Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s criticism[[1067]] is, on the one hand, very much what might be expected by any one who might have managed (it would be difficult) to read only that part of his work which does not contain it, and on the other throws a very useful amount of additional light on his general mental attitude. Himself a remarkable artist from the purely literary side—the best modern German prose-writer by far, with Heine and Schopenhauer—he cannot help paying literary art the same compliment which he pays to some other things, that, not exactly of believing and trembling, but of acknowledging as he blasphemes. He blasphemes, of course, pretty freely: take away blasphemy, parody, and that particular kind of borrowing which thinks to disguise itself by inserting or extracting “nots,” and there is not much of Nietzsche left but form. Zarathustra, the Birth of Tragedy, and Der Fall Wagner. The mere headings of Also Sprach Zarathustra will guide the laziest to his ultimate opinions upon poetry and other things. At the beginning, the Birth of Tragedy (1871) is, despite its title, hardly literary at all; its theory of an orgiastic hyperanthropic Dionysus-cult superseding the calm “Apollonian” Epic, and itself superseded by the corrupting philosophy of Socrates, being entirely philosophic (or philomoric). Later, the onslaught on Wagner is very literary, and consists, in fact, of a violent—of a frantic—protest against the tendencies of Romanticism, of which he quite correctly sees that Wagner is, with whatever differences, a musical exponent, and against “literary” music itself. Perhaps there never was a hostile contention which the other side could accept with such alacrity as Nietzsche’s approximation[[1068]]of Wagner and Victor Hugo. They are extremely alike in merits as in faults, and the recognition of the twinship is a point in favour of Nietzsche’s critical power, whatever his dislike of it may be.

Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen.

To attend more heedfully to chronological order—the four remarkable essays of the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, which, early as they are (1873-76), are perhaps the last things in which Nietzsche displayed himself as entirely compos mentis, are close to our subject throughout,[[1069]] and not seldom openly deal with it. The tremendous castigation administered to the “Culture-Philistinism” of Strauss—a document very fit to be registered as an abiding corrective to the hymns of our German-praisers, from Mr. Arnold to Mr. Haldane, and all who shall follow—is sometimes directly, and always in spirit, literary-critical. The unfriendly attitude of the next paper to the Study of History may seem less so, for, as we have seen, literary criticism without literary history is almost hopeless. But here Nietzsche’s as yet unformulated, but certainly conceived, aspirations towards a future that was to be quite different from the past, probably come in, and he was entitled to regard with suspicion, and to meet with protest, the “dry-as-dust” character of German history-study. The enthusiastic encomia on Schopenhauer and Wagner are again as constantly literary in character as the subsequent denials of both.

La Gaya Scienza.

If the similarity of title in Nietzsche’s La Gaya Scienza (“Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft”) and in Mr Dallas’s above-mentioned book should awake expectations of criticism in anybody, he will be at first grievously disappointed, for, except an anticipation of a later fling at Seneca,[[1070]] he will, for a long time, find nothing at all of the kind. But he will make a very great mistake if he throws the book aside. The aphoristic manner, or rather the manner of detached notes, like Ben Jonson’s in the Discoveries, which Nietzsche had now adopted, makes it unsafe to conclude from any one page, or even from a considerable sequence of pages, what will meet us when we turn the next. In the middle, and again towards the end, we come upon “pockets” of our ore. From § 82 onwards, on the opposition of esprit to the Greek temper, on translation, on the origin of Poetry, we find many noteworthy things, leading up to a formal note on “Prose and Poetry,” wherein is the selection of Leopardi, Mérimée, Emerson, and Landor as the prose masters of the nineteenth century proper. Here Mérimée’s scorn and Landor’s pride may have had something to do with Nietzsche’s admiration: but they cannot be said to usurp their places. I am not Italian scholar enough to give an opinion on Leopardi’s claim. Emerson, some may think, while not denying his merits, “a little over-parted.” I should venture to substitute Schopenhauer, if not Nietzsche himself.[[1071]] And after this we at last come on the long missing passage on Shakespeare, only to find, as perhaps some may have been very well prepared to find, that Shakespeare is not treated as a poet at all, but as the author of Hamlet and the creator of—Brutus! Nietzsche, as most people should know, had a great idea of the Romans, thought them vornehm, and the nearest approaches in history to the Uebermensch; but his special selection of Brutus is very curious, though fortunately out of our range. The other pocket of the book comes long afterwards, and quite toward the end, where we get interesting things on modern German philosophers, “learned books and literature,” and the all-important question, “Was ist Romantik?” Here, however, Nietzsche goes off on Apollo and Dionysus as of old.