Jenseits von Gut und Böse, &c.

The late and already somewhat half-sane Jenseits von Gut und Böse, with its still later and still more fatally symptomatic continuation the Genealogie der Moral (1887), devotes itself mainly to non-literary exercises of Nietzsche’s general topsyturvyfication.[[1072]] But there are passages which at any rate come close to literature. Such are the curious remarks on Galiani, Aristophanes, Petronius, together with some on Plato and Lessing, in §§ 26-28 of Jenseits; those on certain Germans of the great age, from Goethe himself downwards, in § 247; very specially those on German style and speech, in § 250; and the quaint attack on English philosophy in § 255. It may be not improperly observed here, in connection with Nietzsche’s Anglophobia, that besides what was, as in the case of “der Alte Zauberer” (Wagner), a sufficient cause of hate, the fact that he had once been rather directed by and indebted to English thinkers,[[1073]] there were others. He paid us the compliment of believing England to be the European stronghold of Christianity and Morality, and seems to have known very little directly about us.

Götzen-Dämmerung.

The great critical “place” in Nietzsche, however, as far as I have read him (for I have not yet had time to explore the “rubbish-heaps raked together by abject adorers,” as a very competent authority once described them to me, of the Nachgelassene Werke) is the Götzen-Dämmerung (1889), his last publication before the prison-house closed. Nowhere is the Ishmaelite character, which reveals itself pathetically in the Zarathustra, so petulantly present. The very first paragraph batches together as “Meine Unmöglichen,” with a scornful tag to each tail, Seneca, Rousseau, Schiller, Dante, Kant, Hugo, Liszt, George Sand, Michelet, Carlyle, Mill, the Goncourts, and Zola—a somewhat heterogeneous company who receive some recruits in the amplifications of their judgments that follow. A hasty judge, who could not apply the system of ruthless toleration which has been applied in this book, might of course disable Nietzsche altogether on some of them. To say that Dante is “a hyena who makes poetry in graves” is, mutatis mutandis, no more and no less critical than to say that Nietzsche is a Bedlamite who sets his Bedlam on fire and sings and dances on the blazing walls. Here the source of uncritical blindness is obvious: and the explanation is renewed in the cases of Mill, George Sand, and one of the later additions, Renan. But the objection to Mill’s “offensive clearness,”[[1074]] to George Sand as “the milch-cow of beautiful style,” to Renan’s “nerve-dissolvingness,”[[1075]] are really literary objections, and, as some may think, not unjust ones.

Very interesting is his intense hatred of Sainte-Beuve for his “femininity,” his Romanticism (which Nietzsche does not, like some people, mistake), and (as he lets us see, with his usual naïveté) his critical power. His wrath with George Eliot for trying to retain Christian morality, after giving up Christian faith, is less literary. But, on the whole, Nietzsche’s criticism, such as it is, hangs very well together and is characteristic enough, even where it may seem, inconsistent. It has the special bents of the lover of Rausch, of the anti-crusader to whom, not as in the case of his much-admired Beyle,[[1076]] the Christian Hell, but the Christian Heaven, is something that leaves him no peace or patience, with the general drift which we have seen in German criticism, to fix on extra-literary points. A whole study might be made of his attitude to Goethe, whom he welcomes, salutes, almost adores as a fellow anti-crusader, as an example of vornehm selfishness and unsentiment, while he is never tired of bringing in some of Goethe’s greatest things, notably the ends of both parts of Faust, for his favourite end-of-the-nineteenth-century trick of parody-reversal.

His general critical position.

On the whole, therefore, we may call Nietzsche a contributor of extraordinarily interesting things to our history, and in some ways a literary critic in potentia, such as Germany has hardly given us save in the case of Novalis. But here, as elsewhere, his gifts of potency were marred by the impotency, the reckless, uncontrolled, uncontrollable flux and reflux of mood and temper, which distinguished him ever more and more. We have not required—we have seen that it is ridiculous to require—a rigid consistency, a development only in one straight line, from the critic. He may, he must, learn, branch out, even sometimes retrace his steps in a moderate degree. But when we find, with but a few years between the judgments, of Schopenhauer, that he is “a great educator,” a sort of intellectual Joshua to the German Israel, and that he is a “common smasher or debaser of the currency”;[[1077]] of Wagner that he is a hierophant, a master of masters, the “Alexander Magnus” of music, and that he is an “old sorcerer,” a “modern Cagliostro,” a “seducer and poisoner of Art,” we can but shake our heads. No man can go through such revolutions as these and remain a critic, if he ever was one. That in some ways Criticism has seen no nobler mind, no stronger or keener faculty, overthrown and lost to her, is, I think, true enough: but of the overthrow and the loss I can entertain no doubt.