Kaatz[416] affirms that Nietzsche’s ‘intellectual seed’ is everywhere ‘beginning to germinate. Now it is one of Nietzsche’s most incisive points which is chosen as the epigraph of a modern tragedy, now one of his pregnant turns of expression incorporated in the established usage of language.... At the present time one can ... read hardly any essay touching even lightly on the province of philosophy, without meeting with the name of Nietzsche.’ Now, that is certainly a calumnious exaggeration. Things are not quite so bad as that. The only ‘philosophers’ who have hitherto taken Nietzsche’s insane drivel seriously are those whom I have above named the ‘fops’ of philosophy. But the number of these ‘fops’ is, as a matter of fact, increasing in a disquieting way, and their effrontery surpasses anything ever witnessed.
It is, of course, unnecessary to say that Georges Brandès has numbered himself among Nietzsche’s apostles. We know, indeed, that this ingenious person winds himself around every human phenomenon in whom he scents a possible primadonna, in order to draw from her profit for himself as the impresario of her fame. He gave lectures in Copenhagen on Nietzsche, ‘and declaimed in words of enthusiasm about this German prophet, for whom Mill’s morality is nothing but a diseased symptom of a degenerate age; this radical “aristocrat,” who degrades to the rank of slave-revolts all the great popular movements in history for freedom—the Reformation, the French Revolution, modern socialism—and dares to assert that the millions on millions of individuals composing the nations exist only for the purpose of producing, a few times in each century, a great personality.’[417]
A series of imitators are eagerly busying themselves to make Nietzsche their model, whether in clearing the throat or in expectorating. His treatise Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 3 Stück) has found a monstrous travesty in Rembrandt als Erzieher. True, the imbecile author of the latter parody could not imitate Nietzsche’s gushing redundancy of verbiage and the mad leaps of the maniac’s thought. This symptom of disease it were indeed hardly possible to simulate; but he has appropriated as his own the word-quibbling, the senseless echolalia of his model, and endeavours also stammeringly to imitate, as well as his small means allow, Nietzsche’s megalomaniacal and criminal individualism. Albert Kniepf,[418] another imbecile, has been smitten chiefly by Nietzsche’s affected superiority, and with princely mien and gestures struts about in the most diverting manner. He calls himself ‘a man of superior taste and more refined feeling’; he speaks contemptuously of the ‘profane daily bustle of the masses’; sees ‘the world beneath him’ and himself ‘exalted above the world of the multitude’; he does not wish to ‘go into the streets, and squander his wisdom on everyone,’ etc., quite in the style of Zarathustra, the dweller on the highest peaks. The already mentioned Dr. Max Zerbst affects, like Nietzsche, to regard himself as terrible, and to believe that his opponents tremble before him. When he makes them speak he puts whimpering tones into their mouths,[419] and he enjoys with cruelly superior scorn the mortal fear with which he inspires them. In a maniac this attitude is natural and excites pity. But when a fellow like this Dr. Max Zerbst assumes it, it produces an irresistibly comic effect, and calls to remembrance the young man with the weak legs in Pickwick, who ‘believes in blood alone,’ ‘will have blood.’ Zerbst dares to utter the words ‘natural science’ and ‘psycho-physiology.’ That is an agreement among Nietzsche’s disciples: they pass off the insane word-spouter whom they worship for a psycho-physiologist and a physicist! Ola Hansson speaks of Nietzsche’s ‘psycho-physiological intuition’! and in another place says: ‘With Nietzsche, that modern subtle psychologist, who possesses in the highest degree psycho-physical intuition [again], that peculiar power of the end of the nineteenth century, of listening to and spying out all the secret processes and hidden corners in itself,’ etc. ‘Psycho-physical intuition!’ ‘Listening to and spying out itself!’ Our very eyes deceive us. These men, therefore, have no suspicion of what constitutes ‘psychophysics,’ they do not suspect that it is the exact contrary of ancient psychology, which dealt with ‘intuition’ and introspection, i.e., ‘listening to one’s self’ and ‘spying out one’s self’; that it patiently counts and mixes with the apparatus in laboratories, and ‘spies and listens to,’ not itself, but its experimentists and instruments! And such babble of brainless parrots, who chatter in repetition the words they accidentally hear, without comprehending them, is able to make its way in Germany, the creator of the new science of psycho-physiology, the fatherland of Fechner, Weber, Wundt! And no professional has rapped with a ruler the knuckles of these youths, whose fabulous ignorance is surpassed only by their impudence!
But worse still has befallen—something at which all jesting really ceases. Kurt Eisner, who it is true does not agree with Nietzsche’s ‘philosophy,’ is, nevertheless, of the opinion that he has ‘bequeathed us some powerful poems,’[420] and goes so far as to make use of this unheard-of expression: ‘Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a work of art like Faust.’ The question first of all obtruding itself is: Has Kurt Eisner at any time read a line of Faust? This, I take it, must be answered in the affirmative, for it is hardly conceivable that at this time of day there is in Germany any adult, seemingly able to read and write, into whose hands Faust has not fallen at some time or other. Then there remains only one other question: What may Kurt Eisner have understood of Faust? To name in the same breath the senseless spirting jet of words of a Zarathustra with Faust is such a defilement of our most precious poetical treasure that verily if a man of any greater importance than Kurt Eisner had perpetrated it there had been need of an expiatory festival to atone for the insult to Goethe, even as the Church newly consecrates a place of worship when it has been profaned by a sacrilegious act.
