Who are the men who swell the ranks of his partisans? Singers who wish to appear more interesting by acting their parts as well as singing them to produce the maximum of effect with a minimum of voice; composers who hoodwink the public by a sort of glamour into a non-critical attitude; audiences who are bored by the old masters and find in Wagner a stimulant for their jaded nerves.
Yet earlier he had written in such an eloquent strain as this:—
Wagner is never more Wagner than when his difficulties increase tenfold, and he triumphs over them with all the legislative zeal of a victorious ruler, subduing rebellious elements, reducing them to simple rhythms, and imprinting the supreme power of his will on a vast multitude of contending emotions.... It can be said of him that he has endowed everything in nature with a language. He believed that nothing need be dumb. He cast his plummet into the mystery of sunrise, forest and mountain, mist and night shadows, and learned that all these cherished intense longing for a voice.
Houston Chamberlain believes that when the panegyrics and attacks upon Wagner have been consigned to that eternal limbo, the dust-heap, Nietzsche’s Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, will still survive. Perhaps back of the wounded vanity was the usual feeling that in Bayreuth and Wagner his last illusion had vanished; madness was coming on apace. Even his sister admits that he held aloof during the rejoicing and festivities of 1876, and Wagner’s Gemüthlichkeit expressed in exuberant spirits (probably he stood on his head more than once in those gay times; it was a trick of his, as Praeger relates,—his punning, his advice to his shy, shrinking disciple to get him a wife, useless advice to this ardent upholder of ideal friendship), and all these things told on his nerves. He went away, and later in his Menschliches Allzumenschliches appeared the first faint thread that, in Der Fall Wagner, had become a scarlet skein of abuse. He depreciated genius as being “a product of atavism, its glory is cheap, its throne quickly reared, and bending the knee to it is a mere habit.” Wahnfried, quick to detect heresy, recognized the allusion; and Wagner, deeply pained at the defection of a real friend, forbade his name to be mentioned. And Wagner was, as Nietzsche declared, the grande passion of his life.
M. Schuré thus described the personal appearances of Nietzsche:—
No one who conversed with him could fail to be struck by the powers of his mind, and the singularity of his looks. His closely cropped hair and heavy mustache gave him at first sight the air of a cavalry officer. There was combination of hauteur and timidity in his bearing. His voice, musical and deliberate, betrayed the artistic temperament; his meditative almost hesitating gait, the philosopher. Nothing was more deceptive than the apparent calm of his expression. He had the fixed eye of the thinker, but at the same time it was the eye of the searching and keen observer and the fanatical visionary. This dual character of the eye was almost uncanny, and had a disquieting effect on those who talked with him face to face. His expression in moments of enthusiasm could be one of dreamy sweetness, but almost instantly relapsed again into fierce hostility.... There was a distant, isolated atmosphere about the whole Nietzsche personality, a veiled disdain which is often characteristic of the aristocrat of thought.
In a brief tribute to the memory of Friedrich Nietzsche, “So solltet ihr Nietzsche verstehen,” in the Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, Frau Professor Wanda Bartels tells of her and her husband’s chance acquaintance with the famous thinker during a sojourn in Venice. She dwells upon the contrast of his own modest reserve and unassuming ways with those of the blustering youths who flaunt in public as his followers and believers in his “system”; for he had no system, and “did not write to teach the immature, but to free his own soul.” Frau Bartels’s protest calls to mind the more weighty and truly enlightening utterances of another personal friend of Nietzsche, Professor Paul Deussen, of Kiel, who, writing in the Wiener Rundschau on the Truth about Friedrich Nietzsche, discusses with great clearness the two cardinal points of Nietzsche’s doctrine, viz. the Übermensch and the ewige Wiederkehr, or eternal repetition of the world process. The former, Professor Deussen holds, is an ideal of humanity which, in essential points, coincides with the Christ of the church; and when Nietzsche insists that the man within us must be overcome in order that the Übermensch may arise, he preaches what all great moralists and religious teachers have preached. Nietzsche errs in his conception of the nature of the “negation of the will,” and in substituting genius for morality (or the intellect for the will) as the means of attaining to an ideal humanity.
After many years of guessing in the dark as to Nietzsche’s madness, Dr. George M. Gould points out in a careful and convincing essay that the original trouble began with his eyes, with a faulty diagnosis of his complaint. Dr. Gould writes, after sifting all the evidence of Nietzsche’s day-books and his sister’s suspicions as to the real cause, in the Montreal Medical Journal:—
I have spoken of the physiologic cause of this morbidly feverish intensity of mental activity. It appears to me the inevitable irritation due to severe eye-strain. Nietzsche also thought of suicide. Nietzsche produced within twenty years sixteen volumes, all written by himself in small, clear handwriting, all the result of independent philosophic and original thinking, besides several other volumes of technical philologic studies. He was, moreover, a busy, conscientious teacher and lecturer.
The influence of his disease upon his character and writings is everywhere painfully manifest. Nietzsche was seized with an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and his works at the age of twenty-one. With greater intensity his devotion to Wagner and his music, I gather, was turned to morbid dislike by the influence of diseased cerebral activity. Deussen, I feel, is in error when he writes that “A deeper cause lay at the root of Nietzsche’s resignation of his professorship in 1879 than his ‘combined diseases of the nerves of his eyes, brain, and stomach.’ The philologic profession of teachers, like a coat, became too small for him, etc. His internal unrest, etc.”