The Crucified Dionysus
Alexander S. Kaun
Achad Ha’am, in his admirable essay, Priest and Prophet, differentiates between the two ways of serving an Idea. The Prophet is essentially one-sided; a certain idea fills his whole being, masters his every feeling and sensation, engrosses his whole attention. His gaze is fixed always on what ought to be in accordance with his own convictions; never on what can be consistently with the general condition of things outside himself. He is a primal force. The Priest also fosters the Idea, and desires to perpetuate it; but he is not of the race of giants. Instead of clinging to the narrowness of the Prophet, and demanding of reality what it cannot give, he broadens his outlook, and takes a wider view of the relation between his Idea and the facts of life. Not what ought to be, but what can be, is what he seeks. The Idea of the Priest is not a primal force; it is an accidental complex of various forces, among which there is no essential connection. Their temporary union is due simply to the fact that they have happened to come into conflict in actual life, and have been compelled to compromise and join hands. The Priest sooner or later becomes a dominant force, an interpreter, a teacher; the Prophet remains all his life “a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth,” and is cried after, “The Prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad.” Throughout the ages we have seen the repetition of this phenomenon: from Jeremiah to Nietzsche, from Paul to Brandes. The narrow-minded, hapless giants have been sowing seed for future generations; the broad-minded interpreters have been cultivating the soil for their contemporaries.
Friedrich Nietzsche, by George Brandes, recently published by the Macmillan company, adds little new to the vast interpretative literature on the creator of Zarathustra. The book contains a moderate essay on Aristocratic Radicalism, written in 1889, a necrolog, a brief note on Ecce Homo, and a few letters interchanged between the philosopher and the critic. In the last twenty-five years life and literature (perhaps I ought to say art in general) have been so profoundly influenced by Nietzschean views that the source of those views has ceased to be discernable. From Gorky’s Bosyaki and the types of D’Annunzio down to the Manifestoes of the Futurists, the aphorisms and paradoxes of Nietzsche have been sounded and resounded on various scales, and the slogan of Transvaluation of Values has been echoed and re-echoed from the college platform, from the pulpit, from the soap-box, from the stage, even from the cabaret and music-halls (the Ueberbrettl’ movement in central Europe). Perhaps the American public has been too “busy” to be touched by that hurricane, so that it was left to Dr. Foster to appear in our day and proclaim with prophetic fervor and pathos the “new” Decalogue; but then our neophytes will hardly find adequate Dr. Brandes’ Essay written in 1889, when Nietzsche was practically unknown.
Yet this belated book in its somewhat belated English translation contains an invaluable feature—the correspondence between Nietzsche and Brandes. “The letters he sent me in that last year of his conscious life” says the famous critic, “appear to me to be of no little psychological and biographical interest.” Indeed so, and what is more, they reveal a bit of the reserved personality of Brandes and provoke the reader to venture a comparison between the correspondents.
From the very first we mark the distinct characteristics of the Priest and the Prophet. The careful, correct, and clear interpreter, and the bewildering, cascading revaluator of life, or, to use Ben-Zakkay’s metaphor, the plastered well that does not lose a drop, and the powerful spring ever shooting forth new streams; the earnest professor offering practical suggestions, telling of the book-binder, of the copyright business, and of the big audiences at his lectures, and the seething, “three parts blind” sufferer who swings his imagination on revolutionizing Europe, bringing “the whole world into convulsions.” The difference in the style of writing is also characteristic. As against Brandes’ “free and graceful French way in which he handles the language,” Nietzsche thus explains his “difficult position.”
On the scale of my experiences and circumstances, the predominance is given to the rarer, remoter, more attenuated tones as against the normal, medial ones. Besides (as an old musician, which is what I really am), I have an ear for quarter-tones. Finally—and this probably does more to make my books obscure—there is in me a distrust of dialectics, even of reasons. What a person already holds “true,” or has not yet acknowledged as true, seems to me to depend mainly on his courage, on the relative strength of his courage (I seldom have the courage for what I really know).
To which Brandes comments with his usual clarity.
... You write more for yourself, think more of yourself in writing, than for the general public; whereas most non-German writers have been obliged to force themselves into a certain discipline of style, which no doubt makes the latter clearer and more plastic, but necessarily deprives it of all profundity and compels the writer to keep to himself his most intimate and best individuality, the anonymous in him. I have thus been horrified at times to see how little of my inmost self is more than hinted at in my writings.
The earnest tone of Brandes’ letters is at times counteracted by a humorous frolic on the part of his correspondent. I even suspect an ironical smile curving around the Polish mustache, when, for instance, Nietzsche confesses his “admiration for the tolerance of your judgment, as much as for the moderation of your sentences.” Or as when Brandes confesses: