I
THE WILL TO SUFFER
Coleridge quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as declaring that "the greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it." It is an elastic epigram and not unlike the rule which is poor because it won't work both ways. All master reformers, heretics, and rebels were at first great corrupters. It is a prime necessity in their propaganda. Aristophanes and Arius, Mohammed and Napoleon, Montaigne and Rabelais, Paul and Augustine, Luther and Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and Newman, Liszt and Wagner, Kant and Schopenhauer—here are a few names of men who undermined the current beliefs and practices of their times, whether for good or evil. Rousseau has been accused of being the greatest corrupter in history; yet to him we may owe the Constitution of the United States. Pascal, in prose of unequalled limpidity, denounced the Jesuits as corrupting youth. Nevertheless, Dr. Georg Brandes, an "intellectual" and a philosophic anarch, once wrote to Nietzsche: "I, too, love Pascal. But even as a young man I was on the side of the Jesuits against Pascal. Wise men, it was they who were right; he did not understand them; but they understood him and ... they published his Provincial Letters with notes themselves. The best edition is that of the Jesuits," Were not Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt the three unspeakable devils of painting for Blake? Loosely speaking, then, it doesn't much matter whether one considers a great man as a regenerator or a corrupter. Napoleon was called the latter by Taine after he had been saluted as demigod by his idolatrous contemporaries. Nor does the case of Nietzsche differ much from his philosophic forerunners. He scolded Schopenhauer, though borrowing his dialectic tools, as he later mocked at the one sincere friendship of his lonely life, Richard Wagner's. We know the most objective philosophies are tinged by the individual temperaments of their makers, and perhaps the chief characteristic of all philosophers is their unphilosophic contempt for their fellow-thinkers. Nietzsche displayed this trait; so did Richard Wagner—who was in a lesser fashion an amateur philosopher, his system adorned by plumes borrowed from Feuerbach, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. Arthur Schopenhauer was endowed with a more powerful intellect than either Wagner or Nietzsche. He "corrupted" them both. He was materialist enough to echo the epigram attributed to Fontenelle: To be happy a man must have a good stomach and a wicked heart.
Friedrich Nietzsche was more poet than original thinker. Merely to say Nay! to all existing institutions is not to give birth to a mighty idea, though the gesture is brave. He substituted for Schopenhauer's "Will to Live"—(an ingenious variation of Kant's "Thing in Itself") the "Will to Power"; which phrase is mere verbal juggling. The late Eduard von Hartmann built his house of philosophy in the fog of the Unconscious; Nietzsche, despising Darwin as a dull grubber, returned unknowingly to the very land of metaphysics he thought he had fled forever. He was always the theologian—toujours séminariste, as they said of Renan. Theology was in his blood. It stiffened his bones. Abusing Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, he was himself an exponent of a theological odium of the virulent sort, as may be seen in his thundering polemics. He held a brief for the other side of good and evil; but a man can't so easily empty his veins of the theologic blood of his forebears. It was his Nessus shirt and ended by consuming him. He had the romantic cult of great men, yet sneered at Carlyle for his Titanism. He believed in human perfectibility. He borrowed his Superman partly from the classic pantheon, partly from the hierarchy of Christian saints—or perhaps from the very Cross he vituperated. The only Christian, he was fond of saying, died on the Cross. The only Nietzschian, one might reply, passed away when crumbled the brilliant brain of Nietzsche. Saturated with the culture of Goethe, his Superman was sent ballooning aloft by the poetic afflatus of Nietzsche.
He was an apparition possible only in modern and rationalistic Protestant Germany. Like a voice from the Middle Ages he has stirred the profound phlegm and spiritual indifference of his fellow countrymen. But he has in him more of Savonarola than Luther—Luther, who was for him the apotheosis of all that is hateful in the German character: the self-satisfied philistinism, sensuality, beer and tobacco, unresponsiveness to all the finer issues of existence, pious tactlessness and harsh dogmatism.
His truth is enclosed in a transcendental vacuum. Whether he had Galton's science of Eugenics in his mind when he modelled his Zarathustra we need not concern ourselves. His revaluation of moral values has not shaken morality to its centre. He challenged superficial conventional morality, but the ultimate pillars of faith still stand. He reminds us of William Blake when he writes: "The path to one's heaven ever leads through the voluptuousness of one's own hell." And his psychical resemblance to Pascal is striking. Both men were physically debilitated; their nervous systems, overwhelmed by the burdens they imposed upon them, made their days and nights a continuous agony. The Nietzschian philosophy may be negligible, but the psychological aspects of this singularly versatile, fascinating, and contradictory nature are not. His "Will to Power" in his own case resolves itself into the will to suffer. Compared to his, Schopenhauer's pessimism is the good-natured grumbling of a healthy, witty man, with a tremendous vital temperament. Nietzsche was delicate from youth. His experiences in the Franco-Prussian war harmed him. Headache, eye trouble, a weak stomach, coupled with his abuse of intellectual work, and, toward the last, indulgence in narcotics for insomnia, all coloured his philosophy. The personal bias was unescapable, and this bias favoured sickness, not health. Hence his frantic apotheosis of health, the dance and laughter, and his admiration for Bizet's Carmen. Hence his constant employment of joyful imagery, of bold defiance to the sober workaday world. His famous injunction: "Be hard!" was meant for his own unhappy soul, ever nearing, like Pascal's, the abyss of black melancholy.
