They meet now and then on the territory of psychology. Ibsen speaks in The Wild Duck of the necessity of falsehood to life. Nietzsche loved life so greatly that even truth appeared to him of worth only in the case of its acting for the preservation and advancement of life. Falsehood is to him an injurious and destructive power only in so far as it is life-constricting. It is not objectionable where it is necessary to life.
It is strange that a thinker who abhorred Jesuitism as Nietzsche did should arrive at this standpoint, which leads directly to Jesuitism. Nietzsche agrees here with many of his opponents.
Ibsen and Nietzsche were both solitary, even if they were not at all careless as to the fate of their works. It is the strongest man, says Dr. Stockmann, who is most isolated. Who was most isolated, Ibsen or Nietzsche? Ibsen, who held back from every alliance with others, but exposed his work to the masses of the theatre-going public, or Nietzsche, who stood alone as a thinker but as a man continually—even if, as a rule, in vain—spied after the like-minded and after heralds, and whose works, in the time of his conscious life, remained unread by the great public, or in any case misunderstood.
Decision does not fall lightly to one who, by a whim of fate, was regarded by both as an ally. Still more difficult is the decision as to which of them has had the deepest effect on the contemporary mind and which will longest retain his fame. But this need not concern us. Wherever Nietzsche's teaching extends, and wherever his great and rare personality is mastered, its attraction and repulsion will alike be powerful; but everywhere it will contribute to the development and moulding of the individual personality.
IV
(1909)
Since the publication of Nietzsche's collected works was completed, Frau Förster-Nietzsche has allowed the Insel-Verlag of Leipzig to issue, at a high price and for subscribers only, Friedrich Nietzsche's posthumous work Ecce Homo, which has been lying in manuscript for more than twenty years, and which she herself had formerly excluded from his works, considering that the German reading public was not ripe to receive it in the proper way—which we may doubtless interpret as a fear on her part that the attitude of the book towards Germanism and Christianity would raise a terrible outcry.
Now that Nietzsche holds undisputed sway over German minds and exercises an immense influence in the rest of Europe and in America, it will certainly be read with emotion and discreetly criticised.
It gives us an autobiography, written during Nietzsche's last productive months, almost immediately before the collapse of his powers, between October 15 and November 4, 1888; and in the course of this autobiography each of his books is briefly characterised.