Nietzsche then is a critical mode of viewing the universe, rather than creator of a formal philosophy. He has set his imprint on all European culture, from the dream novels of that Italian of the Renaissance, the new Cellini, Gabriele d’Annunzio, to the Pole Przybyszewski, who has transformed Nietzsche into a very Typhoon of emotion. The musician Heinrich Pudor has imitated the master in his attacks on modern music; while Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard Dehmel—all young Germany, young France, has patterned after the great Immoralist, as he chose to call himself. Among the composers affected by him we find Richard Strauss, not attempting to set the philosophy of Nietzsche to music—as many wrongfully suppose—but arranging, as in a huge phantasmagoria, the emotions excited by the close study of Thus spake Zarathustra. And a many-colored piece of music it is, full of frowning mountains, fragrant meads, and barren, ugly, waste places.
Nietzsche met the fate of all rebels from Lucifer to Byron—neglect and obloquy. With something of Heraclitus, of Democritus, of Bruno Giordano, of Luther in him, there was allied a sensitivity almost Chopin’s. The combination is a poor one for practical purposes; so the brain died before the body,—humanity cannot transcend itself. Notwithstanding all his contradictions, limitations, cloudland rhapsodies, aversion from the banal, despite his futile flights into the Inane, his word-weaving, his impossible premisses and mad conclusions, the thunder-march of his ideas, the brilliancy and polish of his style—the greatest German prose since Schopenhauer’s—have insured Nietzsche immortality; as immortality goes among world thinkers: fifty years of quotation and then—the biographical dictionaries.
Friedrich Nietzsche is, as Havelock Ellis declares, “a great aboriginal force”; perhaps, with Max Stirner, the greatest in the last half of the nineteenth century. And that same Stirner is the true stock from which Nietzsche sprang—Stirner who dared to say, “My truth is the truth.”
Nietzsche died August 28, 1900, literally the Morgenröthe of the new century. It was at Weimar, once the home of Goethe and Liszt. Nietzsche was in an insane asylum from 1888. Dr. Hermann Turck asserts that his work was done during a comparatively sane interval between two incarcerations. In 1868 he met Richard Wagner, and under the spell of his synthetic genius he wrote Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik, and dedicated it to Wagner, his “sublime forerunner.” Every line of it, he declares in the preface, was “conceived in close communion with Wagner.” And let those who know only the later Nietzsche casually read this essay to be convinced of its sanity, its acuity, its penetrating originality. Here we find the enthusiastic, impetuous youth, fresh from his Grecian studies, a valiant champion of Hellenistic culture, an opponent of the orientalization of modern life and thought. Twelve years later he discovered in Parsifal this very despised orientalization, and did not hesitate to say so in The Wagner Case, that fatal illustration of George Moore’s pithy axiom: When we change our opinions we change our friends.
The man who marshalled in the most deadly array of attack his arguments against Wagnerism is also the man who wrote the most brilliant book of all on Wagner. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth is a masterpiece of critical rhapsody. The sister who nursed the sick-brained man for twelve years, Frau Friedrich Förster-Nietzsche, tells the story of the dissensions in this friendship, a friendship that could have endured only through a miracle. Both men had “nerves” in a highly irritable condition; and, while Wagner had weathered the storm and had, perforce, developed a stout integument of disdain, Nietzsche had always remained the sensitive, morbid, cloistered student. There is no doubt that Richard Wagner, at the triumphant culmination of his life-work, was an arrogant, exacting, and jealous being. Wahnfried was, as it now is, a Star Chamber, where the Vehmgericht judged swiftly, fiercely. Here is one story told by the sister and quoted by H. E. Krehbiel in his too brief review of the episode:—
My brother and I heard the Triumphlied of Brahms in the Bâle Cathedral. It was a splendid performance and pleased Fritz very much. When he went to Bayreuth in August, he took the pianoforte arrangement with him, apparently in the naïve belief that Wagner would like it. I say “apparently,” for upon later reflection it has occurred to me that this red-bound Triumphlied was meant as a sort of goad, and therefore Wagner’s prodigious wrath seems to have been not altogether groundless. So I will leave the continuation of the tale to Wagner, who had an exquisite fashion of satirizing himself:—
“Your brother set this red book on the piano; whenever I went into the drawing-room, the red thing stared me in the face; it exasperated me, as a red rag to a bull. Perhaps I guessed that Nietzsche wanted it to say to me, ‘See here another man who can turn out something good!’ and one evening I broke out with a vengeance.”
Wagner had a hearty laugh at the recollection. “What did my brother say?” I asked in alarm. “Nothing at all,” answered Wagner. “He simply blushed, and looked at me in astonishment and modest dignity. I would give a hundred thousand marks to have such splendid manners as this Nietzsche, always distinguished, always well bred; it’s an immense advantage in the world.” That story of Wagner’s came back to my mind at this time (spring of 1875). “Fritz,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me that tale about Brahms’s Triumphlied? Wagner related the whole thing to me himself.” Fritz looked straight before him and held his tongue. At last he said, beneath his breath, “Lisbeth, then Wagner was not great.”
Another time Wagner interfered with a walking tour that Nietzsche had planned to take with the son of Felix Mendelssohn, a professor at Freiburg. The young philosopher winced, but gave in to the elder man’s request. His commonplace book reveals his secret irritation. Here is a specimen of his early revolt from the banner of Bayreuth:—
How infinitely purer is the soul of a Bach or a Beethoven in comparison with the soul of a Wagner. In the same sense as Goethe was a painter strayed from his true vocation, and Schiller an orator, Wagner is an actor manqué....