What Nietzsche, as a young man admired more than anything else in Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner was "the indomitable energy with which they maintained their self-reliance in the midst of the hue and cry raised against them by the whole cultured world." He made this self-reliance his own, and this was no doubt the first thing to make an impression.
In the next place the artist in him won over those to whom the aphorisms of the thinker were obscure. With all his mental acuteness he was a pronounced lyricist. In the autumn of 1888 he wrote of Heine: "How he handled German! One day it will be said that Heine and I were without comparison the supreme artists of the German language." One who is not a German is but an imperfect judge of Nietzsche's treatment of language; but in our day all German connoisseurs are agreed in calling him the greatest stylist of German prose.
He further impressed his contemporaries by his psychological profundity and abstruseness. His spiritual life has its abysses and labyrinths. Self-contemplation provides him with immense material for investigation. And he is not content with self-contemplation. His craving for knowledge is a passion; covetousness he calls it: "In this soul there dwells no unselfishness; on the contrary, an all-desiring self that would see by the help of many as with its own eyes and grasp as with its own hands; this soul of mine would even choose to bring back all the past and not lose anything that might belong to it. What a flame is this covetousness of mine!"
The equally strong development of his lyrical and critical qualities made a fascinating combination. But it was the cause of those reversals of his personal relations which deprive his career (in much the same way as Sören Kierkegaard's) of some of the dignity it might have possessed. When a great personality crossed his path he called all his lyricism to arms and with clash of sword on shield hailed the person in question as a demigod or a god (Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner). When later on he discovered the limitations of his hero, his enthusiasm was apt to turn to hatred, and this hatred found vent without the smallest regard to his former worship. This characteristic is offensively conspicuous in Nietzsche's behaviour to Wagner. But who knows whether this very lack of dignity has not contributed to increase the number of Nietzsche's admirers in an age that is somewhat undignified on this point!
In the last period of his life Nietzsche appeared rather as a prophet than as a thinker. He predicts the Superman. And he makes no attempt at logical proof, but proceeds from a reliance on the correctness and sureness of his instinct, convinced that he himself represents a life-promoting principle and his opponents one hostile to life.
To him the object of existence is, everywhere the production of genius. The higher man in our day is like a vessel in which the future of the race is fermenting in an impenetrable way, and more than one of these vessels is burst or broken in the process. But the human race is not ruined by the failure of a single creature. Man, as we know him, is only a bridge, a transition from the animal to the superman. What the ape is in relation to man, a laughingstock or a thing of shame, that will man be to the superman. Hitherto every species has produced something superior to itself. Nietzsche teaches that man too will and must do the same. He has drawn a conclusion from Darwinism which Darwin himself did not see.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century Nietzsche and Tolstoy appeared as the two opposite poles. Nietzsche's morality is aristocratic as Tolstoy's is popular, individualistic as Tolstoy's is evangelical; it asserts the self-majesty of the individual, where Tolstoy's proclaims the necessity of self-sacrifice.
In the same decade Nietzsche and Ibsen were sometimes compared. Ibsen, like Nietzsche, was a combative spirit and held entirely aloof from political and practical life. A first point of agreement between them is that they both laid stress on not having come of small folk. Ibsen made known to me in a letter that his parents, both on the father's and the mother's side, belonged to the most esteemed families of their day in Skien in Norway, related to all the patrician families of the place and country. Skien is no world-city, and the aristocracy of Skien is quite unknown outside it; but Ibsen wanted to make it clear that his bitterness against the upper class in Norway was in no wise due to the rancour and envy of the outsider.
Nietzsche always made it known to his acquaintances that he was descended from a Polish noble family, although he possessed no pedigree. His correspondents took this for an aristocratic whim, all the more because the name given out by him, Niëzky, by its very spelling betrayed itself as not Polish. But the fact is otherwise. The true spelling of the name is Nicki, and a young Polish admirer of Nietzsche, Mr. Bernard Scharlitt, has succeeded in proving Nietzsche's descent from the Nicki family, by pointing out that its crest is to be found in a signet which for centuries has been an heirloom in the family of Nietzsche. Perhaps not quite without reason, Scharlitt therefore sees in Nietzsche's master-morality and his whole aristocratising of the view of the world an expression of the szlachcic spirit inherited from Polish ancestors.
Nietzsche and Ibsen, independently of each other but like Renan, have sifted the thought of breeding moral aristocrats. It is the favourite idea of Ibsen's Rosmer; it remains Dr. Stockmann's. Thus Nietzsche speaks of the higher man as the preliminary aim of the race, before Zarathustra announces the superman.