[1067]. His Works are now obtainable in several forms, there being two complete editions (Leipzig, n. d.), which give all the work published during his lifetime, in 8 vols., and a still lengthening tail of Remains (7 vols. up to 1904), and several others of separate works. Writing on him has been exceedingly copious, “he has become a name”: but there is probably no sounder and fairer contribution to the Um-Nietzschung of Nietzsche, from a portent into an intelligible phenomenon, than Professor Pringle-Pattison’s Essay in the 2nd ed. of Man’s Place in the Cosmos (Edinburgh, 1902).
[1068]. Der Fall Wagner, p. 36 and elsewhere.
[1069]. I was pleased, in reading Nietzsche, after I had written the section above on Grillparzer, and when I had already assigned Hillebrand’s place here, to find him frequently quoting the Austrian dramatist with respect, and definitely selecting the other as the representative German critic of his time.
[1070]. V. inf. The two books which preceded this, Menschliches Allzumenschliches and Morgenröthe, are also almost purely ethical, though the extensive handling of moral philosophers in the past is necessarily literary too.
[1071]. It would be improper to dwell on this point here. I hope to do more justice to Nietzsche’s purely literary side elsewhere.
[1072]. This word has been objected to by precisians. But it has the authority of Thackeray: and if it had none, it is exactly the word wanted for a certain flagrant quality of the latest nineteenth century, and more especially for the ethos of Nietzsche. With all his originality in form, he is simply parasitic in fact. He can only deny and pervert and “topsyturvify” the established and accepted. The Uebermensch himself is much more an “Unmensch,” who is not to be God but an un-God. And the philosopher’s famous syllogism, “There cannot be a God, or why am I not one if there is?” amounts simply to a turning topsyturvy of the much sounder and in fact unanswerable argument, “There must be a God; for I am not one.”
[1073]. Even later his alleged doctrine of “Recurrence”—not his most repugnant to poetry, or philosophy, or religion itself—was only an echo of the carpenter in Peter Simple!
[1074]. Beleidigende Klarheit.
[1075]. Ein Geist der entnervt.
[1076]. He somewhere speaks of Stendhal and Dostoieffsky as his “two great discoveries.” A curious fling by implication at Baudelaire means, I think, only that Baudelaire had the impudence to admire Wagner.