But if so, it is an error which only extends the pathologic to the deeper activities of his mind. How far his cerebral irritation was responsible for his “aristocratic anarchy,” his occasional lapses into egoistic disdain, etc., would be impossible to gauge. It surely was not wholly inoperative. Stringency, hardness, radicalism, it certainly helped to produce. Möbius thinks the Zarathustra would not have been written without the morbid cerebral irritation. It appears almost certain that the aphoristic form of much of his later writing is explained as the result of the manner in which he was forced to do his literary work, i.e. by thinking and note-making while walking. The serious reflexes to eyes, head, and digestive system, which were induced by writing, compelled him to collate these notes with the least overworking possible. Hence also result the growing contradictions and illogicalities, the discreteness and want of transitional, connecting, and modifying sentences.
In one of the last days of December, 1888, or in the first days of January (dates not definite), Nietzsche fell, near his lodgings in Turin, and could not rise again. A servant found him and led him home with much difficulty. For two days he lay silent and still on his sofa, when abnormal cerebral activity and confusion were evident. He spoke much in monologue, sang and played the piano loud and long, lost the sense of money value, and wrote fantastically to and about his friends, etc. Overbeck hurried to him and brought him to Basle, to the sanatorium of Professor Binswanger, the alienist, where the diagnosis, according to Deussen, of progressive, later corrected to that of atypical, paralysis, was made. His mother had him brought to Naumburg, cared for him until her death in 1897, after which his sister moved with him to Weimar. He died August 25, 1900.
According to Dr. Reicholdt the immediate cause of his death was pneumonia, with edema of the lungs. There was no autopsy; an examination of the brain would have revealed many secrets.
Is it not an unusual coincidence that Bayreuth, the very hub of Wagner’s musical and of Nietzsche’s intellectual activities, is also the birthplace of a man who is one of Nietzsche’s forerunners, one is tempted to say, his real philosophical progenitor? In the thriving Bavarian village was born, October 25, 1806, Caspar Schmidt, later known to the world as Max Stirner, the author of The Individual and his Property (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, Leipsic, 1845), the very gospel of modern philosophical anarchy, and a book which, with Guyau’s system of morals, paved the way for Nietzsche. Stirner, poor, unknown, died in Berlin, June 26, 1856. There is a sympathetic study of his life by John Henry Mackay, the German poet with Scotch blood in his veins.
The best single study in the English language on Nietzsche is by Havelock Ellis. This writer hazards the just observation that there was a touch of the “prig” in the philosopher, and that Wagner’s free and easy manners often made him wince. “Your brother with his air of delicate distinction is a most uncomfortable fellow,” Wagner said to Frau Förster-Nietzsche, “one can always see what he is thinking; sometimes he is quite embarrassed at my jokes—and then I crack them more madly than ever.” And the motley crowd that was attracted to Bayreuth filled the exclusive Nietzsche with horror. An aristocrat, a promulgator of an aristocratic philosophy, writers on social science very properly refuse to class this thinker among the leaders of the anarchistic movement—Nietzsche loathed the promiscuous, the popular, in a word, the mob. Wagner was Teutonic (his friend doubted his Teutonism in a memorable passage); he was no longer Hellenic. And he seemed to be going Romeward. It was all too much for the idealist who broke away from his past; in reality, the attempt was made to break with himself. Impending madness was preceded by distressing melancholia.
He loved Wagner to the last, and previous to the tragic crisis, Lou Salomé says that he went to Lucerne, and in Triebschen sat and wept at his ineluctable fate. He even wrote after The Wagner Case such a sentiment as this:—
“Here, while I am speaking of the recreations of my life, I lack the word to express my gratitude for that which formed my deepest and my heartiest solace. This beyond all doubt was the intimate communion with Richard Wagner. I would give little for the rest of my human relations; at no price would I cut out of my life the days of Triebschen, days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime inspirations, of deep moments. I know not what others have gone through with Wagner; our heaven was never traversed by a cloud.”
Was Wagner to blame? Wagner, harassed by a thousand importunings—his gigantic Bayreuth scheme, his money troubles, his uncertain position despite his first big success! Ellis believes, rightly enough, that when Wagner realized Nietzsche was no longer his friend, “he dropped him silently, as a workman drops a useless tool.” This seems cruelly selfish; but Wagner had no time for unselfish moods, for fine-spun theories of friendship. He was a realist. Life had made him one; besides, was there not Ludwig of Bavaria to take the place of the once gentle dreamer, now doubter and scorner? And Wagner was old enough to recognize the value of money. No, the great composer is not to be alone censured. Yet must we exclaim, Alas! poor Nietzsche!
II
What does Nietzsche preach? What is his central doctrine divested of its increments of anti-Semitism, anti-Wagnerism, anti-Christianity, and anti-everything else? Simply, a doctrine as old as the first invertebrate organism which floated in torrid seas beneath a blazing moon: Egoism, individualism, personal freedom, selfhood. He is the apostle of the ego, and he refuses to accept the system spinning of the Teutonic spider philosophers of the day. He is a proclaimer of the rank animalism of man. He believes in the body and not in the soul of theology.