NIETZSCHE.
[Sidenote: =Nietzsche and Wagner.=
_June 18, 1896._]
The intellectual world of the later nineteenth century has no more
remarkable and original, and also no more tragic, figure to show than
the author of these essays. He was descended from a noble Polish family
originally named Nietzky, who gave up their title and estates and
settled in Germany on account of Protestant convictions. Friedrich
Nietzsche was born in 1844. He received a classical education, and at
twenty-eight years of age became Professor of Classical Philology in the
University of Bâle; but throughout life his love of art, and especially
of music, remained an absorbing passion. It appears that his musical
instinct was first aroused by the works of Schumann, and that youthful
enthusiasm led to serious musical studies. Later on he became the most
ardent of Wagnerians, and finally the fiercest of Wagner's assailants.
Nietzsche's earliest writings are academic monographs on various
classical subjects, the brilliant scholarship of which led to his
appointment at Bâle. The philosophical essays began to appear towards
his thirtieth year, during his professorship at Bâle. There are verses,
too, by Nietzsche which exhibit a genuine poetic faculty. The manner and
order of Nietzsche's mental awakening is worthy of attention--first, the
love of music, leading to a general interest in art; next, philological
studies, originally undertaken, in the opinion of his sister Madame
Förster-Nietzsche, as a relief from the feverish problems of modern
æsthetics, and pursued to such purpose that he became a master of Roman
and Greek learning. His writings also reveal a wide knowledge of Hebrew
and Indian literature, besides thorough familiarity with all that is of
first-rate importance in modern thought. His first intellectual master
seems to have been Schopenhauer. In the year 1889 Nietzsche became
hopelessly insane. There is not the least trace of mental disorder in
the previous family history. The stocks from which he was descended were
on both sides of exceptional energy, ability, and character. There is
also abundant testimony to the simplicity, amiability, and charm of his
personal character. His friends and colleagues at Bâle seem to have had
no suspicion of the explosive energies which appear in his writings. His
tastes were throughout life reserved and fastidious, and the ultimate
breakdown of his mind can only be attributed to the sheer excess of
feverish energy with which he lived the intellectual life and to the
effects of spiritual isolation upon a sensitive and most arrogant
nature. He now lies to all intents and purposes dead at
Naumburg-on-the-Saale, in Saxony, which for the past fifty years has
been the home of the family.
The present volume contains Nietzsche's latest essays, the publications
of 1888. The sub-title given to the "Twilight of the Idols," namely,
"How to Philosophise with a Hammer," applies equally well to the entire
volume, which deals exclusively in destructive criticism. The "idols"
upon which Nietzsche here exercises the hammer of a singularly
comprehensive iconoclasm are those of modern democratic civilisation.
The editor of the series is Dr. Tille, Lecturer on German Language and
Literature in the University of Glasgow, and author of "Von Darwin bis
Nietzsche," a book that has attracted some attention in Germany. No
explanation is offered of the motives which prompted the choice of
Nietzsche's latest works for the first volume of the English edition.
The history of Nietzsche's life since 1876 is the history of a tragic
struggle. In that year he attended the Bayreuth festival, though in a
weak state of health. The impression was overpowering, and henceforth
the Wagnerian drama appeared to him in a new light. He conceived a
horror of Wagner, but so deeply rooted in his affections was the
Wagnerian art that with his belief in Wagner everything else that he had
cared for was cast to the winds; he turned upon the religion of his
childhood, the philosophy of his youth, the very land of his birth, and
the only language that he really knew. Why, it may be asked, is the
"Wagner Case," where the Bayreuth master figures as a "rattlesnake,"
offered to readers who have had no means of access to the earlier essay
by the same writer called "Wagner in Bayreuth," an utterance of
enthusiastic discipleship and probably the most discerning appreciation
of Wagner ever yet published? Again, in the early essay on
"Schopenhauer as Educator," one of the "Inopportune Contemplations,"
Nietzsche reckons himself among those readers of Schopenhauer who know
almost from the outset that they have encountered a determining
influence; and, indeed, so saturated is Nietzsche with Schopenhauer's
ideas that he cannot get rid of the Schopenhauer terminology even in his
later writings, where Schopenhauer has become an "old false-coiner." The
expression "Wille zur Macht," an obvious modification of Schopenhauer's
"Wille zum Leben," continually recurs even in Nietzsche's latest
writings, and was to have formed the title of an entire book in his
projected work "The Transvaluation of all Values." The same early work
contains a passage in which Christianity is called one of the purest
examples of the striving after perfection to be found in the history of
mankind, while the "Antichrist," the last essay in the volume now before
us, is a new and more formidable version of the Voltairian "Ecrasez
l'Infâme," a furious denunciation not merely of Christian dogma, but
also, and more especially, of the ethical principles that are the
essence of the Christian system for the modern world. All these
recantations thus appear with scarcely a hint of the antecedent
confessions of faith. It has been denied that the mental development of
Nietzsche underwent any revolution or breach of continuity in the year
1876. German disciples have attempted to prove the consistency of that
development, and in the April number of the "Savoy" Magazine Mr.
