Nietzsche was born in 1844, and became a professor of philology at a Swiss university. His health broke down from eye-strain at the age of thirty-five, and he retired upon a small pension. His insanity came at the age of forty-five, and he lived eleven years longer, slowly rotting to pieces, and meantime growling like a wild beast.
Nietzsche’s enemies, of course, made the most of this cruel fate; they said that he was insane all the time. That is an easy way to dispose of his writings—easy for the average person, who has never experienced such emotional states as Nietzsche dealt with, and does not wish to be troubled by them. But a few who have experienced these states are in better position to decide. Nietzsche’s mature work is perfectly sane; it contains many contradictions, but we have to permit an original mind to grow. His masterpiece, “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” contains the greatest imaginative writing of several centuries.
But we must remember that these books were written by a man who was ill and suffering atrociously. He declared that every year meant for him two hundred days of pain. His view of life is the product of a pain-driven mind, like the ecstasy experienced by martyrs undergoing torture. We do not expect ordered and systematic thought from such persons; but we may learn from them strange secrets concerning the possibilities of the human spirit.
One of Nietzsche’s doctrines is the exaltation of the aristocratic over the democratic virtues. He was the son of a Prussian state pastor, and he glorified war, and was taken as the spiritual director of the invasion of Belgium. It would be easy for me to deal with him on that basis, and draw and quarter him amid general acclamation. The only trouble is that Nietzsche is one of the pioneers of the moral life, a conqueror of new universes for our race.
There are two sides to his message, the positive and the negative. On the positive side it is the record of an exalted poet, proclaiming brotherhood, service, and consecration. On its negative side it represents the fears and repugnances of an invalid, shrinking from life which was too much for him, and seeking refuge in his own visions, where he could be master without interference from a hostile world. Where Nietzsche loved something, you will generally find it something great and noble; where he hated something, you will often find it a thing he failed to understand. There were two subjects upon which he was entirely ignorant; the first woman, and the second economics. This double ignorance distorted all his thought, and has brought it about that his influence counts on the side of the forces he hated.
Nietzsche agreed with the proposition of the present book, that all the arts are propaganda. He showed how those who were able to face life and to conquer made themselves a philosophy and art of self-assertion and development; those who were afraid of life made a philosophy and art of self-sacrifice and renunciation. Nietzsche explained Christianity as a slave religion, evolved by the victims of Roman imperialism; he proclaimed himself Antichrist, and advocated a “master morality.”
Nietzsche’s supreme contribution is the interpretation of evolution; he became the prophet and seer of this doctrine, developing a concept of the Overman, a higher being into which the human race is destined to evolve. Bernard Shaw has popularized the term Superman; but I venture to stick to Overman, which I used in “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” several years before “Man and Superman” was published. Nietzsche might have chosen the term “Supermensch” if he had wished; but he wrote “Uebermensch.”
This concept Nietzsche set forth in “Zarathustra” with fervor and splendor of imagery, a chant the like of which the German language had never known before. Ten years ago, editing “The Cry for Justice,” made up of the world’s revolutionary literature from thirty languages and five thousand years of history, I gave the last place to a quotation from “Zarathustra”; the reason being that it represents to me the ultimate of modern thought, the greatest words in recent poetry. I quote a portion of this passage:
Man is a cord, tied between Beast and Overman—a, cord above an abyss.
A perilous arriving, a perilous traveling, a perilous looking backward, a perilous trembling and standing still.