CHILDHOOD
CHAPTER II
YEARS OF YOUTH
CHAPTER III
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND RICHARD WAGNER--TRIEBSCHEN
CHAPTER IV
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND RICHARD WAGNER--BAYREUTH
CHAPTER V
CRISIS AND CONVALESCENCE
CHAPTER VI
THE LABOUR OF ZARATHUSTRA
CHAPTER VII
THE FINAL SOLITUDE
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
The duel between Nietzsche and civilisation is long since over;
and that high poet and calamitous philosopher is now to be judged
as he appears in the serene atmosphere of history, which--need it
be said?--he infinitely despised. The crowd, the common herd, the
multitude--which he also despised--has recorded its verdict with its
usual generosity to the dead, and that verdict happens to be an ample
revenge. It has dismissed Nietzsche's ideas in order to praise his
images. It has conceded him in literature a brilliant success, and
has treated his philosophy as fundamental nonsense of the sort that
calls for no response except a shrug of the shoulders. The immoralist
who sought to shatter all the Tables of all the Laws, and to achieve
a Transvaluation of all Values, ends by filling a page in _Die Ernte_
and other Anthologies for the Young. And in certifying his style to
be that of a rare and real master the "crowd" has followed a true
instinct. More than Schopenhauer, more even than Goethe, Nietzsche is
accounted by the critics of his country to have taught German prose
to speak, as Falstaff says, like a man o' this world. The ungainly
sentences, many-jointed as a dragon's tail, became short, definite,
arrowy. "We must 'Mediterraneanise' German music," he wrote to Peter
Gast, and in fact he did indisputably "Mediterraneanise" the style of
German literature. That edged and glittering speech of his owed much to
his acknowledged masters, La Rochefoucauld, Voltaire, and Stendhal,
the lapidaries of French. But it was something very intimately his
own; he was abundantly dowered with the insight of malice, and malice
always writes briefly and well. It has not the time to be obscure.
Nietzsche had this perfection of utterance, but a far richer range and
volume. He was a poet by grace divine, and a true Romantic for all the
acid he dropped on Romanticism; the life of his soul was an incessant
creative surge of images, metaphors, symbolisms, mythologies. These two
tendencies produced as their natural issue that gnomic and aphoristic
tongue which sneers, preaches, prophesies, chants, intoxicates and
dances through the pages of _Also Sprach Zarathustra._ German critics
have applied to Nietzsche, and with even greater fitness, Heine's
characterisation of Schiller: "With him thought celebrates its orgies.
Abstract ideas, crowned with vine-leaves, brandish the thyrsus and
dance like bacchantes; they are drunken reflections." Of many aspects
of his own personality Nietzsche may have thought not wisely but too
well; but in this regard it appears that he did not exaggerate himself.
"After Luther and Goethe," he wrote to Rohde, "a third step remained
to be taken.... I have the idea that with _Zarathustra_ I have brought
the German language to its point of perfection." The German world of
letters has not said No! to a claim so proud as to seem mere vanity.
Friedrich Nietzsche holds a safe, and even a supreme position in the
history of literature.
What is to be said of his place in the history of philosophy? Höffding
allows him a high "symptomatic value," but only that. His work has
the merit of a drama, in which the contradictions of modern thought,
vibrant with passion, clash and crash together in a tumultuous
conflict which, unhappily, has no issue. M. Alfred Fouillée, who has
contrasted him with Guyau--that noblest of "modern" thinkers--in his
book _Nietzsche et l'immoralisme,_ draws out a table of antitheses,
and cancelling denials against affirmations, arrives at a result that
looks remarkably like zero. Nietzsche in truth was a man of ecstasies
and intuitions, rather than of consequent thought. He troubled little
to purge himself of self-contradictions, as became a writer whose first
word had been a vehement assault on that Socratic rationalism which,
as he believed, had withered up the vital abundance of Greece. His
instincts were those of an oracle, a mystagogue; and mystagogues do
not argue. Heinrich von Stein, in styling his first book an _Essay in
Lyrical Philosophy,_ spoke in terms of his master's mind.
With Nietzsche reason deliberately abdicates, bearing with it into
exile its categories of good and evil, cause and end. Schopenhauer
had suggested to him that the true key to the riddle of existence was
not intellect but will; behind the mask of phenomena the illuminated
spirit discerned not a Contriving but a Striving, a monstrous Will,
blind as old Œdipus, yearning like him through blood and anguish
to a possible redemption. But in time he cast off Schopenhauer and
pessimism. The Will to Live he "construed in an optimistic sense," and
it darkened into that other mystery, at once vaguer and more malign,
the Will to Power. The problem remained to find a ground for optimism,
and a clue to the harmony, to the recurring rhythms and patterns of
reality as we know it. So was born what is perhaps the characteristic
idea of Nietzsche. The universe is not a phenomenon of Will, it is a
phenomenon of Art. "In my preface to the book on Wagner I had already,"
wrote Nietzsche in 1886, "presented art, and not morality, as the
essentially metaphysical activity of man: in the course of the present
book I reproduce in many forms the singular proposition that the world
is only to be justified as an artistic phenomenon." For the optimist
_quand-même_ this interpretation has many advantages. Cruelty, sorrow
and disaster need no longer dismay him; since a world may at the same
time be a very bad world and a very good tragedy. "It may be," the
lyricist, turned philosopher, wrote later, "that my _Zarathustra_ ought
to be classified under the rubric Music." These two passages, with a
hundred others, determine the atmosphere into which we are introduced.
We have to deal not with a thinker who expounds a system, but with a
prophet who dispenses a Revelation: Nietzsche is not the apologist but
the mystic of Neo-Paganism.
