, that of
an ethical orthodoxy.

The German people was doubtless less deeply and universally imbued with
this faith than our war-prejudice assumes. But phenomena such as the
enormous success of a cheap exposition of it, _Rembrandt als Erzieher_
(1890) by a fervent Bismarckian, and of the comic journal
_Simplicissimus_ (founded 1895) devoted to systematic ridicule of the
old-fashioned German virtues of tenderness and sympathy, indicated a
current of formidable power and compass, which was soon to master all
the other affluents of the national stream.

But older, and in part foreign, influences concurred to colour and
qualify, while they sustained, the Nietzschean influence,--the daemonic
power of Carlyle, the iron intensity and masterful reticence of Ibsen.
This was the case especially, as is well known, in the drama. Gerhardt
Hauptmann, who painted the tragedy of the self-emancipated superman,--as
Mr. Shaw about the same time showed us his self-achieved
apotheosis,--was no doubt the most commanding (as Mr. Shaw was the most
original) figure in the European drama of the early century.

In poetry, the contributory forces were still more subtly mingled, and
the Nietzschean spirit, which blows where it listeth, often touched men
wholly alien from Nietzsche in cast of genius and sometimes stoutly