II
What does Nietzsche preach? What is his central doctrine divested of its increments of anti-Semitism, anti-Wagnerism, anti-Christianity, and anti-everything else? Simply, a doctrine as old as the first invertebrate organism which floated in torrid seas beneath a blazing moon: Egoism, individualism, personal freedom, selfhood. He is the apostle of the ego, and he refuses to accept the system spinning of the Teutonic spider philosophers of the day. He is a proclaimer of the rank animalism of man. He believes in the body and not in the soul of theology.
From Heraclitus to Hobbes materialism has flowed, a sturdy current, parallel with hundreds of more spiritual creeds. I say “more spiritual creeds,” for the spiritualizing of what was once contemptuously called dead, inorganic matter is being steadily prosecuted by every man of science to-day, whether he be electrician, biologist, or chemist. Nietzsche’s voice is raised against the mystagogues, occultists, and reactionaries who, in the name of religion and art, would put science once more under the ban of a century ago. He is the strong pagan man who hates the weak and ailing. He therefore hates the religion of the weak and oppressed. He is an aristocrat in art, believing that there should be an art for artists, and an art—an inferior art—for inferior intelligences. He forgot that there is an art for the artist,—his own particular art, and that into it none but the equally gifted may have an entrance. And he forgot, too, that all great art is rooted in the soil of earth.
Nietzsche hates the music that is beloved of the world. Yet, after the twentieth hearing of Carmen, he frantically asserts that Bizet is a greater man than Wagner, that he is blither, possesses the divine gayety, sparkle, and indescribable fascination of the Greeks! From his letters we learn that as a joke he put up Bizet as a man of straw to fight the Wagner idol. And a joke it is. But what would he have said to the music of Richard Strauss?
He rejects with contempt pity,—that pity which is akin to love; and therefore he hates Wagner, for in Wagner’s music is the note of yearning love and pity sounded by a master hand. To Nietzsche George Eliot’s
Oh may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
... in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self
would have been as silly as was the optimism of Leibnitz to Schopenhauer. This Nietzsche was a terrible fellow, a very Berserker in his mad rage against existing institutions. He used a battering ram of rare dialectic skill, and crash go the religious, social, and artistic fabrics reared ages since! But when the brilliant smoke of his style clears away, we still see standing the same venerable institutions. This tornadic philosopher does damage only to the outlying structures. He lets in light on some dark and dank places. He is a tonic for malaria, musical and religious; and there is value even in his own fantastic Transvaluation of all Values. I fancy that if Friedrich Nietzsche had been a man of physical resources, he would have been a soldier hero. The late Anton Seidl once told me that he knew the unlucky man when he was a Wagnerian. He was slight of stature, evidently of delicate health, but in his eyes burned the restless fire of genius. If that same energy could have been transmuted into action, he might have been a sane, healthy man to-day. In all this he was not unlike Stendhal, of whom Jules Lemaître wrote:—
“A grand man of action, paralyzed little by little by his incomparable analysis.” Nietzsche burned his brain away by a too strenuous analysis of life.
I can recommend to all Wagnerites Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner. It is bound to take the edge off their uncritical worship. But read it after the first study, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. It will also demonstrate that Wagner is great, and Wagnerism dangerous. Nietzsche saw with clear eyes the peril that threatens music because of the Wagnerian principles. We must never lose sight of the fact that with Wagner the drama almost always takes precedence. His deviation from his own theory was his artistic salvation. But there lies the danger in him for young composers. He is a man of the theatre. His music, divested of all the metaphysical verbiage heaped upon it by Wagner and Wagnerian critics, is music of the footlights. A great formalist he is; but it is Wagner’s form, not the form for orchestral writers. It is all well enough to say that the symphony has had its day; but its structure, despite numberless modifications, will survive as long as absolute music itself. And music pure and simple, for itself, undefiled by costumes, scenery, limelights, and vocal virtuosi, is the noblest music of all.
Nietzsche writes of Germany as “being arbitrarily stupefied by itself for nearly a thousand years.”
“Nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been more wickedly misused. Recently a third has been introduced, with which alone every refined and bold activity of intellect can be wiped out—music, our sluggish, ever more sluggish, German music. How much moody heaviness, lameness, humidity, and dressing-gown mood, how much beer is in German intelligence!” You may readily understand that this Nietzsche is a Slav. He is agile of temperament, his mind is a supple one; he loves the keen rapier thrusts, the glancing thrust of the Celt. He hates Germany. Was he a German? He is wholly Slavic at times, and yet what a contradictory man and how naïve his egotism! More feminine altogether than masculine was this febrile, capricious mind, and a hater of the Teuton, a race that is at once both fat and nervous.
Nietzsche is par excellence the thinker for the artistic. If Wagner was a painter, or a symphonist manqué, then Nietzsche was an artist manqué. His prose, swift, weighty, concentrated and brilliant, attracts readers who dislike his doctrines. One must read what he says in his Roving Expeditions of an Inopportune Philosopher.
“Seneca, or the toreador of virtue.”
“Rousseau, or return to nature in impuris naturalibus.”
“Schiller, or the moral Trumpeter of Säckingen.”
“Dante, or the hyena poetising in tombs.”
“Kant, or cant, as an intelligent character.”
“Victor Hugo, or Pharos, in a sea of absurdity.”
“Michelet, or enthusiasm which strips off the coat.”
“Carlyle, or pessimism as an undigested dinner.”
“John Stuart Mill, or offensive transparency.”
“The Goncourts, or the two Ajaxes struggling with Homer; music by Offenbach.”
Nietzsche preached of the beauty and pride of the body. Of pride we cannot have too much. It is the salt of personality. Golden-mouthed Plato, in De Republica, makes outcry against the dullard who thinks shame of his body. The human body is truly a tabernacle, and woe to him that defileth it, says the wise man.