Coming to closer range, we may dismiss at once a great part of his
polemical writings. They were a sort of perpetual bonfire in which
from time to time Nietzsche burned what he had once adored, and much
more beside. They bear witness to that proud independence, one may
almost say that savage isolation, which was the native climate of his
soul. _Niemandem war er Untertan,_ "he was no man's man," he wrote
of Schopenhauer, and that iron phrase expressed his own ideal and
practice. His brochures of abuse he regarded as a mode, though an
unhappy mode, of liberation. He had little love of them himself in his
creative moments: he desired with a fierce desire to rid his soul of
hatreds and negatives and rise to a golden affirmation. "I have been
a fighter," declares Zarathustra, "only that I might one day have my
hands free to bless." "In dying I would offer men the richest of my
gifts. It was from the sun I learned that, from the sun who when he
sets is so rich; out of his inexhaustible riches he flings gold into
the sea, so that the poorest fishermen row with golden oars." It is
not the Will to Power that speaks here, but that older and more sacred
fountain of civilisation, the Will to Love. But if Nietzsche had
that inspiration one is tempted to say of him what he said of Renan:
He is never so dangerous as when he loves. The truth is that he had
the genius of belittlement. It was the other side of his vanity, a
vanity so monstrous that it seems from the first to have eaten of the
insane root. There is no humour, no integral view of things, behind
his critical work. It is sick with subjectivity. And yet Zarathustra
in a temper is, by times, far more amusing than sinister. What could
be better than some of the characterisations in _A Psychologist's
Hedge-School,_ "Seneca, the Toreador of virtue ... Rousseau, or the
return to nature _in impuris naturalibus._ ... John Stuart Mill; or
wounding lucidity"? But when, in this mood, he gnaws and nibbles about
the sanctuaries of life; when he tells us that the true Fall of Man
was the Redemption, that the two most noxious corruptions known to
history are Christianity and alcohol; when he presses his anti-Feminism
to a point that goes beyond even the gross German tradition of which
Luther's _Table Talk_ is a monument, the best that one can do for him
is to remember that he often took too much chloral. It may be that
to the circles in these countries to whom the cult of Nietzscheanism
appeals, this strain of his thought also appeals. This particular
music is not played on many trumpets, but every Superman ought to know
it. And he ought to know further that Zarathustra, being brave, gibes
not only at St. Paul, but even at Herbert Spencer, and has no more
toleration for the gospel according to Marx than for that according to
Matthew.
What is the gospel of this ambiguous prophet? It is, he himself
declares, a long "Memento vivere." His own experience taught him
that the characteristic of life, in its highest moments, is to
be unimaginably alive. From a mere process it becomes a sudden
intoxication, and on the psychology of that intoxication, which is the
psychology of the artist and also that of the lover and the saint,
he has written pages which are a wonder of pure light. From this
standpoint he criticises justly the mechanical theory of adjustments
in which there is nothing to adjust, of adaptations in which there
is nothing to adapt, the whole _ab extra_ interpretation of life
popularised by Darwin, Spencer, and the English school in general. The
living unit is more than a mere node or knot in a tangle of natural
selection; it is a fountain of force, of spontaneity, constantly
overflowing. "The general aspect of life is not indigence and famine,
but on the contrary richness, opulence, even an absurd prodigality."
To live is for Nietzsche, as for the Scholastics, to be a centre of
self-movement. With the Pragmatists he asserts the primacy of life over
thought. But this tension of consciousness, this Dionysiac drunkenness,
is only a foundation, it is not yet a philosophy. Philosophy, or at all
events moral philosophy, begins with the discovery that there are other
people in the world. Your ego, thus drunken and expansive, collides
sharply with another ego, equally drunken and expansive, and it becomes
at once necessary to frame a code of relations, a rule of the road. Is
this force and spontaneity of the individual to flow out towards others
through the channel of domination or through that of love?
Zarathustra had marched with the Germans over prostrate France, he had
said in his Gargantuan egoism: "If there were Gods, how could I bear
not to be a God? _Consequently_ there are no Gods." If the Goths and
the Vandals had read Hegelian metaphysics, observes Fouillée, they
would have answered this question as Nietzsche answered it. The living
unit accumulates a superabundance of force in order to impose its power
on others ... _an andern Macht auslassen._ The Will to Power is the
sole source of human activity. The strong must live as warriors and
conquerors, adopting as their three cardinal virtues pride, pleasure,
and the love of domination. Pity is the deepest of corruptions; it but
doubles pain, adding to the pain of him who suffers the pain of him
who pities. If you have helped any one, you must wash the hands that
helped him, for they are unclean. The Crusaders brought home but one
treasure, the formula, namely, of the Assassins, "Nothing is true,
everything is permitted." Science is mere illusionism; but the warrior,
knowing how to be hard--for that is the new law--will impose his own
arbitrary values on all things, and will make life so good that he will
desire it to be indefinitely repeated. The earth, thus disciplined,
will bring forth the Superman, who, having danced out his day, will
disappear to be recreated by the Eternal Return. Thus spake Zarathustra.
The greatest difficulty that one experiences before such a doctrine
as this is the difficulty of taking it seriously. Nietzsche, who had
a tendency to believe that every reminiscence was an inspiration,
is by no means as original as he thought. After all, there were
sceptics, optimists, tyrants and poets before Zarathustra. The "common
herd" may not be given to discussing ethical dualism, but it knows
that since society began there have been two laws, one for the rich
and another for the poor. Scepticism as to the objectivity of human
values, moral and intellectual, is no new heresy, but a tradition as
old as science, and almost as old as faith. The notion of an Eternal
Return, crystallised by Plato from a mist of earlier speculation, had
exercised many modern thinkers; one has only to name Heine, Blanqui,
von Naegeli, Guyau, Dostoievsky. The Romantics had, at the beginning
of Nietzsche's century, as Schlegel wrote, "transcended all the ends
of life," and, fascinated with the idea of mere power, had filled the
imagination of Europe with seas and storms that raged for the sole
sake of raging. There was no Scholastic compiler of a text-book on
Ethics but had "posed morality as a problem," and asked in his first
_quæstio_ whether there was a science of good and evil. The Superman
so passionately announced by Nietzsche had already been created by
the enigmatic and dilettante fancy of Renan. The name itself was
as old as Goethe, though it is to be recalled that not Goethe but
Mephistopheles applies it to Faust as a sneer and a temptation.
