I had long shared the general belief that this remarkable man died of
general paralysis; but a brief study of the facts as they are set forth
in Frau Foster-Nietzsche’s book, _The Lonely Nietzsche_, will convince
any fair-minded person, as they did me, that such an hypothesis is
untenable. As Nietzsche was undoubtedly one of the makers of the modern
mind it will be worth while to study his health a little, for the more we
study it the more remarkable he becomes.
From youth onwards he was subject to dreadful headaches, often
accompanied by vomiting and intense pain in the eyes. He had temporary
strokes of paralysis, and sometimes lost the power of speech. Probably
the disease from which he suffered was what we now call migraine or “sick
headache.” This is a trouble that is almost confined to persons of active
and intelligent mind, and the cause of it is quite unknown. Nietzsche,
imagining that his headaches had something to do with his digestion, used
to starve himself and lead the most ascetic life; but all to no purpose.
Starvation rather tends to make the patient worse. As a rule this
sickness tends to improve as the patient grows older; but in Nietzsche’s
case advancing age brought no relief. Work was impossible, and he had
to get leave of absence from his position as Professor of Classical
Philology in the University of Basel in 1876. Later on he tried to resume
work, but spent many years in wandering from one health resort to another
in almost constant pain; indeed, he said that for him two hundred days
out of every year were days of pain.
This migraine is a very terrible complaint which affects mostly the elect
of the earth: those whose brains are far above the average. Women are
more often affected by it than men; and in them it appears to become
worse periodically and at the climacteric. Afterwards it generally leaves
them. Clods do not suffer from migraine; the trouble appears to be one of
the prices that very clever men have to pay for their brains. Sufferers
from it are generally very prone to seasickness and to trainsickness, and
once an attack is in full blast no treatment whatever but natural sleep
seems to relieve it. The pain appears to be so terrible that the stomach
is paralysed by the sheer violence of it, and such drugs as aspirin,
phenacetin, and even opium pills are useless because they are at once
vomited. Sometimes symptoms indistinguishable from those of migraine
persist for many years in cases of chronic Bright’s disease; and there is
reason to suspect that it may be accompanied by some sudden constriction
of an artery in the brain. In the worst cases the pain also affects the
eye; and occasionally there is confusion of speech or even positive
aphasia. Possibly even a stroke of paralysis may occur, and there is the
usual fear of insanity that seems to accompany all nervous troubles in
highly neurotic men.
Late in the year 1888 the blow fell; and Nietzsche became definitely
insane. Nietzsche’s sister has left us quite a good account of it which
enables us to guess with a certain amount of probability the actual
nature of his insanity; though we must always remember that he had been
suffering from this terrible agony for years and had already had strokes
that were probably due to a temporary constriction of a cerebral artery.
During the latter end of 1888 Nietzsche was even more than usually
worried; sensitive old women, Wagnerians and all the little people were
writing him abusive letters. Something had to go. Either angry people
must leave him alone or the delicate filament of Nietzsche’s mind must
snap. It had already been strained past endurance by his headaches and
pains in the eye and incessant self-denial. The first symptom seems to
have been that his Italian landlady noticed that Professor Nietzsche had
suddenly taken to imbibing gigantic draughts of water. Suddenly, while he
was walking near his home, he fell down in the street and could not get
up again; that is to say, probably one of his cerebral arteries had gone
into a state of spasm. His landlord found him and helped him home, where
he lay for two days on a sofa in a lethargic, probably semi-conscious,
state; he would not say a word nor answer questions. When he awoke to the
world again he was deranged. He talked loudly to himself and would not
allow people into his room, for he said he was composing an oratorio. He
had always been interested in music. He began to write wild letters to
his friends and relatives, accusing them of all sorts of silly things,
but, be it observed, of nothing indecent. Then he began to accuse himself
of fancied extravagance. When he met Professor Oberbeck he ran towards
him and embraced him, saying, “My dear fellow, I hope you’ve brought me
money; I’ve been living so extravagantly!” Nietzsche extravagant; a man
who was a byword for asceticism and who did not even then realise the
fame and fortune that was beginning to come to him! When they examined
his papers they found 900 francs among them. They took him to Jena, where
he was admitted to an asylum. Unhappily his friends had no specimen of
his handwriting to assist the asylum doctors, and as it was before the
days of the cerebro-spinal Wassermann test, it is not surprising that
the poor doctors, driven to give the thing a name, hinted at general
paralysis, though they seem to have eaten their words later.