Havelock Ellis remarks, with reference to Nietzsche's Polish descent,
that he was "not Teuton enough to abide for ever with Wagner." But in
any case the apostacy of Nietzsche from Wagner is a painful subject.
When he satirises Germany as the "flat-land" of Europe, the land of the
Hyperboreans and worshippers of Woden, the god of bad weather, when he
accuses the Germans of loving everything nebulous and ambiguous and
hating clearness, consistency, and logic, we may remember that though
Germany was the land of his birth Nietzsche was not a German by blood.
But to Wagner he had been bound by ties of personal friendship as well
as by fervent artistic admiration, so that no sufficient excuse can be
offered for the appalling diatribe in which he smothers with ridicule
both Wagner himself and everything connected with the Wagnerian art. The
plea of insanity can scarcely be allowed. There is too much method in
Nietzsche's madness. Moreover, he is no vulgarian like Nordau, lecturing
in a muddy pathological jargon about subjects completely over his head.
Nietzsche knew what he was talking about; if he had not first been the
most enthusiastic of Wagner's disciples he could not have become so
formidable an enemy. But though we may wish that on arriving at a new
mental standpoint he had dealt more gently with his former friends, yet
the temper which leads a writer to disregard every other consideration
in sheer intentness on the truth of the matter in hand is a quality not
to be slightly discounted.
That Nordau should have anticipated Nietzsche in this country is a
public calamity. The talk about Wagner's degeneracy and decadence had
thus passed into a tiresome cant, and now that the real source of the
only serious anti-Wagnerian criticism makes its appearance the task of
disengaging the important side of that criticism seems almost hopeless.
A few of the leading points against Wagner's works may, however, be
mentioned here--the want of life in the whole and the excess of life in
the small parts, the internal anarchy, the distress and torpor
alternating with disturbance and chaos, the dwelling on the pathetic
note till taste is overcome and resistance overthrown, the hypnotic
character of Wagner's influence, his musty hierarchic perfumes, his
wealth of colours and demi-tints, his mysteries of vanishing light that
spoil us for other music--these are some of the characteristics of
decadent art upon which the case against Wagner is based, and it is
impossible to deny either the acuteness of Nietzsche's observation or
the damaging character of his indictment. On the other hand, it must be
remembered that the renovation of musical drama under Wagner's influence
is an unquestionable fact. Wagner saved us from the period when operas
were concocted from point to point by the most distinguished composer of
the day with a view to the tastes of the Parisian Jockey Club. Wagner
brought back dignity and poetry; he brought back sincerity, he infused a
strain of powerful and far-reaching vitality into the art that he
practised. The enthusiasm of the Wagnerian renascence absorbed nearly
all that was commanding in the musical talent of the time; it affected
even the Italian school, which had hitherto pursued an absolutely
independent line of development. Admitting, therefore, that Nietzsche is
often right in detail, just as Voltaire is now and then right when he
finds fault with "Hamlet," we are disposed to reject Nietzsche's general
conclusion no less emphatically than Voltaire's description of Shakspere
as a drunken savage. The truth is that decadence or decline in one
principle of vitality often means awakening energy in another. Nietzsche
had latterly worked himself to a point of view from which the mystery of
northern poetry and the vividly imaginative detail of Gothic art are
intolerable. His remarks about Wagner's want of taste in the disposition
of broad masses and his over-liveliness in minute detail are like a
criticism of Strasburg Cathedral by an ancient architect; his view of