Zarathustra is not a prophet nor even a pioneer; he brings but a new
mode of speech, his triumphant and dancing phrase sweeps into its
whirl a thousand ghosts and phantoms. And what is to be said of the
doctrine itself? Perhaps the most adequate answer to Nietzsche, on the
plane of his own ideas, is that of Guyau. Both were poets, strayed
into philosophy, both seize upon life as the key to all reality. But
Guyau finds in the spontaneous outflow of individual life, itself the
spring of sociability, fraternity, love. An organism is more perfect
as it is more sociable, there can be no full intensity without wide
expansion. "There is a certain generosity inseparable from existence,
without which one withers up interiorly and dies. The mind must flower;
morality, altruism are the flower of human life." The reduction of
all consciousness to one mode--in Nietzsche the Will to Power--is
neither new nor difficult. La Rochefoucauld tracked down behind all
motives the motive of self-interest, and modern simplifiers have amused
themselves by analysing passion into unconscious thought. The soul,
as St. Augustine tells us, is all in every part; and since the same
self is always present, it is obviously possible in some fashion or
another to translate any one mood of its life into any other. But such
suppression of the finer details, while interesting as a tour de force,
is not scientific psychology. The Will to Power is not sufficiently
definite to serve the turn of a moralist or even an immoralist. Power
is of many kinds. Love hath its victories not less renowned than
hate. Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, history would, says Pascal,
have been different, and in the phrase of the French _chanson_ there
are often more conquests ambushed in the hair of Delilah than in
that of Samson. Nietzsche himself perceived that it was necessary to
establish a hierarchy of values as between different manifestations
of "power," but this _Umwerthung aller Werthe_ was never either
achieved or achievable. The evangel of Zarathustra dissolves into mere
sound and fury for lack of what the Court of Equity calls reasonable
particularity. Most notable is this in regard to the two laws. Am I a
Superman--or rather a potential ancestor of the Superman, for in this
case hereditary privilege runs backwards--with the right to found my
life on pride, pleasure, and the love of power, or am I a slave with no
right except to remain a slave? The test is astral, and even nebulous.
If you can compel the stars to circle about you as their centre, if you
have a chaos in you and are about to beget a dancing star, then you
are of the seed of the Superman. Unhappily, the only people who could
seriously entertain such an estimate of themselves are the very wealthy
and the very mad. Zarathustra derides the mob in order to flatter the
snob; he is _malgré lui_ the casuist of the idle rich, the courtier of
international finance.
Friedrich Nietzsche was an optimist. It was a paradox of courage. There
is nothing nobler or more valiant in the history of thought than his
refusal to let the sun be dimmed by the mist of his own suffering. "No
invalid has the right to be a pessimist." "Let them beware: the years
in which my vitality sank to its minimum were those in which I ceased
to be a pessimist." That is magnificent, but it is not philosophy. If
Nietzsche by his insomnia and his wounded eyes is pledged on the point
of honour to optimism, is not Schopenhauer by his fixed income and
excellent digestion similarly pledged to pessimism? But Zarathustra's
optimism is not merely positive, it is ecstatic: to express its fulness
he creates the formula of the Eternal Return. He claps his hands and
cries "Encore!" to life. He is drunken with joy as men are in the
taverns with corn and the grape, and he shouts "The same again!"
This Eternal Return is presented to us as a conclusion of mathematical
physics and spectrum analysis. St. Thomas Aquinas taught, following
Aristotle, that the stars were composed of a substance nobler than
that of earth, not subject to birth or death, and so immune from
corruption. But Fraunhofer and his successors have, with their prisms
and telescopes, discovered in the stars the same eighty-one or
eighty-two elements which constitute the earth. Since then we have
but a finite number of indestructible elements and forces, and an
infinite space and time--or at least a space and time to which we can
conceive no limits--it must follow that the same combinations will
repeat themselves incessantly both in space and time. There is not only
an Eternal Return, but an Infinite Reduplication. And if thought, as
Nietzsche assumed, is only the phosphorescence accompanying certain
arrangements of matter, the same conscious life must also repeat
itself. One does not stay to discuss this phantasy of mathematics
except to say that whoever was entitled to entertain it Zarathustra
was not. If science is, as he held, a mere linked illusionism, how can
it give so absolute a prophecy? To Nietzsche it was no conclusion, but
a reminiscence from Greek speculation which came to him, disguised in
the flame of an inspiration, under that pyramidal rock near Sorlei,
"six thousand feet above men and time." He accepted it because it
seemed to him the supreme formula of optimism. His mind was incited
to it perhaps by that sombre passage in which his rejected master,
Schopenhauer, declares that if you were to knock on the graves, with
power to summon forth the dead to rise up and live their lives again,
none would answer to your call. Christianity agrees with Schopenhauer;
for though Christianity is an optimism, it is founded on pessimism. It
is an optimism poised on a centre that does not lie within the walls
of space and time. Christianity called a new world into existence to
redress the balance of the old; and were this old world all--a closed
circuit, a rounded whole--Zarathustra might dance and chant through all
its Campo Santos without finding more than a very few to rise up and
follow him.
The practical consequences to which Nietzsche was led were in his own
phrase inactual, out of time and out of season. Zarathustra is, by a
natural kinship, a prophet of the Anarchists, but he hated Anarchism;
by a strange transformation, the genius of a certain school of
Socialists, but he despised Socialism. German officials in Poland may
find in him a veritable Oppressors' Handbook; he danced through the
streets at the victory over France, but he derided the German State
and Empire as a new idol. He contemned women, but praised indissoluble
marriage. He preached pleasure, but celebrated chastity in a noble
hymn. He was all for authority and inequality, "a Joseph de Maistre,"
says Fouillée, "who believes in the hangman without believing in the
Pope"; but when he looked at a criminal on trial he acquitted everybody
except only the judge. He denounced Bismarck and the Kaiser for being
too democratic; he regarded Science, too, as disastrously democratic,
because it subjected all phenomena, great and small, to the same
uniform laws. Will was his god, but he saw the world under the aspect
of a Mahometan determinism, and submitted himself to a resignation,
an adoption of the hostile ways of existence, an _amor fati_ which a
Stoic might think extravagant. A German proletarian, full of German
prejudices, he thought himself Polish and noble, and boasted of being a
_sans-patrie_ and a "good European." Pity, generosity, self-immolation,
the whole ritual of civilisation, were condemned by Zarathustra and
practised by him. In brief, Nietzsche never rose above a sort of
philosophical cinematograph; he had the glitter but never the hard
definiteness of the diamond which he chose as his symbol.