Not only in Germany is the Nietzsche gang working mischief; it is also infesting other lands. Ola Hansson,[421] already mentioned, entertains his Swedish fellow-countrymen most enthusiastically with ‘Nietzsche’s Poetry’ and ‘Nietzsche’s Midnight Hymn’; T. de Wysewa[422] assures the French, who are not in the position to prove the accuracy of his assertions, that ‘Nietzsche is the greatest thinker and most brilliant author produced by Germany in the last generation,’ etc.
It has, nevertheless, been reserved to a lady to beat the male disciples of Nietzsche, in the audacious denial of the most openly manifest truth. This feminine partisan of Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, with a cool imperturbability fit to take away the breath of the most callous spectator, turns her back on the fact that Nietzsche has for years been confined in a lunatic asylum, and proclaims with brazen brow that Nietzsche, from the aristocratic contempt of the world belonging to the ‘over-human,’ has voluntarily ceased to write, and withdrawn himself into solitude. Nietzsche is a man of science and a psycho-physiologist, and Nietzsche keeps silence, because he no longer finds it worth the trouble to speak to the men of the herd; these are the catch-words cried aloud throughout the world by the Nietzsche band. In the face of such a conspiracy against truth, honesty, sound reason, it is not enough to have proved the senselessness of Nietzsche’s system, it must also be shown that Nietzsche has always been insane, and that his writings are the abortions of frenzy (more exactly, of ‘maniacal exaltation’).
A few followers of Nietzsche, undoubtedly not fit to hold a candle to Lou Salomé, do not contest the fact of Nietzsche’s insanity, but say that he became insane because he withdrew himself too much from men, because he lived too long in the deepest solitude, because his speed of thought was so ruinously, unnaturally rapid. This unheard-of idiocy could circulate throughout the entire German press, and yet not a single newspaper had the gumption to remark that insanity can never be the consequence of solitude and too speedy thought, but that, on the contrary, a propensity for solitude and vertiginously rapid thought are the primary and best known signs of existing insanity, and that this prattle of Nietzsche’s partisans is, perhaps, of equal force with the assertion that someone had contracted lung disease through coughing and hæmorrhage!
For Nietzsche’s ‘anthropophobia’ we have the evidence of his biographers, who cite curious examples of it.[423] His rapid thought, however, is a phenomenon never absent in frenzied madness. That the unprofessional reader may know what he is to understand by this, we will present him with the clinical picture of this form of insanity traced by the hand of the most authoritative masters.
‘The acceleration of the course of thought in mania,’ says Griesinger, ‘is a consequence of the facilitation of the connection between representations, where the patient humbugs, romances, declaims, sings, calls into service all the modes of exteriorizing ideas, rambles incoherently from one topic to another, the ideas hurtling against and overthrowing each other. The same acceleration of ideation is found in certain forms of dementia and in secondary psychical enfeeblement, “with activity produced by hallucinations.” The logical concatenations are not in this case intact, as in argumentation and hypochondriacal dementia; or the precipitate sequence of representations no longer follows any law; or, again, only words and sounds devoid of meaning succeed each other with impetuous haste.... Thus there arises ... a ceaseless chase of ideas, in the torrent of which all is borne away in pell-mell flight. The latter conditions appear chiefly in raving madness; at its inception especially, a greater mental vivacity often manifests itself, and cases have been observed where the fact that the patient became witty was a sure sign of the imminence of an attack of frenzy.’[424]
Still more graphic is the description given by Krafft-Ebing.[425] ‘The content of consciousness is here [in ‘maniacal exaltation’] pleasure, psychical well-being. It is just as little induced by events of the external world as the opposite state of psychical pain in melancholia, and is, therefore, referable to an inner organic cause only. The patient literally revels in feelings of pleasure, and declares, after recovery, that never, when in good health, has he felt so contented, so buoyant, so happy, as during his illness. This spontaneous pleasure undergoes powerful increments ... through the perception by the patient of the facilitated processes of ideation ... through the intensive accentuation of ideas by feelings of pleasure and by agreeable cœnæstheses, especially in the domain of muscular sensation.... In this way the cheerful mood temporarily exalts itself to the height of pleasurable emotions (gay extravagance, exuberance), which find their motor exteriorization in songs, dances, leaps.... The patient becomes more plastic in his diction ... his faculties of conception act more rapidly, and, in accelerated association, he is at once more prompt in repartee, witty and humorous to the point of irony. The plethora of his consciousness supplies him with inexhaustible material for talk, and the enormous acceleration of his ideation, in which there spring up complete intermediate forms with the rapidity of thought, without undergoing exteriorization in speech, causes his current of ideas, in so far as they find expression, to seem rambling.... He continually exercises criticism in respect of his own condition, and proves that he is himself aware of his abnormal state by ... claiming, among other things, that he is only a fool, and that to such everything is permissible.... The invalid cannot find words enough to depict his maniacal well-being, his “primordial health.”’