While we believe that too much stress has been laid upon the pathologic side of Pascal's and Nietzsche's characters, there is no evading the fact that both seemed tinged with what Kurt Eisner calls psychopathia spiritualis. The references to suffering in Nietzsche's books are significant. There is a vibrating accent of personal sorrow on every page. He lived in an inferno, mental and physical. We are given to praising Robert Louis Stevenson for his cheerfulness in the dire straits of his illness. He was a mere amateur of misery, a professional invalid, in comparison with Nietzsche. And how cruel was the German poet to himself. He tied his soul to a stake and recorded the poignant sensations of his spiritual auto-da-fé. At the close of his sane days we find him taking a dolorous pride in his capacity for suffering. "It is great affliction only—that long, slow affliction in which we are burned as it were with green wood, which takes time—that compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depth and divest ourselves of all trust, all good nature, glossing, gentleness.... I doubt whether such affliction improves us; but I know that it deepens us.... Oh, how repugnant to one henceforth is gratification, coarse, dull, drab-coloured gratification, as usually understood by those who enjoy life!... Profound suffering makes noble; it separates. ... There are free, insolent minds that would fain conceal and deny that at the bottom they are disjointed, incurable souls—it is the case with Hamlet." Nietzsche has the morbidly introspective Hamlet temper, and Pascal has been called the Christian Hamlet.
We read in Overbeck's recollections that Nietzsche manifested deep interest in the personality of Pascal. Both hated hypocrisy. But the German thinker saw in the Frenchman of genius only a Christian who hugged his chains, one who for his faith suffered "a continuous suicide of reason." (Has not Nietzsche himself also said hard things about Reason?) "One is punished best by one's virtues" ... or, "He who fights with monsters, let him be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." This last is unquestionably a reminiscence of Pascal. He could not endure with equanimity Pascal's sacrifizio dell' intelletto, not realizing that the Frenchman felt beneath his feet the solid globe of faith. He discerned the Puritan in Pascal, though failing to recognise the Puritan in himself. Despite his praise of the Dionysian element in art and life, a puritan was buried in the nerves of Nietzsche. He never could tolerate the common bourgeois joys. Wine, Woman, Song, and their poets, were his detestations. Yet he hated Puritanism in Protestant Christianity. "The dangerous thrill of repentance spasms, the vivisection of conscience," he contemns; "even in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty." He wrote to Brandes: "Physically, too, I lived for years in the neighbourhood of death. This was my great piece of good fortune; I forgot myself. I outlived myself—a shedding of the skin." Pascal also knew the sting of the flesh and brain. From the time he had an escape from sudden death, he was conscious of an abyss at his side. "Men of genius," he wrote, "have their heads higher but their feet lower than the rest of us." With Nietzsche there was a darker nuance of pain; he speaks somewhere of "the philtre of the great Circe of mingled pleasure and cruelty." His soul was a mysterious palimpsest. The heart has its reasons, cried Pascal; of Nietzsche's heart the last word has not been written.
His criticism of Pascal was not clement. He said: "In Goethe the superabundance becomes creative, in Flaubert the hatred; Flaubert, a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist with instinctive judgment at bottom.... He tortured himself when he composed, quite as Pascal tortured himself when he thought." Yes, but Nietzsche was as fierce a hater as Pascal or Flaubert. He set up for Christianity a straw adversary and proceeded to demolish it. He forgot that, as Francis Thompson has it: "It is the severed head that makes the Seraph." Nietzsche would not look higher than the mud around the pedestal. He, poor sufferer, was not genuinely impersonal. His tragedy was his sick soul and body. "If a man cannot sing as he carries his cross, he had better drop it," advises Havelock Ellis. Nietzsche bore a terrible cross—like the men staggering with their chimeras in Baudelaire's poem—but he did not bear it with equanimity. We must not be deceived by his desperate gayety. As a married man he would never have enjoyed, as did John Stuart Mill, spiritual henpeckery. He was afraid of life, this dazzling Zarathustra, who went on Icarus-wings close to the sun. He could speak of women thus: "We think woman deep—why? Because we never find any foundation in her. Woman is not even shallow." Or, "Woman would like to believe that love can do all—it is a superstition peculiar to herself. Alas! he who knows the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and liable to error even the best, the deepest love is—how it rather destroys than saves."
Der Dichter spricht! Also the bachelor. Once a Hilda of the younger generation, Lou Salomé by name, came knocking at the door of the poet's heart. It was in vain. The wings of a great happiness touched his brow as it passed, No wonder he wrote: "The desert grows; woe to him who hides deserts"; "Woman unlearns the fear of man"; "Thou goest to women! Remember thy whip." (Always this resounding motive of cruelty.) "Thy soul will be dead even sooner than thy body"; "Once spirit became God; then it became man; and now it is becoming mob"; "And many a one who went into the desert and suffered thirst with the camels, merely did not care to sit around the cistern with dirty camel-drivers." Here is the aristocratic radical.