But it would be very superficial to suppose that a thought so
passionate could be altogether unreal. Zarathustra is a counter-poison
to sentimentalism, that worst ailment of our day. He brings a sort of
ethical strychnine which taken in large doses is fatal, but in small
doses is an incomparable tonic. He disturbed many who were woefully at
ease in Zion, and was a poet of the heroic life. Germany, so apt to
lose herself in the jungle of scholarship, needed to be reminded that
erudition exists for the sake of life and not life for the sake of
erudition. To literature, when he wrote in conformity with its settled
and common tradition, he gave great chants of courage, loneliness
and friendship. In M. Halévy's book, founded on that of Madame
Förster-Nietzsche, we have in English for the first time a portrait
of him in the intimacies of his life and thought. It exhibits him as
better than his gospel, a hundred times better than most of those
disturbers of civilisation who call themselves his disciples.
T. M. KETTLE
The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD
Karl-Ludwig Nietzsche, a young clergyman of the Lutheran Church,
came of an ecclesiastical family. His father and his grandfather had
taught theology. His wife was the daughter and the granddaughter of
clergy-men. Ignoring modern thought and all the agitations and desires
of his time, he followed the safe path of the double tradition,
which had at once been revealed by God to the faithful and indicated
by Princes to their subjects. His superiors thought highly of him.
Frederick William IV., King of Prussia, condescended to take him under
his wing, and he might have hoped for a fine career had he not suffered
from headaches and nerves. As it was, rest became essential.
He asked for a country parish, and that of Röcken was confided to
him. The situation of this poor village, whose little houses uprear
themselves in a vast plain on the confines of Prussia and Saxony, was
melancholy; but Karl-Ludwig Nietzsche liked the place, for solitude was
acceptable to him. He was a great musician, and often, at the fall of
day, would shut himself up in his church and improvise upon the rustic
organ whilst the good folk of his parish stood without and listened in
admiration.
The pastor and his young wife waited four years for their first child,
who was born on October 15,1844, the King's birthday. The coincidence
increased the father's joy. "O month of October, blessed month," he
wrote in his church register, "ever have you overwhelmed me with joy.
But of all the joys that you have brought me, this is the deepest,
the most magnificent: I baptize my first child.... My son, Friedrich
Wilhelm, such shall be your name on earth in remembrance of the royal
benefactor whose birthday is yours."
The child soon had a brother, then a sister. There are women who
remember Friedrich's infancy, and those quickly passing days of joy
round the Nietzsches' hearth. Friedrich was slow in learning to speak.
He looked at everything with grave eyes, and kept silent. At the age
of two and a half he spoke his first word. The pastor liked his silent
boy, and was glad to have him as a companion of his walks. Never did
Friedrich Nietzsche forget the sound of distant bells ringing over the
immense pool-strewn plain as he wandered with his father, his hand
nestled in that strong hand.
Misfortune came very quickly. In August, 1848, Nietzsche's father fell
from the top of the stone steps leading up to his door, and struck his
head violently against the edge of one of them. The shock brought on a
terrible attack, or, perhaps, for one cannot be certain, only hastened
its approach: Karl-Ludwig Nietzsche lost his reason, and, after a year
of aberration and decline, died. Friedrich Nietzsche was then four
years old. The incidents of this tragic time made a deep impression
upon his mind: night-alarms, the weeping in the house, the terrors of
the closed chamber, the silence, the utter abandonment to woe; the
tolling bells, the hymns, the funeral sermons; the coffin engulfed
beneath the flagstones of the church. His understanding of such things
had come too early, and he was shaken by it. His nights were troubled
with visions, and he had a presentiment of some early disaster. He had
dreams--here is the naïve recital that he makes in his fourteenth year:
"When one despoils a tree of its crown it withers and the birds desert
its branches. Our family had been despoiled of its crown; joy departed
from our hearts, and a profound sadness entered into possession of us.
And our wounds were but closing when they were painfully reopened.
About this time I had a dream in which I heard mournful organ music,
as if at a burial. And as I was trying to discover the cause of this
playing, a tomb opened sharply and my father appeared, clad in his
shroud. He crossed the church, and returned with a little child in his
arms. The tomb opened again, my father disappeared into it, and the
stone swung back to its place. At once the wail of the organ ceased,
and I awoke. The next morning I told the dream to my dear mother. A
short while after, my little brother Joseph fell ill, and after a
nervous crisis of a few hours, he died. Our grief was terrible. My
dream was exactly fulfilled, for the little body was placed in the arms
of its father. After this double calamity the Lord in heaven was our
sole consolation. It was towards the end of January, 1850."
In the spring of this year the pastor's widow left the parochial house
and went to reside in the neighbouring town of Naumburg-zur-Saale,
where she was near her own people. Relations of hers lived in the
neighbouring countryside. Her husband's mother and his sister came to
stay with her in the small house, to which the children, who at first
had been disconsolate, gradually grew accustomed.
Naumburg was a royal city, favoured by the Hohenzollerns and devoted
to their dynasty. A bourgeois society of officials and pastors, with
some officers' families and a few country squires, lived within the
grass-grown ramparts, pierced with five gates, which were closed every
evening. Their existence was grave and measured. The bell of the
metropolitan church, flinging its chimes across the little town, awoke
it, sent it to sleep, assembled it to State and religious festivals.
As a small boy Nietzsche was himself grave and measured. His instincts
were in accord with the customs of Naumburg, and his active soul was
quick to discover the beauties of his new life. He admired the military
parades, the religious services with organ and choir, the majestic
anniversary celebrations. He found himself deeply moved every year by
the return of Christmas. His birthday stirred him less deeply, but was
a source of great joy.
"My birthday being also that of our beloved King," he wrote, "I am
awakened that day by military music. I receive my presents: the
ceremony is quickly over, and we go together to the church. Although
the sermon is not directed to my special benefit, I choose the best of
it and apply it to myself. Afterwards we all assemble at the school to
celebrate the great festival.... Before the break-up a fine patriotic
chorus is sung, and the director _concilium dimisit._ Then comes for
me the best moment of all; my friends arrive and we spend a happy day
together."
Friedrich did not forget his father, and wished to follow his example
and to become, like all the men of his race, a pastor, one of the
elect who live near God and speak in His name. He could conceive no
higher vocation, nor any more congenial to himself. Young as he was,
he had an exacting and meticulous conscience. The slightest scolding
pained him, and he liked to take his own line, unaided. Whenever he
felt a scruple he would retire to some obscure hiding-place and examine
his conscience, nor would he resume his play with his sister until
he had deliberately arrived at a condemnation or a justification of
his conduct. One day, when it was raining in torrents, his mother saw
him coming back from school with slow, regular steps, although he
was without umbrella or cloak. She called him, and he came sedately
up to her. "We have always been told not to run in the streets," he
explained. His companions nicknamed him "the little pastor," and
listened, in respectful silence, when he read them aloud a chapter from
the Bible.
