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Zarathustra is full of lenity. Others have said: Thou shalt not commit adultery. Zarathustra teaches: The honest should say to each other, "Let us see whether our love continue; let us fix a term, that we may find out whether we desire a longer term." What cannot be bent, will be broken. A woman said to Zarathustra, "Indeed, I broke the marriage, but first did the marriage break me."

Zarathustra is without mercy. It has been said: Push not a leaning waggon. But Zarathustra says: That which is ready to fall, shall ye also push. All that belongs to our day is falling and decaying. No one can preserve it, but Zarathustra will even help it to fall faster.

Zarathustra loves the brave. But not the bravery that takes up every challenge. There is often more bravery in holding back and passing by and reserving one's self for a worthier foe. Zarathustra does not teach: Ye shall love your enemies, but: Ye shall not engage in combat with enemies ye despise.

Why so hard? men cry to Zarathustra. He replies: Why so hard, once said the charcoal to the diamond; are we not near of kin? The creators are hard. Their blessedness it is to press their hand upon future centuries as upon wax.

No doctrine revolts Zarathustra more than that of the vanity and senselessness of life. This is in his eyes ancient babbling, old wives' babbling. And the pessimists who sum up life with a balance of aversion, and assert the badness of existence, are the objects of his positive loathing. He prefers pain to annihilation.

The same extravagant love of life is expressed in the Hymn to Life, written by his friend, Lou von Salom, which Nietzsche set for chorus and orchestra. We read here—

"So truly loves a friend his friend
As I love thee, O Life in myst'ry hidden!
If joy or grief to me thou send;
If loud I laugh or else to weep am bidden,
Yet love I thee with all thy changeful faces;
And should'st thou doom me to depart,
So would I tear myself from thy embraces,
As comrade from a comrade's heart."

And the poem concludes—

"And if thou hast now left no bliss to crown me.
Lead on I thou hast thy sorrow still!"[8]

When Achilles chose to be a day-labourer on earth rather than a king in the realm of the shades, the expression was a weak one in comparison with this passionate outburst, which paradoxically thirsts even for the cup of pain.

Eduard von Hartmann believes in a beginning and end of the "world process." He concludes that no eternity can lie behind us; otherwise everything possible must already have happened, which—according to his contention—is not the case. In sharp contrast to him, on this point as on others, Zarathustra teaches, with, be it said, a somewhat shallow mysticism—which is derived from the ancient Pythagoreans' idea of the circular course of history and is influenced by Cohelet's Hebrew philosophy of life—the eternal recurrence; that is to say, that all things eternally return and we ourselves with them, that we have already existed an infinite number of times and all things with us. The great clock of the universe is to him an hour-glass, which is constantly turned and runs out again and again. This is the direct antithesis of Hartmann's doctrine of universal destruction, and curiously enough it was put forward at about the same time by two French thinkers: by Blanqui in L'ternit par les Astres (1871), and by Gustave Le Bon in L'Homme et les Socits (1881).

At his death Zarathustra will say: Now I disappear and die; in a moment I shall be nothing, for the soul is mortal as the body; but the complex of causes in which I am involved will return, and it will continually reproduce me.

At the close of the third part of Zarathustra there is a chapter headed "The Second Dance Song." Dance, in Nietzsche's language, is always an expression for the lofty lightness of mind, which is exalted above the gravity of earth and above all stupid seriousness. This song, extremely remarkable in its language, is a good specimen of the style of the work, when it soars into its highest flights of poetry. Life appears to Zarathustra as a woman; she strikes her castanets and he dances with her, flinging out all his wrath with life and all his love of life.

"Lately looked I into thine eyes, O Life! Gold saw I gleaming in thy night-eye—my heart stood still with the joy of it.

"A golden skiff saw I gleaming upon shadowy waters, a sinking, drinking, reblinking, golden swinging-skiff.

"At my foot, dancing-mad, didst thou cast a glance, a laughing, questioning, melting, swinging-glance.

"Twice only did thy little hands strike the castanets—then was my foot swinging in the madness of the dance.

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"I fear thee near, I love thee far; thy flight allureth me, thy seeking secureth me; I suffer, but for thee, what would I not gladly bear!

"For thee, whose coldness inflameth, whose hatred mis-leadeth, whose flight enchaineth, whose mockery pleadeth!

"Who would not hate thee, thou great bindress, inwindress, temptress, seekress, findress! Who would not love thee, thou innocent, impatient, wind-swift, child-eyed sinner!"

In this dialogue between the dancers, Life and her lover, these words occur: O Zarathustra, thou art far from loving me as dearly as thou sayest; thou art not faithful enough to me. There is an old, heavy booming-clock; it boometh by night up to thy cave. When thou hearest this clock at midnight, then dost thou think until noon that soon thou wilt forsake me.

And then follows, in conclusion, the song of the old midnight clock. But in the fourth part of the work, in the section called "The Sleepwalker's Song," this short strophe is interpreted line by line; in form half like a medival watchman's chant, half like the hymn of a mystic, it contains the mysterious spirit of Nietzsche's esoteric doctrine concentrated in the shortest formula—

Midnight is drawing on, and as mysteriously, as terribly, and as cordially as the midnight bell speaketh to Zarathustra, so calleth he to the higher men: At midnight many a thing is heard which may not be heard by day; and the midnight speaketh: O man, take heed!

Whither hath time gone? Have I not sunk into deep wells? The world sleepeth. And shuddering it asketh: Who is to be master of the world? What saith the deep midnight?

The bell boometh, the wood-worm burroweth, the heart-worm gnaweth: Ah! the world is deep.

But the old bell is like a sonorous instrument; all pain hath bitten into its heart, the pain of fathers and forefathers; and all joy hath set it swinging, the joy of fathers and forefathers—there riseth from the bell an odour of eternity, a rosy-blessed, golden-wine perfume of old happiness, and this song: The world is deep, and deeper than the day had thought.

I am too pure for the rude hands of the day. The purest shall be masters of the world, the unacknowledged, the strongest, the midnight-souls, who are brighter and deeper than any day. Deep is its woe.

But joy goeth deeper than heart's grief. For grief saith: Break, my heart! Fly away, my pain! Woe saith: Begone!

But, ye higher men, said ye ever Yea to a single joy, then said ye also Yea unto all woe. For joy and woe are linked, enamoured, inseparable. And all beginneth again, all is eternal. All joys desire eternity, deep, deep, eternity.