It is weakness, admitted Goethe, not to possess the capacity for noble indignation; but Nietzsche was obsessed by his indignations. His voice, that golden poet's voice, becomes too often shrill, cracked, and falsetto. Voltaire has remarked that the first man who compared a woman to a rose was a poet, the second a fool. In his attitude toward Woman, Nietzsche was neither fool nor poet; but he never called her a rose. Nor was he a cynic; he saw too clearly for that, and he had suffered. Suffering, however, should have been a bond with women. Despite his cruel utterances he enjoyed several ideal friendships with cultivated women. "There is no happy life for woman—the advantage that the world offers her is her choice in self-sacrifice," wrote Mr. Howells. Gossip has whispered that he was hopelessly in love with Cosima Wagner. A charming theme for a psychological novel. So was Von Bülow, once—until he married her; so, Anton Rubinstein. Both abused Wagner's music; Von Bülow after he became an advocate of Brahms; Rubinstein always. Nietzsche, just before 1876, experienced the pangs of a Wagnerian reactionary. A pretty commentary this upon masculine mental superiority if one woman (even such a remarkable creature as Cosima) could upset the stanchest convictions of these three men. And convictions, asserted Nietzsche, are prisons. He contrived to escape from many intellectual prisons. Cosima had proved the one inflexible jailer.
Merciless to himself, he did not spare others. Of Altruism, with its fundamental contradictions, he wrote:
A being capable of purely altruistic actions alone is more fabulous than the Phœnix. Never has a man done anything solely for others, and without any personal motive; how could the Ego act without Ego? ... Suppose a man wished to do and to will everything for others, nothing for himself, the latter would be impossible, for the very good reason that he must do very much for himself, in order to do anything at all for others. Moreover, it presupposes that the other is egoist enough constantly to accept these sacrifices made for him; so that the men of love and self-sacrifice have an interest in the continued existence of loveless egoists who are incapable of self-sacrifice. In order to subsist, the highest morality must positively enforce the existence of immorality.—(Menschliches, I, 137-8).
"Nietzsche's criticism on this point," remarks Professor Seth Pattison, "must be accepted as conclusive. Every theory which attempts to divorce the ethical end from the personality of the moral agent must necessarily fall into this vicious circle; in a sense, the moral centre and the moral motive must always ultimately be self, the satisfaction of the self, the perfection of the self. The altruistic virtues, and self-sacrifice in general, can only enter into the moral ideal so far as they minister to the realisation of what is recognised to be the highest type of manhood, the self which finds its own in all men's good. Apart from this, self-sacrifice, self-mortification for its own sake, would be a mere negation, and, as such, of no moral value whatever."
Hasn't this the familiar ring of Max Stirner and his doctrine of the Ego?
Nietzsche with Pascal would have assented that "illness is the natural state of the true Christian." There was in both thinkers a tendency toward self-laceration of the conscience. "Il faut s'abêtir," wrote Pascal; and Nietzsche's pride vanished in the hot fire of suffering. The Pascal injunction to stupefy ourselves was not to imitate the beasts of the field, but was a counsel of humility. Montaigne in his essay on Raymond de Sebonde wrote before Pascal concerning the danger of overwrought sensibility; (Il nous faut abestir pour nous assagir, is the original old French). It would have been wise for Nietzsche to follow Pascal's advice. "We live alone, we die alone," sorrowfully wrote the greatest religious force of the past century, Cardinal Newman (a transposition of Pascal's "Nous mourrons seuls"). Nietzsche was the loneliest of poets. He lived on the heights and paid the penalty, like other exalted searchers after the vanished vase of the ideal.
II
NIETZSCHE'S APOSTASY
Although Macaulay called Horace Walpole a "wretched fribble," that gossip knew a trick or two in fancy fencing. "Oh," he wrote, "I am sick of visions and systems that shove one another aside and come again like figures in a moving picture." This was the outburst of a man called insincere and fickle, but frank in this instance. Issuing from the mouth of Friedrich Nietzsche this cry of the entertaining, shallow Walpole would have been curiously apposite. The unhappy German poet and philosopher suffered during his intellectual life from the "moving pictures" of other men's visions and systems, and when he finally escaped them all and evoked his own dream-world his brain became over-clouded and he passed away "trailing clouds of glory." It is an imperative necessity for certain natures to change their opinions, to slough, as sloughs a snake its skin, their master ideas. Renan went still further when he asserted that all essayists contradict themselves sometime during their life.
