Let me be leaping,
To soar and circle
Through ether sweeping,
Is now the passion
That me hath won,
he but set the pace for Nietzsche, the Dancing Philosopher. Dancing blithely over a tight rope stretched between two eternities, the Past and the Future, Man, gay, and unafraid, views the depths of Time and Space. It is “Man who is a rope connecting animal and Beyond Man” (Übermensch). “He is a bridge, not a goal; a transition and a destruction.” These seemingly startling statements, which may be found in Thus spake Zarathustra, are, after all, nothing new; Christianity, with its angels and Darwinism, with its bold hints at future evolutions and developments, do but say the same things, each in its own way. But Nietzsche, like his beloved Euphorion, must needs graze the rim of the sun in his flight, and Icarus-wise come tumbling to earth—and a Weimar retreat.
The Titanism of Nietzsche, might over right, power over weakness, impels him to hate all weakness, and Christianity, he declares, is a weakness, a degenerate sort of Judaism, complicated with the teachings of Greek mystagogues. He says that the first and only Christian was nailed to the cross, and this should please the heart of Tolstoy. Bolder still is Nietzsche’s wish that a Dostoïevsky might have depicted the Christ in all his childlike innocence and Godlike love. Nietzsche worships force and hates slave-morality, i.e. all modern religions, in which pity for the weak is basic. To him the symbol of the crucifix is degrading, a symbol of degenerating races. A very Spartan, he would have the great blond barbarian once more trample, Attila-like, the blood-stained soil of Europe and Asia, sparing none. Væ Victis! “What is best belongeth to my folk and myself. And if it is not given to us, we take it, the best food, the purest sky, the strongest thoughts, the most beautiful women.” Thus spake Zarathustra, and the voice is Nietzsche’s, but the hands are the hands of Esau—Bismarck: Blood and Iron!
It is in Also sprach Zarathustra that the genius of Nietzsche is best studied. Like the Buddhistic Tripitaka, it is a book of highly colored Oriental aphorisms, interrupted by lofty lyric outbursts. It is an ironic, enigmatic rhetorical rhapsody, the Third Part of a half-mad Faust. In it may be seen flowing all the currents of modern cultures and philosophies, and if it teaches anything at all, it teaches the wisdom and beauty of air, sky, waters, and earth, and of laughter, not Pantagruelian, but “holy laughter.” The love of earth is preached in rapturous accents. A Dionysian ecstasy anoints the lips of this latter-day Sibyl on his tripod, when he speaks of earth. He is intoxicated with the fulness of its joys. No gloomy monasticism, no denial of the will to live, no futile thinking about thinking,—so despised by Goethe,—no denial of grand realities, may be found in the curriculum of this Bacchantic philosopher. A Pantheist, he is also a poet and seer like William Blake, and marvels at the symbol of nature, “the living garment of the Deity”—Nietzsche’s deity, of course. It is this realistic, working philosophy—if philosophy it be in the academic sense—that has endeared Nietzsche to the newer generation, that has set his triumphant standard on the very threshold of the new century. After the metaphysical cobweb spinners, the Hegels, Fichtes, Schellings, after the dreary pessimism of the soured Schopenhauer,—whose pessimism was temperamental, as is all pessimism, so James Sully has pointed out,—after many negations and stumblings, the vigorous affirmations of this Nihilist are stimulating, suggestive, refreshing, especially in Germany, the stronghold of philosophical and sentimental Philistinism. Not reward, but the sheer delight of living, of conquering self, of winning victories in the teeth of defeat,—thus spake the wisdom of Nietzsche.
For English-speaking readers the many attacks on Nietzsche have placed the philosopher under the cloud of a peculiar misconception. Viciously arguing that a man in a madhouse could only produce a mad philosophy, his assailants forgot that it was Nietzsche’s very intensity of mental vision, his phenomenal faculty of attention, his hopeless attempt to square the circle of things human, that brought about his sad plight. If he had not thought so madly, so strenuously, if he had put to slumber his irritable conscience, his insatiable curiosity, with current anodynes, Nietzsche might have been alive to-day.
In Also sprach Zarathustra he consciously or unconsciously vied with Goethe in Faust; with Wagner’s Ring, with Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, with Ibsen’s Brand, with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, with Senancour’s Oberman, with Browning’s Paracelsus. It is the history of his soul, as Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s—there are some curious parallelisms between these two subjective epics. It is intimate, yet hints at universality; it contains some of Amiel’s introspection and some of Baudelaire’s morbidity; half mad, yet exhorting, comforting; Hamlet and John Bunyan.