The ordinary typical case of general paralysis is much as follows: An
apparently perfectly sane and normal man suddenly goes out and orders
a dozen motor-cars, or twenty-three cameras, or fifty arm-chairs, or
a dozen sets of gymnastic apparatus or something equally silly; then
he goes home to his wife very well pleased with himself and boasts how
he has suddenly become the best cyclist in Europe or the most famous
cricketer. No doubts for him, gladsome fellow! Probably he will also tell
her that he is God. Or perhaps he will indecently assault some little
girl before the very eye of some hitherto friendly policeman. Sometimes
the disease will begin with purely neurasthenic and gloomy symptoms,
so that even a clever doctor may be put off the scent for months or
years. But when he is examined carefully it will generally be found that
his hand is tremulous so that he cannot write intelligibly; his tongue
trembles and perhaps wobbles in and out like a trombone; his speech is
indistinct; the pupils of his eyes may be unequal or not circular. Later
come the fits and increasing dementia that haunt him till his death.
The fact that Nietzsche suffered from doubts about money and showed no
sign of obscenity seems to point to a totally different form of insanity.
Faithful to the principle that no doctor ought to offer a diagnosis
without having seen the patient, I hesitate to say definitely what was
the matter with Nietzsche, especially as Dr. Oscar Levy of Hamburg is
still alive and knows the Nietzsche case intimately; but I should not
wonder if the poor overwrought man was suddenly seized by something akin
to melancholia,[23] that last infirmity of sensitive minds. As clods
do not suffer from migraine they comparatively rarely attain to the
heights—or depths—of melancholia. Under the influence of nursing, rest
and protection from the attacks of the world, he partly recovered, but,
as generally happens with melancholia in middle age, he seems to have
become more emotional and partly demented before the chronic trouble
that may have caused his headaches ultimately killed him. Throughout
his insanity the difficulty in speaking pursued him. “I don’t speak
prettily,” he would pathetically say; and after a tremor that may have
been uræmic he passed away.
No philosopher has been more shockingly misrepresented to the British
public; and now that the bitterness of the war is over it is quite time
that we should make some effort to understand what he intended. The
famous “superman” was not a big bullying German _picklehaube_; it seems
to have represented what a man might become if freed from conventional
repression: if his instincts were perfect in every way. The “will to
power” was not the arrogance that caused the war; as a matter of fact,
no man ever attacked German militarism so fiercely as did Nietzsche.
It really represented what the modern evolutionist means by survival
value in all organisms. Possibly Nietzsche made a mistake in attributing
prudery to the effects of Pauline Christianity; the very essence of
prudery is now thought to lie in unconscious regrets of the old for their
lost sexual power. It seems to be a frustrated wish-fulfilment and is
found among people who worship mumbo-jumbo, as well as among those who
pretend to follow Jesus.
Nietzsche did well to point out, as Huxley pointed out years ago, that
“all men are _not_ born free and equal,” as optimists have averred. A
little healthy pessimism would be very good for the world; it would teach
it to be more careful about paying its debts and would prevent it from
blundering into an ignorant war such as the last one.
But nobody who has ever seen the disgusting spectacle of a man dying of
general paralysis, demented, helpless, lying bestial, an obscene body
that has long survived its soul, deserted by every one but his mother and
his old aunts, could ever look at the portrait of the dying Nietzsche,
gazing so wistfully into the setting sun, and say that Nietzsche died of
general paralysis. The Italians called him Il Santo, the Saint; so far
did he seem to them above all moral frailty.
It was probably owing to his incessant pain that he could never settle
down to systematise his philosophy, but had to write in epigrams.