With Nietzsche the apparent contradictions of his Wagner-worship and Wagner-hatred may be explained if we closely examine the concepts of his first work of importance, The Birth of Tragedy. It was a misfortune that his bitterest book, The Wagner Case, should have been first translated into English, for Wagner is our music-maker now, and the rude assaults of Nietzsche fall upon deaf ears; while those who had read the earlier essay, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, were both puzzled and outraged. Certainly the man who could thus flout what he once adored must have been mad. This was the popular verdict, a facile and unjust verdict. What Nietzsche first postulated as to the nature of music he returned to at the close of his life; the mighty personality of Richard Wagner had deflected the stream of his thought for a few years. But as early as 1872 doubts began to trouble his sensitive conscience—this was before his pamphlet Richard Wagner in Bayreuth—and his notebooks of that period were sown with question-marks. In the interesting correspondence with Dr. Georg Brandes, who literally revealed to Europe the genius of Nietzsche, we find this significant passage:
I was the first to distil a sort of unity out of the two [Schopenhauer and Wagner].... All the Wagnerians are disciples of Schopenhauer. Things were different when I was young. Then it was the last of the Hegelians who clung to Wagner, and "Wagner and Hegel" was still the cry in the '50s.
Nietzsche might have added the name of the philosopher Feuerbach. Wagner's English apologist, Ashton Ellis, repudiates the common belief that Wagner refashioned the latter part of the Ring so as to introduce in it his newly acquired Schopenhauerian ideas. Wagner was always a pessimist, declares Mr. Ellis; Schopenhauer but confirmed him in his theories. Wagner, like Nietzsche, was too often a weathercock. A second-rate poet and philosopher, he stands chiefly for his magnificent music. Nietzsche or any other polemiker cannot change the map of music by fulminating against Wagner. Time may prove his true foe—the devouring years that always show such hostility to music of the theatre, music that is not pure music.
The spirit of the letter to Brandes quoted above may be found in Nietzsche Contra Wagner (The Case of Wagner, page 72). Nietzsche wrote:
I similarly interpreted Wagner's music in my own way as the expression of a Dionysian powerfulness of soul.... It is obvious what I misunderstood, it is obvious in like manner what I bestowed upon Wagner and Schopenhauer—myself.
He read his own enthusiasms, his Hellenic ideals, into the least Greek among composers. Wagner himself was at first pleased, also not a little nonplussed by the idolatry of Nietzsche. Remember that this young philologist was a musician as well as a brilliant scholar.
Following Schopenhauer in his main contention that music is a presentative, not a representative art; the noumenon, not the phenomenon—as are, for instance, painting and sculpture—Nietzsche held that the unity of music is undeniable. There is no dualism, such as instrumental music and vocal music. Sung music is only music presented by a sonorous vocal organ; the words are negligible. A poem may be a starting-point for the composer, yet in poetry there is not the potentiality of tone (this does not naturally refer to the literary tone-quality of music). From a non-musical thing music cannot be evolved. There is only absolute music. Its beginning is absolute. All other is a masquerading. The dramatic singer is a monstrosity—the actual words of Nietzsche. Opera is a debased genre. We almost expect the author to deny, as denied Hanslick, music any content whatsoever. But this he does not. He is too much the Romantic. For him the poem of Tristan was but the "vapour" of the music. Music is the archetype of the arts. It is the essence of Greek tragedy and therefore pessimistic. Tragedy is pessimism. The two faces of the Greek art he calls the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses. One is the Classic, the other the Romantic; calm beauty as opposed to bacchantic ecstasy. Wagner, Nietzsche identified with the Dionysian element, and he was not far wrong; but Greek? The passionate welter of this new music stirred Nietzsche's excitable young nerves. He was, like many of his contemporaries, swept away in the boiling flood of the Wagnerian sea. It appeared to him, the profound Greek scholar, as a recrudescence of Dionysian joy. Instead, it was the topmost crest of the dying waves of Romanticism. Nietzsche later realised this fact. To Brandes he wrote:
Your German romanticism has made me reflect how the whole movement only attained its goal in music (Schumann, Mendelssohn, Weber, Wagner, Brahms); in literature it stopped short with a huge promise—the French were more fortunate. I am afraid I am too much of a musician not to be a Romanticist. Without music life would be a mistake.... With regard to the effect of Tristan I could tell you strange things. A good dose of mental torture strikes me as an excellent tonic before a meal of Wagner.
Nietzsche loved Wagner the man more than Wagner the musician. The news of Wagner's death in 1883 was a terrible blow for him. He wrote Frau Wagner a letter of condolence, which was answered from Bayreuth by her daughter Daniela von Bülow. (See the newly published Overbeck Letters.)