He was careful of his prestige. "When one is master of oneself," he
gravely taught his sister, "then one is master of the whole world." He
was proud, and believed in the nobility of the Nietzsches. This was
a family legend which his grandmother loved to relate, and of which
he and his sister Lisbeth used to dream. Remote ancestors of theirs,
Counts, Nietzski by name, had lived in Poland. During the Reformation
they defied persecution, and broke with the Catholic Church. Thereafter
they wandered wretchedly for three years, outcasts, pursued from
village to village. With them was their son, who had been born on
the eve of their flight. The mother nursed this child with devoted
constancy, and he thus acquired, in spite of all ordeals, wonderful
health, lived to a great age, and transmitted to his line the double
virtue of strength and longevity.
Friedrich was never tired of listening to so fine an adventure. Often
also he asked to be told the history of the Poles. The election of the
King by the Nobles, gathered together on horseback in the midst of a
great plain, and the right which the meanest of them had to oppose his
veto to the will of all the rest, struck him with admiration: he had no
doubt that this race was the greatest in the world. "A Count Nietzski
must not lie," he declared to his sister. Indeed, the passions and the
powerful desires which, thirty or forty years later, were to inspire
his work, already animated this child with the bulging forehead and the
big eyes, whom unhappy women loved to fold in their tender caresses.
When he was nine years old his tastes widened, and music was revealed
to him by a chorus from Handel, heard at church. He studied the piano.
He improvised, he accompanied himself in chanting the Bible, and his
mother, remembering her husband's fate, was troubled, for he, too, like
the child, used to play and improvise on the organ at Röcken.
The instinct of creation--an instinct that was already
tyrannical--seized hold of him; he composed melodies, fantasies, a
succession of mazurkas, dedicated to his Polish ancestors. He wrote
verses, and mother, grandmother, aunts, sister, received, every
anniversary, a poem with his music. Games themselves became the
pretext for work. He drew up didactic treatises, containing rules
and advice, which he handed over to his comrades. First he taught
them architecture; then, in 1854, during the siege of Sebastopol,
the capture of which made him weep--for he loved all Slavs and hated
the revolutionary French--he studied ballistics and the defence of
fortified places. At the same time, he and two friends founded a
theatre of arts, in which they played dramas of antiquity and of
primitive civilisations, of which he was the author: _The Gods of
Olympus_ and an _Orkadal._
He left school to enter college at Naumburg. There he showed from the
first such conspicuous ability that his professors advised his mother
to send him to study in a superior institute. The poor woman hesitated.
She would have liked to keep her child near her.
This was in 1858. Nietzsche's vacation was of rather a serious
character. He spent it as usual in the village of Pobles, under the
shadow of wooded hills, on the banks of the fresh and lazy Saale, in
which each morning he bathed. His maternal grandparents had him and his
sister Lisbeth to stay with them. He was happy, with a heaped abundance
of life; but his mind was preoccupied with the uncertainty of his
future.
Adolescence was coming; and perhaps he was about to leave his own
people and change his friends and his home. With some anxiety he
foresaw the new course which his life was going to follow. He called
to mind his boyish past, all the long years of childhood, at which one
should not smile--thirteen years filled with the earliest affections
and the earliest sorrows, with the first proud hopes of an ambitious
soul, with the splendid discovery of music and poetry. Memories came,
numerous, vivid, and touching: Nietzsche, who had a lyric soul,
suddenly became, as it were, intoxicated with himself.
He took up his pen, and in twelve days the history of his childhood was
written. He was happy when he had finished.
"Now I have brought my first notebook to a proper end," he writes, "and
I am content with my work. I have written with the greatest pleasure
and without a moment's fatigue. It is a grand thing to pass in review
before one the course of one's first years, and to follow there the
development of one's soul. I have sincerely recounted all the truth
without poetry, without literary ornamentation. That I may write many
more like it!"
Four little verses followed:
"Ein Spiegel ist das Leben
In ihm sich zu erkennen,
Möcht' ich das erste nennen
Wonach wir nur auch streben."[1]
[1] "Life is a mirror. I might say that the recognition of ourselves in
it is the first object to which we all strive."
* * * * *
The school of Pforta is situated five miles from Naumburg, on the bank
of the Saale. Ever since a Germany has existed there have been teachers
and scholars in Pforta. Some Cistercian monks, come in the twelfth
century from the Latin West to convert the Slavs, obtained possession
of this property, which lies along both banks of the river. They built
the high walls which surround it, the houses, the church, and founded
a tradition which is not extinct. In the sixteenth century they were
expelled by the Saxon princes, but their school was continued, and
their methods conserved by the Lutherans who were installed in their
place.
"The children shall be brought up to the religious life," says an
instruction of 1540. "For six years they shall exercise themselves
in the knowledge of letters, and in the disciplines of virtue." The
pupils were kept separated from their families, cloistered with their
teachers. The school had its fixed rules and customs: anything in the
shape of easy manners was forbidden. There was a certain, established
hierarchy: the oldest scholars had charge of the youngest and each
master was the tutor of twenty pupils. Religion, Hebrew, Greek, and
Latin were taught. In this old monastery German rigour, the spirit
of humanism, and the ethic of Protestantism formed a singular and
deep-rooted alliance, a fruitful type of life and sentiment. Many
distinguished men owed their education to Pforta: Novalis, the
Schlegels, Fichte--Fichte, philosopher, educator, patriot, and chief
glory of the school. Nietzsche had long desired to study at Pforta, and
in October, 1858, a scholarship being awarded him, he left his family
to enter the school.
He now disappears for a time from our ken. An heroic and boyish
anecdote is the sole memory of his first year. The story of Mucius
Scævola seemed an improbable one to some of his comrades; they denied
it: "No man would have the courage to put his hand in fire," opined
these young critics. Nietzsche did not deign to answer, but seized from
the stove a flaming coal and placed it in the palm of his hand. He
always carried the mark of this burn, the more visible because he had
taken care to keep in repair and enlarge so glorious a wound by letting
melted wax run over it.