the Wagnerian drama as concerned with problems of hysteria and as
exhibiting a gallery of morbid personages is like an indictment by a
Roman patrician of the entire "Corpus Poeticum Boreale." Nietzsche was
all his life a stranger to tolerance and compromise, and towards the end
this peculiarity became greatly accentuated. His failing health
attracted him to southern climates, and he presently decreed that the
north was no longer to exist. Having found a sort of salvation among the
"Halcyonians," he is constrained to wage spiritual warfare against all
Hyperboreans, and especially against Wagner, regarded as the typical
Hyperborean. "Ah, the old Minotaur!" says Nietzsche, "What has he not
cost us already! Every year trains of the finest youths and maidens are
led into his labyrinth to be devoured. Every year all Europe strikes up
the cry: 'Off to Crete! Off to Crete!'" It is highly interesting to
observe where Nietzsche finds an antidote for the painful impression of
the Wagnerian art. The one modern work that thoroughly satisfied his
later taste was Bizet's "Carmen." "This music seems to me perfect," he
says; "it approaches lightly, nimbly, and with courtesy. It is rich and
precise. It builds, organises, completes, and is thus the antithesis of
that polypus in music which Wagner calls unending melody. It has the
subtlety of a race, not of an individual. It is free from grimace and
imposture. I become a better man," says Nietzsche, "when this Bizet
exhorts me. Such music sets the spirit free. It gives wings to thought.
With Bizet's work one takes leave of the humid north and all the steam
of the Wagnerian ideal." "Carmen" is only the music of devil-may-care,
of gaiety and sunburnt mirth, with a strong spice of southern passion;
but it has really vivid originality, it has true unity of style, and the
unerring perfection with which the composer has caught and reflected a
certain mood of wayward grace and mastered the musical symbolism of the
bright and fierce and fickle south, the lightness and fire, the logical
development and rhythmical charm of the music stamp the work as an
unmistakable masterpiece of its kind. In his delight at finding
something congenial to his later taste Nietzsche forgot the question of
scope, and forgot that Bizet was only a trifler. It was enough for him
that he had found a "Halcyonian" to contrast with Wagner, the
"Hyperborean." Another objection to the line taken in the introduction
is that the isolated insistence on Nietzsche's "physiological" standard
gives the impression of a type of thinker inconceivably remote from what
he really was. Many a dull and stodgy materialist, such as the author
of "Kraft und Stoff," has maintained the universality of the
physiological standard; while the special characteristic of Nietzsche's
ethical ideas is surely something very different. Is it not the
audacious denial that any one ethical system is valid for all classes of
mankind?--the theory of "Herrenmoral" and "Sklavenmoral,"
master-morality and slave-morality--and the attribution of all social
mischief to the ever-increasing prevalence of slave-morality over
master-morality. Is it not the acceptance of the caste-system as the
simple recognition of a universal and unchanging fact of life which
really differentiates Nietzsche both from the English moralists and from
all other European writers whatsoever? Perhaps Dr. Tille was unwilling
to alarm his readers, and conscious of addressing a public which regards
the question of human equality as having been finally settled a hundred
years ago, deliberately avoided bringing forward opinions that savour of
Oriental despotism. But seeing that every line of Nietzsche's writings
is animated by such opinions, it is impossible to deal with the subject
at all without shocking the ideas of a democratic age. Nietzsche, it
should be remembered, was a belated scion of the proudest, most
turbulent, and most ruthlessly tyrannical aristocracy that ever existed.