Nothing could be more unfair than to ascribe to Nietzsche petty motives in his breaking off with Wagner. There were minor differences, but it was Parsifal and its drift toward Rome, that shocked the former disciple. What he wrote of Wagner and Wagnerism may be interpreted according to one's own views, but the Parsifal criticism is sound. That parody of the Roman Catholic ceremonial and ideas, and the glorification of its psychopathic hero, with the consequent degradation of the idea of womanhood, Nietzsche saw and denounced. "I despise everyone who does not regard Parsifal as an outrage on morals," he cried. To-day his denunciations are recognised by wise folk as wisdom. He first heard Carmen in Genoa, November 27, 1881. To his exacerbated nerves its rich southern melodies were soothing. He overpraised the opera—which is a sparkling compound of Gounod and Spanish gypsy airs; an olla podrida as regards style. He knew that this was bonbon music compared with Wagner. And the confession was wrung from his lips: "We must first be Wagnerians." Thus, as he escaped from Schopenhauer's pessimism, he plucked from his heart his affection for Wagner. He had become Zarathustra. He painted Wagner as an "ideal monster," but the severing of the friendship cost Nietzsche his happiness. An extraordinary mountain-mania attacked him on the heights of the upper Engadine. All that he had once admired he now hated. He had a positive genius for hatred, even more so than Huysmans; both writers were bilious melancholics, and both were alike in the display of heavy-handed irony. With Nietzsche's "ears for quarter tones"—as he told Brandes—it would have been far better for him to remain with Peter Gast in Italy, while the latter was writing that long-contemplated study on Chopin. Nietzsche loved the music of the Pole who had introduced into the heavy monochrome of German harmonies an exotic and chromatic gamut of colours.
If Wagner erred in his belief that it was the drama not the music which ruled in his own compositions (for his talk about the welding of the different arts is an æsthetic nightmare), why should not Nietzsche have made a mistake in ascribing to Wagner his own exalted ideals? Wagner's music is the Wagner music drama. That is a commonplace of criticism—though not at Bayreuth. Nietzsche taught the supremacy of tone in his early book. He detested so-called musical realism. These two men became friends through a series of mutual misunderstandings. When Nietzsche discovered that music and philosophy had naught in common—and he had hoped that Wagner's would prove the solvent—he cooled off in his faith. It was less an apostasy than we believe. Despite his eloquent affirmation of Wagnerism, Nietzsche was never in his innermost soul a Wagnerian. Nor yet was he insincere. This may seem paradoxical. He had felt the "pull" of Wagner's genius, and, as in the case of his Schopenhauer worship, he temporarily lost his critical bearings. This accounts for his bitterness when he found the feet of his idol to be clay. He was lashing his own bare soul in each scarifying phrase he applied to Wagner. He saw the free young Siegfried become the old Siegfried in the manacles of determinism and pessimism; then followed Parsifal and Wagner's apostasy—Nietzsche believed Wagner was going back to Christianity. There is more consistency in the case of Friedrich Nietzsche than has been acknowledged by the Wagnerians. He, the philosopher of decadence and romanticism, could have said to Wagner as Baudelaire to Manet: "You are only the first in the decrepitude of your art."
If Nietzsche considered the poem a vaporous background for the passionate musical mosaic of Tristan and Isolde, what would he have thought if he could have heard the tonal interpretation of his Also Sprach Zarathustra, as conceived by the mathematical and emotional brain of Richard Strauss? I recall the eagerness with which I asked an impossible question of Frau Foerster-Nietzsche when at the Nietzsche-Archive, Weimar, in 1904: Is this tone-poem by Richard Strauss truly Nietzschean? Her tact did not succeed in quite veiling a hint of dubiety, though the noble sister of the dead philosopher was too tender-hearted to suggest a formal criticism of the composer's imposing sound-palace. It is not, however, difficult to imagine Nietzsche, alive, glaring in dismay and with "embellished indignation" as he hears the dance theme in Zarathustra. Nor would he be less surprised if he had suddenly forced upon his consciousness a performance of Claude Debussy's mooning, mystic, triste Pélléas et Mélisande, with its invertebrate charm, its innocuous sensuousness, its absence of thematic material, its perverse harmonies, its lack of rhythmic variety, and its faded sweetness, like that evoked by musty, quaint tapestry in languid motion. (Debussy might have delved deeper into churchly modes and for novelty's sake even employed pneumes to lend his score a still more venerable aspect. Certainly his tonalities are on the other side of diatonic and chromatic. Why not call them pneumatic scales?) Surely Nietzsche could not have refrained from exclaiming: Ah! the pathos of distance! Ah! what musical sins thou must take upon thee, Richard Wagner! Strauss and Debussy are the legitimate fruits of thy evil tree of music!
Miserably happy poet, like one of those Oriental wonder-workers dancing in ecstasy on white-hot sword-blades, the tears all the while streaming down his cheeks as he proclaims his new gospel of joy: "Il faut méditerraniser la musique." Alas! the pathos of Nietzsche's reality. Reality for this self-tortured Hamlet-soul was a spiritual crucifixion and a spiritual tragedy.
III
ANTICHRIST?
The penalty of misrepresentation and misinterpretation seems to be attached to every new idea that comes to birth through the utterances of genius. At first with Wagner it was the "noise-making Wagner"—whereas he is a master of plangent harmonies. Ibsen, we were told, couldn't write a play. His dramatic technique is nearly faultless; in reality, with its unities there is a suspicion of the academic in it and a perilous approach to the Chinese ivory mechanism of Scribe. And paint, Paris asserted, the late Edouard Manet could not. It was precisely his almost miraculous manipulation of paint that sets this artist apart from his fellows. The same tactless rating of Friedrich Nietzsche has prevailed in the general critical and popular imagination. Nietzsche has become the bugaboo of timid folk. He has been denounced as the Antichrist; yet he has been the subject of a discriminating study in such a conservative magazine as the Catholic World. Thanks to the conception of some writers, Nietzsche and the Nietzschians are gigantic brutes, a combination of Genghis Khan and Bismarck, terrifying apparitions wearing mustachios like yataghans, eyes rolling in frenzy, with a philosophy that ranged from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter, and with a consuming atheism as a side attraction. Need we protest that this is Nietzsche misread, Nietzsche butchered to make a stupid novelist's holiday.