Assuredly, he did not easily endure this new life of his. He played
little, not caring to attach himself to unfamiliar people; moreover,
the tender customs of the maternal hearth had ill prepared him for
the disciplines of Pforta. He only went out once a week, on Sunday
afternoon. Then his mother, his sister, and two Naumburg friends of his
came to meet him at the school door, and spent the day with him in a
neighbouring inn.
In July, 1859, Nietzsche had a month's liberty. The holidays of pupils
at Pforta were never longer. He revisited the people and places that he
liked, and made a rapid voyage to Jena and Weimar. For a year he had
written only what he had to write as a task, but now the inspiration
and delight of the pen returned to him, and he composed out of his
impressions of summer a sentimental fantasy which is not barren of
pathos.
"The sun has already set," he writes, "when we leave the dark
enclosure. Behind us, the sky is bathed in gold; above us, there is
a glow of rosy clouds: before us, we see the town, lying at rest
under the gentle breeze of evening. Ah, Wilhelm, I say to my friend,
is there any joy greater than that of wandering together across the
world? Oh, pleasure of friendship, faithful friendship: oh, breath
of this magnificent summer night, perfume of flowers, and redness of
evening! Do you not feel your thoughts soar upward, to perch like the
jubilant lark on a throne of golden clouds? The wonder of these evening
landscapes! It is my own life that unveils itself to me. So are my
own days arranged: some shut within the dark penumbra, others lifted
up in the air of liberty! At this moment our ears are pierced by a
shrill cry: it comes from the madhouse which stands near our path. Our
hands join in a tighter clasp, as if some evil genius had touched us
with a sweep of menacing wings. Go from us, ye powers of Evil! Even
in this beautiful world there are unhappy souls! But what, then, is
unhappiness?"
At the beginning of August he returned to Pforta, as sadly as he had
gone there in the first instance. He could not accept the brusque
constraint of the place, and, being unable to cease thinking of
himself, he kept for some weeks an intimate diary which shows us how he
employed his time and what his humours were from one day to another.
We find, to begin with, certain courageous maxims against ennui, given
him by his professor and transcribed; then a recital of his studies,
his distractions, his readings, and the crises which depress him.
The poetic soul of the child now resists, now resigns itself to its
impressions and bows painfully beneath a discipline. When emotion
urges him he abandons prose, which is not musical enough to express
his melancholy. Rhythm and rhyme appear; under an inspiration he makes
a few verses, a quatrain, a sextain; but he does not seek after the
lyrical impulse, nor hold to it; he merely follows it when it rises
within him; and, as soon as it weakens, prose takes its place, as in a
Shakesperean dialogue.
Life at Pforta was, however, brightened by hours of simple and youthful
joy. The pupils went out for walks, sang in chorus, bathed. Nietzsche
took part in these delights, and related them. When the heat was too
heavy, the life of the water replaced the life of study. The two
hundred scholars would go down to the river, timing their steps to the
tunes they had struck up. They would throw themselves into the water,
following the current without upsetting the order of their ranks,
accomplish a swim long enough to try, and yet elate, the youngest
members of the party, then clamber up the bank at their master's
whistle, put on their uniforms, which a ferry boat had convoyed in
their wake; then, still singing, still in good order, would march back
to their work and to the old school. "It is absolutely stunning," says
Nietzsche in effect.
So time went by, and the end of August came. The Journal is silent for
eight days, then for six, then for a whole month. When he reopens his
notebook, it is to bring it to an end.
"Since the day on which I began this Journal my state of mind has
completely changed. Then we were in the green abundance of the
late summer: now, alas! we are in the late autumn. Then I was an
_unter-tertianer_ (a lower form boy); now I am in a higher form.... My
birthday has come and gone, and I am older--time passes like the rose
of spring, and pleasure like the foam of the brook.
"At this moment I feel myself seized by an extraordinary desire for
knowledge, for universal culture. That impulse comes to me from
Humboldt, whom I have just read. May it prove as lasting as my love for
poetry!"
He now mapped out a vast programme of study in which geology, botany,
and astronomy were combined with readings in the Latin stylists,
Hebrew, military science, and all the techniques. "And above all
things," said he, "Religion, the foundation of all knowledge. Great is
the domain of knowledge, _infinite_ the search after truth."
A winter and spring-time sped away while the boy worked on. But now
came his second holidays, then the third return to school; it was when
autumn had denuded the great oaks on the estate of Pforta. Friedrich
Nietzsche is seventeen years of age, and he is sad. Too long had
he imposed upon himself a painful obedience; he had read Schiller,
Hölderlin, Byron; he dreams of the Gods of Greece, and of the sombre
Manfred, that all-powerful magician who, weary of his omnipotence,
vainly sought repose in the death which his art had conquered. What
cares Nietzsche for the lessons of his professors? He meditates on the
lines of the romantic poet:
"Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,
The tree of knowledge is not that of life."
He grows weary at last. He longs to escape from the routine of classes,
from tasks which absorb his whole life. He would listen to his soul
alone, and thus come to understand the dreams with which his mind
overflows. He confides in his mother and his sister, and declares that
his projects for the future have changed. The thought of the University
bores him; he now wants to be not a professor, but a musician. His
mother reasons with him, and succeeds in appeasing him a little. But
her success is not for long. The death of a master to whom he had
been attached completes his confusion of mind. He neglects his work,
isolates himself, and meditates.
He writes. From his earliest childhood he had had the instinct of
the phrase and the word, the instinct of visible thought. He writes
incessantly, and not one shade of his unrest has remained hidden
from us. He surveys the vast universe of romanticism and of science,
sombre, restless, and loveless. This monstrous vision fascinates and
frightens him. The pious ways of his boyhood still hold him under their
influence; he reproaches himself for his inclinations towards audacity
and negation, as if for sins. He strives to retain his religious faith,
which is dwindling day by day. He does not break with it sharply in the
French and Catholic manner, but slowly and fearfully detaches himself;
slowly, because he venerates those dogmas or symbols which stand for
all his past, for his memories of his home and his father; fearfully,
because he knows that in renouncing the old security he will find not
a new security to take its place, but a surging throng of problems.
Weighing the supreme gravity of the choice imposed on him, he meditates:
"Such an enterprise," he writes, "is the work not of a few weeks but
of a life-time: can it be that, armed solely with the results of a
boy's reflections, any one will venture to destroy the authority of two
thousand years, guaranteed as it is by the deepest thinkers of all the
centuries? Can it be that with his own mere fancies and rudiments of
thought any one will venture to thrust aside from him all that anguish
and benediction of religion with which history is profoundly penetrated?