He witnessed, with despairing rage, both the success of vulgarity in
that modern Europe which had ruined his ancient and noble race, and what
he regarded as the progressive depreciation of the high-bred qualities
in human nature under the influence of socialistic ideas. Though nowhere
expressly stated, the thought of his people, disinherited for their
inability to adapt themselves to the modern spirit, is never absent
from his consciousness, and he uses his matchless literary power to tell
the men of an industrial and co-operative civilisation what the last of
genuine aristocrats thinks of them. With advancing years Nietzsche
became less and less German and more and more Polish, till after the
break with Wagner and Schopenhauer we find him openly satirising
everything German. He has, in fact, "reverted to type," and from 1876
onwards he figures as a feudal aristocrat in exile.
In his general type of culture Nietzsche was very un-English. The
questions of æsthetics have never been treated in this country as
anything but an affair of dilettantes--at best a superior kind of
trifling; whereas for Nietzsche they were a matter of life and death.
And if it is a point of conscience with cultivated Englishmen to take
some interest in graphic and plastic art, we have nevertheless
practically excluded music from our scheme of culture. We have, perhaps,
advanced a little beyond Lord Chesterfield's view of music as a pursuit
leading to nothing but waste of time and bad company, and an English
nobleman of the present day would probably hesitate to lay down, as Lord
Chesterfield laid down, that the legitimate claims of music upon the
attention of a cultivated man are adequately met by the occasional
giving of a penny to a fiddler. Yet in the depths of his consciousness
the typical Englishman has still a tendency to regard the disputes of
the musical world as Byron regarded the Handel and Buononcini
controversy:--
"Strange all this difference should be
'Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee."
Excepting, perhaps, one or two recent cases, such as Dr. Parry and Mr.
Hadow, our men of light and leading have had nothing important to say
about music, whereas for Nietzsche, a scholar and critic of commanding
reputation, music was the one art possessing genuine vitality in the
modern world, and the questions of musical æsthetics were anything but
an affair of dilettantes; they were the questions connected with a
tremendous power for good or evil.
Of all Nietzsche's fantastic conceptions that which has produced the
most curious results is the famous "blonde beast," a sort of bogey
invented for the purpose of annoying and frightening Socialists. The
satirist begins by expressing contempt of herding creatures and
admiration of "beautiful solitary beasts of prey." Sheep and cattle, he
reminds the Socialists, are naturally gregarious, but lions have never
been known to acquire the gregarious instinct. Next he develops the
theory of analogy between great men of the conquering type and common
criminals--the same theory as is set forth, ostensibly as a joke but
really with much seriousness, in Fielding's "Jonathan Wild." This theory
stands in high repute among Socialists, who find it useful for attacking
great men of the conquering and warfaring type, so that when Nietzsche
turns it against Socialism he strikes with a two-edged sword. Lastly, he
conjures up a fearsome image of predatory and unscrupulous vigour, a
combination of Napoleon and feudal aristocrat. This is the "blonde
beast" which, according to the programme of the Nietzschian apocalypse,
is to devour the enfeebled man of the modern world. It is one of
Nietzsche's happiest inspirations, and has already provoked a
literature. Quite recently, for example, a book appeared in Germany
accepting with perfect gravity and recommending for immediate practical
adoption the principles of the "blonde beast." One might almost imagine
that Nietzsche foresaw some such result with secret satisfaction at the
idea of his posthumous revenge on the "flat-land." There are signs, too,
in the English press that the popular imagination is about to fix on
Nietzsche as a writer who recommends promiscuous ruffianism. Was not
Darwin known for many years as the preposterous eccentric who said men
were descended from monkeys? It is, however, advisable to warn those who
are not greatly concerned with mental problems, who value tradition and
take a hopeful view of life, that they had better leave Nietzsche alone.
His influence is on the whole gloomy, disquieting, and profoundly
unsettling, though in relation to the critical literature of the
Continent he is unquestionably one of the great originals, one of the
few "voices" that find many echoes.