Ideas to be vitally effective must, like scenery, be run on during the exact act of the contemporary drama. The aristocratic individualism of Nietzsche came at a happy moment when the stage was bare yet encumbered with the débris of socialistic theories left over from the storm that first swept all Europe in 1848. It was necessary that the pendulum should swing in another direction. The small voice of Max Stirner—who, as the French would say, imitated Nietzsche in advance—was swallowed in the universal gabble of sentimental humanitarianism preached from pulpits and barricades. Nietzsche's appearance marked one of those precise psychological moments when the rehabilitation of an old idea in a new garment of glittering rhetoric would resemble a new dispensation. For over a decade now the fame and writings of the Saxon-born philosopher have traversed the intellectual life of the Continent. He was translated into a dozen languages, he was expounded, schools sprang up and his disciples fought furious battles in his name. His doctrines, because of their dynamic revolutionary quality, were impudently annexed by men whose principles would have been abhorrent to the unfortunate thinker. Nietzsche, who his life long had attacked socialism in its myriad shapes, was captured by the socialists. However, the regression of the wave of admiration has begun not only in Germany but in France, once his greatest stronghold. The real Nietzsche, undimmed by violent partisanship and equally violent antagonism, has emerged. No longer is he a bogey man, not a creature of blood and iron, not a constructive or an academic philosopher, but simply a brilliant and suggestive thinker who, because of the nature of his genius, could never have erected an elaborate philosophic system, and a writer not quite as dangerous to established religion and morals as some critics would have us believe. He most prided himself on his common sense, on his "realism," as contradistinguished from the cobweb-spinning idealisms of his philosophic predecessors.
Early in 1908 a book was published at Jena entitled Franz Overbeck and Friedrich Nietzsche, by Carl Albrecht Bernouilli. In it at great length and with clearness was described the friendship of Overbeck—a well-known church historian and culture-novelist, born at St. Petersburg of German and English parents—and Nietzsche during their Basel period. Interesting is the story of his relations with Richard Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt, the historian of the Renaissance. As a youth Nietzsche had won the praises of both Rietschl and Burckhardt for his essay on Theognis. This was before 1869, in which year at the age of twenty-six he took his doctor's degree and accepted the chair of classical philology at Basel. His friend Overbeck noted his dangerously rapid intellectual development and does not fail to record, what has never been acknowledged by the dyed-in-the-wool Nietzschians, that the "Master" had read and inwardly digested Max Stirner's anarchistic work, The Ego and His Own. Not only is this long-denied fact set forth, but Overbeck, in a careful analysis, reaches the positive conclusion that, notwithstanding his profound erudition, his richly endowed nature, Friedrich Nietzsche is not one of the world's great men; that in his mad endeavour to carve himself into the semblance of his own Superman he wrecked brain and body.
The sad irony of this book lies in the fact that the sister of Nietzsche, Frau Foerster-Nietzsche, who nursed the poet-philosopher from the time of his breakdown in 1888 till his death in 1900; who for twenty years has by pen and personally made such a successful propaganda for his ideas, was in at least three letters—for the first time published by Bernouilli—insulted grievously by her brother. This posthumous hatred as expressed in the acrid prose of Nietzsche is terribly disenchanting. He calls her a meddlesome woman without a particle of understanding of his ideals. He declares that she martyred him, made him ridiculous, and in the last letter he wrote her, dated December, 1886, he wonders at the enigma of fate that made two persons of such different temperaments blood-relatives. Bernouilli, the editor of these Overbeck letters, adds insult to injury by calling the unselfish, noble-minded sister and biographer of her brother a tyrannical and not very intellectual person, who often wounded her brother with her advice and criticism.
Peter Gast doubts the authenticity of these letters, for, as he truthfully points out, the love of Nietzsche for his sister, as evidenced by an ample correspondence, was great. We recall the touching exclamation of the sick philosopher when once at his sister's house in Weimar he saw her weeping: "Don't cry, little sister, we are all so happy now." That "now" had a sinister significance, for the brilliant thinker was quite helpless and incapable of reading through the page of a book, though he was never the lunatic pictured by some of his opponents. A deep melancholy had settled upon his soul and he died without enjoying the light of a returned reason. It has not occurred to German critics that these letters even if genuine are the product of a diseased imagination. Nietzsche became a very suspicious man after his break with Wagner. He suffered from the mania of persecution. He hated mankind and fled to the heights of Sils-Maria to escape what Poe aptly described as the "tyranny of the human face."