"To decide at a stroke those philosophical problems about which human
thought has maintained an unending war for many thousands of years;
to revolutionise beliefs which, accepted by men of the weightiest
authority, first lifted man up to the level of true humanity; to link
up Philosophy with the natural sciences, without as much as knowing the
general results of the one or the others; and finally to derive from
those natural sciences a system of reality, when the mind has not yet
grasped either the unity of universal history, or the most essential
principles--it is a masterpiece of rashness....
"What then is humanity? We hardly know: one stage in a whole, one
period in a process of Becoming, an arbitrary production of God? Is
man aught else than a stone evolved through the intermediary worlds of
flora and fauna? Is he from this time forward a completed being, or
what has history in reserve for him? Is this eternal Becoming to have
no end? What are the springs of this great clock? They are hidden; but
however long be the duration of that vast hour which we call history,
they are at every moment the same. The crises are inscribed on the
dial-face: the hand moves on, and when it has reached the twelfth hour,
it begins another series: it inaugurates a period in the history of
humanity.
"To risk oneself, without guide or compass, on the ocean of doubt is
for a young brain loss and madness; most adventurers on it are broken
by the storms, few indeed are the discoverers of new lands.... All our
philosophy has very often appeared to me a very Tower of Babel....
It has as its desolating result an infinite disturbance of popular
thought; we must expect a vast upheaval when the multitude discovers
that all Christianity is founded on gratuitous affirmations. The
existence of God, immortality, the authority of the Bible, Revelation,
will for ever be problems. I have attempted to deny everything: ah, to
destroy is easy, but to construct!"
What a marvellous instinct appears in this page! Friedrich Nietzsche
poses the precise questions which are later to occupy his thought and
gives a foretaste of the energetic answers with which he is to trouble
men's souls: humanity is a nothing, an arbitrary production of God;
an absurd Becoming impels it towards recommencements without a term,
towards eternal returns; all sovereignty is referable in the last
instance to force, and force is blind, following only chance....
Friedrich Nietzsche affirms nothing: he disapproves of rapid
conclusions on grave subjects, and, so long as he is hesitant, likes
to abstain from them. But when he commits himself, it will be with a
whole heart. Meanwhile he stays his thought. But, despite himself, it
overflows at times in its effort towards expression. "Very often," he
writes, "submission to the will of God and humility are but a mantle
thrown over the cowardice and pusillanimity which we experience at
the moment when we ought to face our destiny with courage." All the
Nietzschean ethics, all the Nietzschean heroism are included in these
few words.
We have named the authors who were Nietzsche's favourites at this
time: Schiller, Byron, Hölderlin--of these he preferred Hölderlin,
then so little known. He had discovered him, as one discovers, at a
glance, a friend in a crowd. It was a singular encounter. The life of
this child, now scarcely begun, was to resemble the life of the poet
who had just died. Hölderlin, the son of a clergyman, had wished to
follow his father's vocation. In 1780 he is studying theology at the
University of Tübingen with comrades whose names are Hegel, Sendling.
He ceases to believe. He comes to know Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, and
the intoxication of romanticism. He loves the mystery of nature, and
the lucid mind of Greece; he loves them together, and dreams of uniting
their beauties in a German work. He is poor, and has to live the hard
life of a needy poet. As a teacher, he endures the ennui of wealthy
houses in which he is despised generally, and once is loved too much--a
brief rapture that ends in distress. He returns to his native village,
for its air and its people are pleasant to him. He works, writes at
his leisure, but as it pains him to live at the expense of his own
family, he goes away again. He has some of his verses published; but
the public shows no taste for those fine poems in which the genius
of an unknown German calls up the Gods of Olympus to people the deep
forests of Suabia and the Rhineland. The unhappy Hölderlin dreams of
vaster creations, but goes no farther than a dream: Germany is a world
in itself, and Greece is another; the inspiration of a Goethe is needed
to unite them, and to fix in eternal words the triumph of Faust, the
ravisher of Helen. Hölderlin writes fragments of a poem in prose: his
hero is a young Greek, who laments over the ruin of his race and,
frail forerunner of Zarathustra, calls for the rebirth of a valorous
humanity. He composes three scenes of a tragedy, taking for his hero
Empedocles, tyrant of Agrigentum, poet, philosopher, haughty inspirer
of the multitude, a Greek isolated among the Greeks by reason of his
very greatness, a magician, who, possessing all nature, wearies of the
satisfactions which one life can offer, retires to the summit of Etna,
sends away his family, his friends, his appealing people, and flings
himself, one evening, at sunset, into the crater.
The work is full of power; but Hölderlin abandons it. His melancholy
enfeebles and exalts him. He wishes to leave Germany where he has
suffered so much, and to free his relatives from the inconvenience of
his presence. Employment is offered to him in France, at Bordeaux, and
he disappears. Six months later he returns home sunburnt and in rags.
He is questioned, but he does not reply. Enquiries are made and it is,
with great difficulty, discovered that he had crossed France on foot
under the August sun. His mind is gone, swallowed up in a torpor which
is to last for forty years. He dies in 1843, a few months before the
birth of Nietzsche. It might please a Platonist to think that the same
genius passed from one body to the other. Surely the same German soul,
romantic by nature, and classic in aspiration, broken at length by its
desires, animated these two men, and predestined them to the same end.
One seems to surprise across the tenor of their lives the blind labour
of the race, which, pursuing its monotonous bent, sends into the world,
from century to century, like children for like ordeals.
That year, at the approach of summer, Nietzsche suffered severely from
his head and eyes. The malady was uncertain in its nature, but possibly
had its origin in the nerves. His holidays were spoilt. But he arranged
to be able to stay at Naumburg until the end of August, and the joys of
a prolonged leisure compensated him for previous vexations.
* * * * *
He returned to Pforta in a wholesome frame of mind. He had not
resolved his doubts but he had explored them, and could without
wronging himself become once more a laborious student. He was careful
not to interrupt his reading, which was immense. From month to month
he sent punctually to his two friends at Naumburg, poems, pieces of
dance and song music, essays in criticism and philosophy. But these
occupations were not allowed to interrupt his work as a student. Under
the direction of excellent masters, he studied the languages and the
literatures of antiquity.
