V
Nietzsche Replies
“It is certainly not the least charm of a theory,” says Nietzsche, “that it is refutable.”[276] But “what have I to do with mere refutations?”[277] “A prelude I am of better players.”[278] “Verily, I counsel you,” said Zarathustra, “depart from me and defend yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still, be ashamed of him. Perhaps he hath deceived you. The man of perception must not only be able to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends. One ill requiteth one’s teacher by always remaining only his scholar. Why will ye not pluck at my wreath? Ye revere me; but how if your reverence one day falleth down? Beware of being crushed to death with a statue! Ye say ye believe in Zarathustra? But what is Zarathustra worth? Ye are my faithful ones; but what are all faithful ones worth? When ye had not yet sought yourselves ye found me. Thus do all faithful ones; hence all belief is worth so little. Now I ask you to lose me and find yourselves; not until all of you have disowned me shall I return unto you.”[279]
VI
Conclusion
“Look,” says Rudin, in Turgenev’s story, “you see that apple tree? It has broken down with the weight and multitude of its own fruit. It is the emblem of genius.” “To perish beneath a load one can neither bear nor throw off,” wrote Nietzsche,—“that is a philosopher.”[280] I shall announce the song of the lightning, said Zarathustra, and perish in the announcing.[281]
Insanity with such a man is but a matter of time; he feels it coming upon him; he values his hours like a man condemned to execution. In twenty days he writes the Genealogy of Morals; in one year (1888) he produces The Twilight of the Idols, Antichrist, The Case of Wagner, Ecce Homo, and his longest and greatest book, The Will to Power. He not only writes these books; he reads the proof-sheets, straining his eyes beyond repair. He is almost blind now; he is deceived, taken advantage of, because he can hardly see farther than his touch. “If I were blind,” he writes pitifully, “I should be healthy.”[282] Yet his body is racked with pain: “on 118 days this year I have had severe attacks.”[283] “I have given a name to my pain, and call it ‘a dog’—it is just as pitiful, just as importunate and shameless; and I can domineer over it, vent my bad humor on it, as others do with their dogs, servants, and wives.”[284]
Meanwhile the world lives on unnoticing, or noticing only to misunderstand. “My foes have become mighty, and have so distorted my teaching, that my best beloved must be ashamed of the gifts that I gave them.”[285] He learns that the libertines of Europe are using his philosophy as a cloak for their sins: “I can read in their faces that they totally misunderstand me, and that it is only the animal in them which rejoices at being able to cast off its fetters.”[286] He finds one whom he thinks to make his disciple; he is buoyed up for a few days by the hope; the hope is shattered, and loneliness closes in once more upon him. “A kingdom for a kind word!” he cries out in the depth of his longing; and again he writes, “For years no milk of human kindness, no breath of love.”[287]
In December, 1888, one whom he has thought friendly writes that his brother-in-law is sending to a magazine an attack on him. It is the last blow; it means that his sister has joined the others in deserting him. “I take one sleeping-draught after another to deaden the pain, but for all that I cannot sleep. To-day I will take such a dose that I will lose my wits.”[288] He has been taking chloral, and worse drugs, to pay for the boon of sleep; the poison tips the scale already made heavy by his blindness and eye-strain, by his loneliness, by the treachery of his friends, by his general bodily ailments; he wakes up from this final draught in a stupor from which he never recovers; he writes to Brandes and signs himself “The Crucified”; he wanders into the street, is tormented by children, falls in a fit; his good landlord helps him back to his room, sends for the simple, ignorant doctor of the neighborhood; but it is too late; the man is insane. Age, forty-four; another—the only name greater than his among modern philosophers—had died at that pitifully early age.
The body lingered eleven years behind the mind. Death came in 1900. He was buried as he had wished: “Promise me,” he had asked his sister, many years before, “that when I die only my friends shall stand about my coffin, and no inquisitive crowd. See that no priest or anyone else utters falsehoods at my graveside, when I can no longer defend myself; and let me descend into my tomb as an honest pagan.”[289]
After his death the world began to read him. As in so many cases the life had to be given that the doctrine might be heard. “Only where there are graves,” he had written in Zarathustra, “are there resurrections.”[290]