[Sidenote: =Nietzsche in English.=
_August 4, 1899._]
The publication of a complete English translation of the works of
Nietzsche is an enterprise which deserves the cordial thankfulness of
all lovers of profound thought and fine literary style. It is not too
much to say that no German writer since Goethe's death, with the
possible exception of Schopenhauer, has united in the same degree as
Nietzsche the two characteristics of originality of matter and charm
and pungency of expression. And of no modern writer whatever, except of
George Meredith, can it be said that he possesses anything like
Nietzsche's power of compelling his reader, whether he is an admiring
reader or a protesting one, to think for himself about the fundamental
problems of life and conduct. Nietzsche's philosophy, with its intense
hatred of Christianity and modern humanitarianism, is scarcely likely to
make any large number of converts among us, but if it can compel us to
ask ourselves honestly and plainly what the unacknowledged ideals of our
civilisation are, and whether they are, after all, capable of being
rationally justified, he will have done an infinitely greater service to
thought than any founder of sect or school.
If one measures the worth of a book by its suggestiveness rather than by
the degree in which its propositions can be accepted as a whole,
Nietzsche's own description of his "Thus spake Zarathustra" as the
profoundest of German works will hardly appear exaggerated. In the
absence of the great work on the "Transvaluation of all Values," which
was so lamentably cut short by the philosopher's incurable illness,
"Zarathustra" must probably be accepted as the prime document of the new
moral code, of which Nietzsche was the best known and most eloquent
preacher.
Nietzsche's hero has, of course, very little in common with the
semi-historical fighting prophet of Iran. Under the disguise of a story
with no particular scene or date, he gives you a treatise on the moral
life as it might be if men would regard the extirpation of the unfit and
the propagation of a race of physically and mentally superior beings as
the first and last of human duties. Of course, in any such picture there
must always be many subjective features, and much that is characteristic
of Zarathustra, his extreme individualism, his love of loneliness and
solitary places, his hatred of a complex and expensive life, is simply a
reflection of the peculiar personal taste of his Creator. Had Nietzsche
himself not been free from ordinary social and domestic ties, it is
likely that the individualistic and anti-social strain in his teachings
would have been far less prominent than it is. But when all allowance
has been made for such personal idiosyncrasies, it remains the fact that
Nietzsche has more boldly than any other writer of our time raised the
most important of social questions; the question whether the ethical and
political ideals of Christianity, of democracy, of universal
benevolence, are those of a healthy or those of a radically diseased
humanity. No future vindication of our current idea can be regarded as
of any value unless it sets itself to grapple, more seriously than
professional moral philosophy has as yet done, with the attack of
Zarathustra. In the minor writings which fill the other two volumes of
the translation already published, Nietzsche is less constructive and
more purely iconoclastic. The "Antichrist" subjects the established
religion of Europe and the moral code based upon it to a criticism which
is always suggestive, often profound, sometimes merely angry and
wrong-headed. The attack upon Wagner, in whom Nietzsche had once looked
for a master, is closely connected with the furious onslaught upon
Christian ideals. Of Wagner the musician Nietzsche has many things both
hard and shrewd to say, but the Wagner against whom the main brunt of
his polemic is directed is Wagner the psychologist, the pessimist, the
preacher of chastity and resignation--in a word, as Nietzsche
understands him, the decadent. Christianity, according to Nietzsche, has
made decadence into a religion, Schopenhauer has turned it into a
philosophy, Wagner into an æsthetic theory. Hence the constant polemic
against all three which recurs in all Nietzsche's writings. The
"Genealogy of Morals" is devoted to the exposition of a favourite theory
of Nietzsche's, that there have always been two antithetical codes of
moral values, that of "masters" and that of "slaves." "Masters" prize
above everything else qualities which bespeak a superabundance of
personal force, strength, beauty, wealth, long life; "slaves" set the
highest store by qualities which make servitude more endurable, and in
the end render revenge upon the "master" possible. Starting from this
primary assumption, Nietzsche shows wonderful insight in his examination
of the growth of concepts like "guilt," "sin," "bad conscience."
Transcriber's Note
Obvious typographical errors were repaired, as listed below. Other
apparent inconsistencies or errors have been retained. Missing,
extraneous, or incorrect punctuation has been corrected and hyphenation
has been made consistent.
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold (=bold=).
Page i, "directon" changed to "direction". (Mr. Johnstone died in 1870,
and the direction of Arthur's education fell entirely upon his mother.)
