II.
Most writers on Nietzsche—and they are legion—begin with extolling him as a prophet or abusing him as a lunatic. I submit that before we extol or abuse, our first duty is to understand. And we can no longer evade that duty. We cannot afford any longer to ignore or dismiss the most powerful force in Continental literature, on the vain pretence that the author was mad, as if the greatest French thinker of the eighteenth century, Rousseau, and the greatest thinker of the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte, had not fallen victims to the same disease.
And, on the whole, Nietzsche is not difficult to understand, although there has arisen a host of commentators to obscure his meaning, although Nietzsche himself delights in expressing himself in the form of cryptic and mystic aphorism, although he continuously contradicts himself. But apart from those difficulties, his message is strikingly simple and his personality is singularly transparent. And his message and his personality are one. He is a convincing illustration of Fichte’s dictum, that any great system of philosophy is the outcome, not of the intellect, but of a man’s character. Nietzsche is not a metaphysician like Hegel, whom he abhorred. He is not a “logic-grinder,” like Mill, whom he despised. He is a moralist, like the French, whom he loved. His culture and learning were French even more than German. He was steeped in Montaigne, to whom he has paid a glowing tribute in “Schopenhauer as Educationalist.” He was a careful student of the great French classics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He read and annotated Guyau, with whom he had many points in common. By a curious coincidence, a few years before the advent of Nietzsche, a great French thinker had anticipated every one of Nietzsche’s doctrines, and had expressed them in one of the most striking books of the French language. And by an even more curious paradox, whilst every European critic devotes himself to-day to the interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, they systematically ignore—as Nietzsche himself ignored—the masterpiece of the Frenchman.