The first thing that occurs to one after reading Beyond Good and Evil is that Nietzsche is more French than German. It is well known that his favourites were the pensée writers, Pascal, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Chamfort, Vauvenargues. A peripatetic because of chronic ill health—he had the nerves of a Shelley and the stomach of a Carlyle—his ideas were jotted down during his long walks in the Engadine. Naturally they assumed the form of aphorisms, epigrams, jeux d'esprit. With his increasing illness came the inability to write more than a few pages of connected thoughts. His best period was between the years 1877 and 1882. He had attacked Schopenhauer; he wished to be free to go up to the "heights" unimpeded by the baggage of other men's ideas. It was with disquietude that his friends witnessed the growing self-exaltation that may be noted in the rhapsodical Zarathustra.
He felt the ground sinking under him—his pride of intellect Luciferian in intensity—and his latter works were a desperate challenge to his darkening brain and the world that refused to recognize his value.
Nietzsche had the true ascetic's temperament. He lived the life of a strenuous saint, and his Beyond Good and Evil might land us in a barren desert, where austerity would rule our daily conduct. To become a Superman one must renounce the world. It was the easy-going, down-at-the-heel morality of the world, its carrying water on both shoulders, that stirred the wrath of this earnest man of blameless life and provoked from him so much brilliant and fascinating prose. He wrote a swift, golden German. He was a stylist. The great culture hero of his day, nourished on Latin and Greek, he waged war against the moral ideas of his generation and ruined his intellect in the unequal conflict. He turned on himself and rended his soul into shreds rather than join in the affirmations of recognised faith. Yet what eloquent, touching pages he has devoted to the founder of the Christian religion. His last signature in the letter to Brandes reveals the preoccupation of his memory with the religion he despised. Nietzsche made the great renunciation of inherited faith and committed spiritual suicide. Libraries are filled with the works of his commentators, eager to make of him what he was not. He has been shamelessly exploited. He has been called the forerunner of Pragmatism. He was a poet, an artist, who saw life as a gorgeously spun dream, not as a dreary phalanstery. He belonged rather to Goethe and Faust than to Schopenhauer or the positivists. Hellenism was his first and last love.
The correspondence between Nietzsche and his famulus, the musician Peter Gast—whose real name is Heinrich Kôselitz—from 1876 to 1889, appeared last autumn and comprises 278 letters. Another Nietzsche appears—gentle, suffering, as usual still hopeful. He loves Italy; at the end, Turin is his favourite city. There is little except in the final communication to show a mind cracking asunder. No doubt this correspondence was given to the world as an offset to the Overbeck-Bernouilli letters.
Leslie Stephen declared that no one ever wrote a dull autobiography, and risking a bull, added, "The very dulness would be interesting." Yet one is not afraid to maintain that Friedrich Nietzsche's autobiography is rather a disappointment; possibly because too much was expected. It should not be forgotten that Nietzsche, when at Wagner's villa Triebschen, near Lucerne, read and corrected Wagner's autobiography, which is yet to see the light of publication. He seems to have violated certain confidences, for he was the first—that is, in latter years—to revive the story of Wagner's blood relationship to his stepfather, Ludwig Geyer. In Leipsic this was a thrice-told tale. Moreover, he warned us to be suspicious of great men's autobiographies and then wrote one himself, wrote it in three weeks, beginning October 15, 1888, the forty-fourth anniversary of his birth, and ending with difficulty November 4. It rings sincere, and was composed at white heat, but unhappily for this present curious generation of Nietzsche readers it tells very little that is new.
Notwithstanding Nietzsche's wish that the book should not exceed in price over a mark and a half, a limited edition de luxe has been put forth with the acquiescence of the Nietzsche archive, Weimar, and at a high price. This edition is limited to 1,250 copies. It is clearly printed, but the decorative element is rather bizarre. Henry Van de Velde of the Weimar Art School is the designer of the title and ornaments. Raoul Richter, professor at the Leipsic University, has written a few appreciative words at the close.
Nietzsche was at Turin, November, 1888. There he wrote the following to Professor Georg Brandes, the celebrated Copenhagen critic: "I have now revealed myself with a cynicism that will become historical. The book is called Ecce Homo and is against everything Christian.... I am after all the first psychologist of Christianity, and like the old artillerist I am, I can bring forward cannon of which no opponent of Christianity has even suspected the existence.... I lay down my oath that in two years we shall have the whole earth in convulsions. I am a fatality. Guess who it is that comes off worst in Ecce Homo? The Germans! I have said awful things to them." This was the "golden autumn" of his life, as he confessed to his sister Elizabeth. In a little over four weeks from the date of the letter to Brandes Nietzsche went mad, after a stroke of apoplexy in Turin. The collapse must have taken place between January 1 and 3, 1889. Brandes received a card signed "The Crucified One"; Overbeck, his old friend at Basel, was also agitated by a few lines in which Nietzsche proclaimed himself the King of Kings; while to Cosima Wagner at Bayreuth was sent a communication which read, "Ariadne, I love you! Dionysos." Like Tolstoy, Nietzsche suffered from theomania and prophecy madness.