He would have been happy, had not the pressing questions of the future
and of a profession begun to torment him.
"I am much preoccupied with the problem of my future," he wrote to his
mother in May, 1862. "Many reasons, external and internal, make it
appear to me troubled and uncertain. Doubtless I believe myself to be
capable of success in whatever province I select. But strength fails
me to put aside so many of the diverse objects which interest me. What
shall I study? No idea of a decision presents itself to my mind, and
yet with myself alone it lies to reflect and to make my choice. What
is certain is that whatever I study I shall be eager to probe to its
depths. But this fact only renders the choice more difficult, since
the question is to discover the pursuit to which one can give one's
whole self. And how often they deceive us, these hopes of ours! How
quickly one is put on the wrong track by a momentary predilection,
a family tradition, a desire! To choose one's profession is to make
one in a game of _lotto,_ in which there are many blanks, but only
very few prizes! At this moment my position is uncomfortable. I have
dispersed my interest over so many provinces that if I were to satisfy
my tastes I would certainly become a very learned man, but only with
great difficulty a professional animal. My task is to destroy many of
my present tastes, that is clear, and, by the same process, to acquire
new ones. But which are the unfortunates that I am to throw overboard?
Precisely my dearest children, maybe! ..."
His last holidays slipped by into the beginning of his last year.
Nietzsche returned without vexation to the old school which he was soon
to leave. The rules had grown lighter, and he had a room to himself,
and certain liberties. He went out to dine on the invitation of this or
that professor, and thus, even in the monastery, he had his first taste
of the pleasures of the world. At the house of one of his tutors he met
a charming girl; he saw her again, and, for the first time in his life,
fell in love. For some days his dreams were all of the books which he
wished to lend her, of the music which he wished to play with her. His
emotion was delicious. But the girl left Pforta, and Nietzsche returned
to his work. The _Banquet_ of Plato, the tragedies of Æschylus, were
his last diversions before he gave himself up to the ordinary round
of tasks. Sometimes he sat down to the piano just before the supper
hour; two comrades who were to remain his friends, Gersdorff and Paul
Deussen, listening while he played them Beethoven or Schumann, or
improvised.
Poetry is always by him. If he has the slightest leisure, if there is
a delay of some hours in his work, the lyricist reappears. On Easter
morning he leaves school, returns home, goes straight to his room,
where he is alone, dreams for a moment; then finds himself assailed by
a multitude of impressions. He writes with intense pleasure after his
long privation. And is not the page, which we transcribe here, worthy
of Zarathustra?
"Here I am on the evening of Easter Day, seated at my fire, enveloped
in a dressing-gown. Outside a fine rain is falling. All about me
is solitude. A sheet of white paper lies on my table; I look at it
in a muse, rolling my pen between my fingers, embarrassed by the
inextricable multitude of subjects, feelings, thoughts which press
forward and ask to be written. Some of them clamour and make a great
tumult: they are young and eager for life. Others gesture and struggle
there also: they are old thoughts, well matured, well clarified;
like elderly gentlemen they regard with displeasure the mêlée of
young bloods. This struggle between an old world and a new it is that
determines our mood; and the state of combat, the victory of these,
the weakness of those, we call at any moment our state of mind, our
_Stimmung...._ Often when I play the spy on my thoughts and feelings,
and study them in religious silence, I am impressed as with the hum and
ferment of savage factions, the air shudders and is torn across as if a
thought or an eagle had shot up towards the sun.
"Combat is the food which gives strength to the soul. The soul has
skill to pluck out of battle sweet and glorious fruits. Impelled by the
desire for fresh nutriment, it destroys; it struggles fiercely--but
how gentle it can be when it allures the adversary, gathers it close
against itself, and wholly assimilates it.
"That impression, which at this moment makes all your pleasure or all
your pain, will, it may be, slip off in an instant, being the mere
drapery of an impression still more profound, will disappear before
something older and higher. Thus our impressions grave themselves
deeper and deeper on our souls, being ever unique, incomparable,
unspeakably young, swift as the instant that brought them.
"At this moment I am thinking of certain people whom I have loved;
their names, their faces pass before my mind. I do not mean that
in fact their natures become continually more profound and more
beautiful; but it is at least true that each of these reminiscences,
when I recover it, leads me on to some acuter impression, for
the mind cannot endure to return to a level which it has already
passed; it has a need of constant expansion. I salute you, dear
impressions, marvellous undulations of an agitated soul. You are as
numerous as Nature, but more grandiose, for you increase and strive
perpetually--the plant, on the contrary, gives out to-day the same
perfume that it gave out on the day of creation. I no longer love
now as I loved a few weeks ago, and I find myself in a different
disposition at this moment from that in which I was when I took up this
pen."
Nietzsche returned to Pforta to undergo his last examinations. He all
but failed to pass; and, indeed, in mathematics he did not obtain
the required number of marks. But the professors, overlooking this
inadequacy, granted him his diploma. He left his old school, and left
it with pain. His mind easily adjusted itself to the places where it
lived, and clung with equal force to happy memories and to melancholy
impressions.
The break-up of the school was a prescribed ceremony. The assembled
students prayed together for the last time; then those who were about
to leave presented their masters with a written testimony of gratitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche's letter moves one by its pathetic and solemn
accent. First he addresses himself to God: "To Him who has given
me all, my first thanks. What offering should I bring Him, if not
the warm gratitude of my heart, confident of His love? It is He who
has permitted me to live this glorious hour of my life. May He, the
All-Bountiful, continue to watch over me." Then he thanks the King,
"through whose goodness I entered this school...; him and my country
I hope one day to honour. Such is my resolve." Then he speaks to his
venerated masters, to his dear comrades, "and particularly to you, my
dear friends: what shall I say to you at the instant of parting? I
understand how it is that the plant when torn from the soil which has
nourished it can only take root slowly and with difficulty in a foreign
soil. Shall I be able to disaccustom myself to you? Shall I be able to
accustom myself to another environment? Adieu!"
These long effusions were not enough, and he wrote, for himself alone,
certain lines in which they are repeated:
"So be it--it is the way of the world:
Let life deal with me as with so many others:
They set forth, their frail skiff is shattered,
And no man can tell us the spot where it sank.
Adieu, adieu! the ship's bell calls me,
And as I linger the shipmaster urges me on.
And now to confront bravely waves, storms, reefs.
Adieu, adieu!..."