Page xii, "symbolize" changed to "symbolise" for consistency. (He would
have nothing to do with the attempt to symbolise and revive a
civilisation that had utterly passed away,...)
Page xii, "civilization" changed to "civilisation" for consistency. (He
would have nothing to do with the attempt to symbolise and revive a
civilisation that had utterly passed away,...)
Page xli, "Nietzschean" changed to "Nietzschian" for consistency. (The
review of Tille's translation, well bears partial reprinting in this
volume for its keen intelligence and also as a quite early sketch of the
Nietzschian system in the English press.)
Page xxvi, "nor h" changed to "north". (It lies in a well-wooded
district of Podolia, some hundred miles further north than the region to
which I first went.)
The absence of the sub-heading, I., in CHAPTER V has been kept true to
the original.
Page 41, missing "on" added. (... a man of genius who, without private
means, had thrown up his employment and taken himself and his wife on a
long journey to a foreign country in order to win recognition in "la
ville Lumière" must, in the course of three fruitless years, have felt
something worse than misgiving.)
Page 42, "aud" changed to "and". (... it is that bitterness of spirit
which finds expression in the smashing and burning ...)
Page 58, "naively" changed to "naïvely" for consistency. (Besides doing
justice to the drama as an allegorical picture of life in the light of
certain nineteenth-century ideas, the performance was a specially good
revelation of its amusing and naïvely entertaining qualities.)
Page 61, duplicate "which" deleted. (In regard to "Walküre" and
"Siegfried," which have long been in the repertory of London, Paris, and
other capitals, the superiority of Bayreuth is very much less
certain--that is to say, of Bayreuth as represented by this year's
performances.)
Page 80, "begining" changed to "beginning" for consistency. (The best of
the music is at the beginning, where there is an extremely fine chorus,
"The Challenge of Thor," containing various musical elements all truly
expressive and fraught with the same primitive and racy vigour.)
Page 84, "same" changed to "some". (The striking success of this
composition reminds us of the following passage occurring at the end of
an article by Sir Hubert Parry written some years ago.)
Page 122, "Frankfort" changed to "Frankfurt" for consistency. (The chief
feature in the interpretation on Tuesday was the superb rendering, by
Professor Hugo Becker, of Frankfurt, of the violoncello solo which
throughout the work is identified with the person of the titular hero.)
Page 129, "Symphony" changed to "Symphonie" for consistency. (="Faust
Symphonie," Düsseldorf.=)
Page 129, "like" changed to "likes". (Whether one likes his style or
not,...)
Page 151, "dramatized" changed to "dramatised" for consistency. (He is a
great master of form, but he dramatises the chamber-music forms very
much as Beethoven dramatised the symphony,...)
Page 153, "Carneval" changed to "Carnaval" for consistency. (In his
rendering of Schumann's "Carnaval" not a point was missed,)
Page 179, "Wienaiwski's" changed to "Wieniawski's" for consistency.
(Wieniawski's Fantasia on Themes from Gounod's "Faust," Paganini's
caprice "I Palpiti," Bazzini's "Ronde des Lutins," the last-named played
among the encore pieces.)
Page 180, duplicate "and" deleted. (For the present we are mainly
concerned with Mr. Kreisler, who is not so desperately youthful, but is
a mature and military-looking man, though he is commonly reckoned among
the players of the new school, or the rising generation.)
Page 192, "Leonara" changed to "Leonora" for consistency. (Glancing now
at musical activity in other countries, we find attention necessarily
concentrated in the first instance upon the heroic figure of Beethoven,
who in this year (1813) had already given to the world his Eroica, C
minor, Pastoral, and Seventh Symphonies, besides his Violin Concerto,
Razoumoffsky Quartets, Waldstein and Appassionata Sonatas, his one opera
"Fidelio," together with the third "Leonora" overture, and many other
works of towering genius.)
Page 224, "idiosyncracies" changed to "idiosyncrasies". (But when all
allowance has been made for such personal idiosyncrasies, it remains the
fact that Nietzsche has more boldly than any other writer of our time
raised the most important of social questions ...)