These details are not in the autobiography but may be found in Dr. Mügge's excellent study just published, Nietzsche, His Life and Work. Overbeck started for Turin and there found his poor old companion giving away his money, dancing, singing, declaiming verse, and playing snatches of crazy music on the pianoforte. He was taken back to Basel and was gentle on the trip except that in the Saint-Gothard tunnel he sang a poem of his, "An der Brücke," which appears in the autobiography. His mother brought him from Switzerland to Naumburg; thence to Dr. Binswanger's establishment at Jena. Later he lived in his sister's home at Upper Weimar, and from the balcony, where he spent his days, he could see a beautiful landscape. He was melancholy rather than mad, never violent—this his sister has personally assured me—and occasionally surprised those about him by flashes of memory; but full consciousness was not to be again enjoyed by him. Overwork, chloral, and despair at the "conspiracy of silence" caused his brain to crumble. He had attained his "Great Noon," Zarathustra's Noon, during the closing days of 1888. In August, 1900, came the euthanasia for which he had longed.
There is internal evidence that the autobiography was written under exalted nervous conditions. The aura of insanity hovers about its pages. Yet Nietzsche has seldom said so many brilliant, ironical, and savage things. He melts over memories of Wagner, the one friendship of a life crowded with friends and cursed by solitude. He sets out to smash Christianity, but he expressed the hope that the book would fall into the hands of the intellectual élite. He divides his theme into the following heads: Why I Am So Clever: Why I Am So Sage: Why I Write Such Good Books: Why I Am a Fatality. (You recall here the letter to Brandes.) He ranges from the abuse of bad German cookery to Kantian metaphysics. He calls Ibsen the typical old maid and denounces him as the creator of the "Emancipated Woman." Yes, he does insult Germany and the Germans, but no worse than in earlier books; and certainly not so effectively as did Goethe, Heine, and Schopenhauer. In calling the Germans the "Chinese of Europe" he but repeated the words of Goncourt in Charles Demailly. He speaks of Liszt as one "who surpasses all musicians by the noble accents of his orchestration" (vague phrase); and depreciates Schumann's "Manfred." He, Nietzsche, had composed a counter overture which Von Bülow declared extraordinary. True, Von Bülow did call it something of the sort, with the advice to throw it into the dust-bin as being an insult to good music. He analyses his recent readings of Baudelaire—whose diary touched him deeply—of Stendhal, Bourget, Maupassant, Anatole France, and others. Best of all, he minutely analyses the mental processes of his books from The Birth of Tragedy to The Wagner Case. He declares Zarathustra a dithyramb of solitude and purity, and proudly boasts that the Superman builds his nest in the trees of the future.
What a master of invective! He often descends to the street in his tongue-lashing, as, for instance, when he groups "shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats." Woman is always the enemy. The only way to tame her is to make her a mother. As for female suffrage, he sets it down to psychological disorders. He is a nuance, and is the first German to understand women! Alas! And not the last man who will repeat this speech surely hailing from the Stone Age. He seems rather proud of his double personality, and hints at a third. Oddly enough, Nietzsche asked that his Ecce Homo (the title proves his constant preoccupation with Christianity) be translated into French by Strindberg, the Swedish poet and the first dramatist to incorporate into his plays the Nietzschian philosophy, or what he conceived to be such. (Daniel Lesueur has written of the various adaptations for gorillas of a teaching that really demands from man the utmost that is in him.) Nietzsche was a hater of Christianity; above all of Christian morals, but he was a brave and honest fighter. He raged at George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, and Carlyle for their half-heartedness. To give up the belief in Christ and His mission meant for Nietzsche to drop the moral system, to transvalue old moral values. This, he truthfully asserted, George Eliot and Spencer had not the courage to do. He did not skulk behind such masks as the Higher Criticism, Modernism, or quacksalver Christian socialism. Compromise was abhorrent to him. His Superman, with its echoes of Wagner's Siegfried, Ibsen's Brand, Stendhal's wicked heroes, the Renaissance Borgias, the second Faust of Goethe, and not a little of Hamlet, is a monster of perfection that may some day become a demigod for a new religion—and no worse than contemporary mud-gods manufactured daily. Nietzsche's particular virtue, even for the orthodox, is that though he assails their faith he also puts to rout with the fiery blasts of his rhetoric all the belly-gods, the false-culture gods, the gods who "heal," and other "ghosts"—as Max Stirner calls them. But to every generation its truths (or lies).
A recently published anecdote of Ibsen quotes a statement of his a propos of Brand. "The whole drama is only meant as irony. For the man who wants all or nothing is certainly crazy." Well, Friedrich Nietzsche was such a man. No half-way parleyings. Fight the Bogey. Don't go around. He went more serenely than did Brand to his ice cathedral on the heights. His prayer uttered years before came true: "Give me, ye gods, give me madness! Madness to make me believe at last in myself."
Nietzsche is the most dynamically emotional writer of his times. He sums up an epoch. He is the expiring voice of the old nineteenth-century romanticism in philosophy. His message to unborn generations we may easily leave to those unborn, and enjoy the wit, the profound criticisms of life, the bewildering gamut of his ideas; above all, pity the tragic blotting out of such a vivid intellectual life.