He once made a proposal to found a monastery for freethinkers. What an abbot he would have been!
Did Nietzsche not declare, in the words of the Apostle Matthew (xvi. 26), slightly altered:—
“For what is a man profited if he shall gain his own soul and lose the whole world?”
Consider his great opponent, Tolstoy, who preaches the doctrine of non-resistance, of altruism, of a depressing socialism which is saturated with the very Orientalism so despised by Nietzsche! But then, Tolstoy does not play fair in the game. He has reached the threescore and ten of Scriptures; he has led, by his own acknowledgment, a life of self-indulgence; he has gambled and drank deeply. His belly was his god. Then he ran the intellectual gamut of dissipation. He worshipped at the shrines of false gods, wrote great, gray, godless novels, won renown, family happiness, riches, love, admiration, applause, and notoriety. So, having lived too happily, he forthwith falls to railing at destiny, like the Englishman Mr. Krehbiel tells us of in his Music and Manners. Quoting Haydn he writes, “Mr. Brassey once cursed because he enjoyed too much happiness in this world.” Tolstoy, having tasted of everything, has damaged his palate. Man pleases him not, nor does woman. In every book of his later, lonesome years he gives away the secret of life’s illusion, like the mischievous rival of a conjuror. It is not fair to the young ones who, with mouth agape, gaze at the cunning pictures limned by that old arch-hypocrite, Nature. The young man who has not had the courage to make a fool of himself some time in his career has not lived. Robert Louis Stevenson said this, and he said it better. Away with your cynics! Throw pessimism to the dogs! Let Tolstoy swear that the inverted bowl of the firmament is full of ashes, full of burnt-out stars; youth will see the bravery of the cosmical circus, its streamers, its mad coursing through eternity. The only way to help others is to help yourself!
So, despite his age, which is democratic, the aristocrat Nietzsche caught its ears; in the teeth of a religious reaction he preached rank atheism; and he opposed to altruism a selfless egotism. In a word, all his tendencies were set against those of his time; yet he has succeeded in attracting the attention of his contemporaries. Brandes is right in declaring that in some secret way Nietzsche “must have agreed with much of the tumult of modern thought.”
In his Gay Science,—a mockingly ironic title for such a sad book,—Nietzsche wrote these sentences; as in a meteoric flare we realize the sickness of his prophetic soul. He alludes to his idea of Eternal Recurrence:—
How were it if, some day or night, a demon stole after thee into thy most solitary solitude, and said to thee: “This life, as thou livest it now, and hast lived it, thou shalt have to live over again, and not once but innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure, and every thought and sigh, and everything in thy life, the great and the unspeakably petty alike, must come again to thee, and all in the same series and succession; this spider, too, and this moonlight betwixt the trees, and this moment likewise and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of time is always turned again, and thou with it, thou atom of dust.” Wouldest thou not cast thyself down, and with gnashing of teeth curse the demon who thus spoke? Or hast thou ever experienced the tremendous moment in which thou wouldest answer him, “Thou art a god, and never heard I anything more divine”?
Frau Andreas-Salomé, whose book on the philosopher is interesting, though disclaimed by Frau Förster-Nietzsche, adds this illuminating commentary on Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence doctrine:—
He struggled with it at first as with a fate from which there was no escape. Never can I forget the hours in which he first confided it to me as a secret, as something of whose verification and confirmation he had an unspeakable horror; he spoke of it only in a low voice and with every sign of the profoundest horror. And he suffered in truth so deeply in life that the certainty of life’s eternal recurrence could not but be for him a thing to shudder at. The quintessence of the doctrine of recurrence, the radiant apotheosis of life which Nietzsche afterwards taught, forms so profound a contrast to his own painful experiences of life that it impresses us as an uncanny mask.
And she further remarks: “Nietzsche contemplated the possibility that the theory might be scientifically deduced by physics from the doctrine of atoms.” And here we are almost back to the orthodox belief in eternity. All thought moves circle-wise, and Nietzsche’s ethical teaching is as old as Callicles in the Gorgias.
Nietzsche, then, is not such a revolutionary thinker. He is the perfect type of the old Greek rhapsodist, the impassioned rhetor, who with sonorous, beautiful phrases charmed and soothed his listeners as he pursued his peripatetic way. Sometimes the sound of what he says remains long after the memory of its sense has vanished. However, a perfect art or philosophy, or a perfect world itself, might soon grow monotonous. The ameliorating, if slightly hedonistic, philosophy of the Cardinal in John Inglesant comes back in pleasing sequence:—
There is no solution; believe me, no solution of life’s enigma worth the reading.... What solution can you hope to find, brooding on your own heart, on this narrow plot of grass shut in by lofty walls? You, and natures like yours, make this great error; you are moralizing and speculating upon what life ought to be, and in the meantime it slips by you, and you are nothing, and life is gone. I have heard, you doubtless, in a fine concert of viols extemporary descant upon a thorough-bass in the Italian manner, when each performer in turn plays such a variety of descant, in concordance to the bass, as his skill and the present invention may suggest to him. In this manner of play the consonances invariably fall true upon a given note, and every succeeding note of the ground is met, now in the unison or octave, now in the concords, preserving the melody throughout by the laws of motion and sound. I have thought that this is life.
To a solemn bass of mystery and of the unseen each man plays his own descant, as his taste or fate suggests; but this manner of play is so governed and controlled by what seems a fatal necessity that all melts into a species of harmony; and even the very discords and dissonances, the wild passions and deeds of men, are so attempered and adjusted that without them the entire piece would be incomplete. In this way I look upon life as a spectacle.