yet repulsing those about him, lest, if he gave way to love, love should bring death!

I am not inventing his idealism. He was idealistic even from his youth. Who would expect to find Mazzini entering the life of Nietzschethe one the champion of the rights of men and our moral mission, the other the champion of the rights of the body and the reversal of values? In 1871 Nietzsche crossed the Gotthard to Lugano. In the diligence he found an old man, with whom he entered into conversation. The two became enthusiastic, finding each other in agreement on many things. The old man quoted to Nietzsche one of the noblest maxims of Goethe: "Sich des halben zu entwohnen und im Ganzen, Vollen, Schönen, resolut zu leben." Nietzsche never forgot that thought, nor the man who had brought it to his attention. That man was Mazzini. Nietzsche said later, to Malwida von Meysenbug: "There is no other man whom I esteem as I esteem Mazzini." And he was sincere. Let whoso will explain the apparent difference between two such heroes.

Nietzsche had neither wife nor mistress; he had friends among women; he had for some time a quasi-fiancée-Lou Salomé-he had a sister who pretended to understand him, and followed him as best she could. But if woman had but a slight part in his life-as is the case with all saintsfriendship played a very great part in it. A man

who felt friendship as deeply and solemnly as he did could not be common, though he should write no more than a manual of Piedmontese cookery. His days at Triebschen with Wagner and Cosima are the sunniest bay of his life. The affectionate esteem of Rohde and of Burckhardt, the warm deference of Paul Rée, of Peter Gast, of Stein, of Lanzki, were the best of the few uncertain comforts that humanity gave him. But what pain as well! When Wagner ceased to understand him and he realized what Wagner was (sad discovery: a charlatan, perilous because he was inspired!); when Paul Rée betrayed him, when Erwin Rohde, a professor to the last auricle of his heart, refused the smile and the embrace that would have spared him overwhelming grief; when the others left him alone or treated him as an amiable decoy, as a poetic "original"; then the blood-drops of his wounded heart fell one by one, not outwardly upon his flesh-as in the crucifixions of ancient Rome-but within him. And little by little they killed him: "Where are ye, friends? Come, it is time, it is time!"

That song written at night in Rome within the eternal sound of the fountain-"my heart too is an overflowing fountain"-is perhaps the most ardent declaration of love that genius ever addressed to deaf humanity. But men are prone to prefer a casual flattery to the ennobling influence of a true love. And they gave no heed.

"Evening of my life! the sun sets; soon thou wilt no longer thirst, O thirsty heart." He wrote the Ecce Homo; he wrote to Peter Gast, signing himself "The Crucified," and to Cosima Wagner, saying, "Ariadne, I love thee." In these two last letters-which seemed to carry the final evidence of his madness-we have the clearest confessions of his destiny. Nietzsche was content to be an Antichrist, and in being an Antichrist he was perforce to some extent a Christ. He was a Dionysos of grief, a man tormented by others and by himself. He died, I assure you, as on a Palestinian cross.

To Cosima Wagner, in the last hour before the clouding of his mind, he wrote his love. Cosima Wagner was to him Ariadne, and Ariadne meant love. Perhaps he had loved her secretly; perhaps in his break with Wagner there was an element of jealousy. However that may be, that final declaration of his is far more profound, far more weighty than it seems. For Cosima-Ariadne was to him humanity itself, joyous, laughing, full of life and strength-that same humanity that had been the support of Wagner in his triumph.

For Nietzsche, that support had failed. His love had found no chance to spend itself in fullness and in liberty. It was indeed of love, shut in and unappeased, that Nietzsche died. We slew him all of us-by our common human behavior. Nor will he be our last victim.

X

WALT WHITMAN1

I

I CANNOT Write of Walt Whitınan, I confess, with an easy objectivity. The soul and the verse of the sage of Manhattan are too intimately related in my mind to one of the most important discoveries of my early youth: the discovery of poetry.

Among my father's books I found the two little five-cent volumes of the Biblioteca Universale in which Gamberale had published part of his translation of Whitman; and I read them and reread them with that enthusiasm which does not survive the teens. Though I was no bourgeois gentilhomme I had then no clear idea of the difference between verse and prose; and I did not stop to inquire why these songs were com

Written à propos of L. Gamberale's version of the Leaves of Grass: Foglie di erba, Palermo, 1908.

In the present translation the Italian quotations from Whitman are replaced by the corresponding passages of the English text as printed in the edition of Leaves of Grass published by Doubleday, Page and Company in 1920. The page references in the footnotes are to this edition.

posed of verses so long as to fill two or three lines of print. I read them-I breathed in the poetry of the sea, of the city, of the universe-without a thought of the pale scholars who count the syllables of a soul in emotion as they would count, if they could, the notes of the nightingale that sings for love.

And I must confess that I, a Tuscan, an Italian, a Latin, learned the meaning of poetry not through Virgil or through Dante-much less through the casuist Petrarch or the mosaicist Tasso, poets de luxe, and therefore men of letters rather than poets-but through the puerile enumerations and the long, passionate invocations of the good reaper of the Leaves of Grass. Even today, though so many years have passed, I cannot read without emotion the Whispers of Heavenly Death or There Was a Child Went Forth. Later on I read the Leaves of Grass in English, became acquainted, through thick American volumes, with the life and the countenance of Whitman, and studied in Jannacone's little book the metrical questions raised by Whitman's verse. But I have never forgotten those wondrous hours of my boyhood.

I am not saying all this for the sake of writing an uncalled-for bit of spiritual autobiography, but just to explain why I cannot speak of Whitman as if he were one of the ordinary foreign poets reserved for special importation by pro